41:4 Autumn 1995

AUGUST KLEINZAHLER

Glossolalia All the Way to Buffalo

The Autumn 1995 issue included poems by Nathaniel Mackey, Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Christian Bök, August Kleinzahler, Benjamin Friedlander, Mark Halliday, Pam Rehm, John Latta, and others. The issue was David Nicholls’s last regular issue as editor (the 1996 fiftieth anniversary issue that this website is based on was his last special issue), and nicely anticipates the five-year tenure of editor Andrew Rathmann (managing editor under Nicholls) and poetry editor Devin Johnston (whose tenure began with this issue).

Johnston reflected recently on the range of material he and Andrew Rathmann published.

At the start, we wrote dozens of solicitation letters to every poet who interested us, requesting not only submissions but recommendations for poets we might be unaware of. These included not just Americans, but poets from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, as well as translators of work in other languages. The aim was a rigorous eclecticism that was not bound by a single aesthetic. Thus Robert Bly appeared near Barbara Guest, Derek Mahon near Anne Carson. It wasn't that we wanted the journal to be representative or objective, if either were possible; but to engage energetically with the present.

Rathmann, for his part, wrote that

We’ve selected August Kleinzahler’s “Glossolalia All the Way to Buffalo” to represent the issue. Born in New Jersey, Kleinzahler now lives in San Francisco, and is the author of several books of poetry, including Green Sees Things In Waves (FSG, 1998), where “Glossolalia” was reprinted. His most recent books are The Strange Hours Travelers Keep and the memoir Cutty, One Rock (both FSG, 2004). Reviewing Kleinzahler’s selected poems Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club (FSG, 2000) in CR 47:1 (Spring 2001), Peter O’Leary wrote:

If you have any of Kleinzahler's collections, you'll find reviewers' blurbs pointing to the poet's "street-talk" or his "lyric sense of urban grit and neon." And you have that, certainly--a pugilistic, city poetry more usually funny than not. But you also have an immensely capable narrative voice that works ironies into sometime transcendence.

Kleinzahler recently wrote us about “Glossolalia”:

In this particular poem I'm playing with notions of how words and language take shape, mutate, etc. It was written at a time when I was exploring the possibilities of a loose blank verse line. It still feels a bit of a rollick and gives me no shame. I'm pleased that it found a home where it did.

He also offered these reflections on Chicago Review:

The Chicago Review, I've found over the years, to be a bit brainier and more adventurous than equivalent journals, if uneven. But unevenness can be a useful liability, so far as literary magazines go. Its neighbor, the soporific, pretentious and grossly over-funded Poetry is not at all uneven. And its other neighbor, the Triquarterly Review, not nearly uneven enough. If one wants a model of evenness, especially with regard to poetry, the New Yorker is even as the road in and out of Platte, South Dakota. Nor was I surprised that the editor I dealt with when the "Glossolalia" was published, Devin Johnston, turned out to be a gifted poet and co-editor of the excellent Flood Editions [after his tenure at CR—ed]. Nor was I surprised when a recent issue of the CR was devoted to the work of Christopher Middleton, as brainy and adventurous a poet as one might find. What other journal in this benighted land would have the intelligence and nerve for such an enterprise? Lots of good things happen at the CR because they're allowed to happen.

Kleinzahler’s review-essay on Middleton’s poetry appeared in Spring 2005's "Christopher Middleton: Portraits."

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