A History of Western Music: Poems

by August Kleinzahler

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

What does it mean for a book of poems that its most memorable entry isn’t a poem at all? In A History of Western Music, the latest collection from August Kleinzahler, this perverse state of affairs makes for one of the most vexing reading experiences in recent memory. Such a marvelous bafflement as the “The Monkey of Light” (that’s the piece’s name), which maybe, just maybe, gets to limp through the back door as a “prose poem,” reads like nothing, in fact, but some of the most engrossing prose around: like an extremely brief historical fiction by Guy Davenport, or, better yet, one of those tales of uncertain provenance to emerge from the devious mind of Luis Sagasti. Whatever it is (narrating the invention of something called an “ocular harpsichord,” and it is fascinating) it comes dangerously close to being all that’s worth recommending from such a hectic collection.

And hectic it is. In A History of Western Music, there isn’t even the semblance of a semblance of order (let alone the gestural, makeweight substructure of one of our so-called modernist epics). And how could there be, in a collection that doesn’t even have the decency to obey the dictates of first-grade numeracy? Kleinzahler proceeds from a poem entitled “Chapter 63” to another called “Chapter 88,” concluding (27 “chapters” later) with “Chapter 99,” and why? No reason. Why do you ask? You’re not allowed to know.

The book’s best, most accessible poem is easily its first. Subtitled “Whitney Houston,” the setting is a grocery store.

You stand, almost hypnotized, at the rosticceria counter

staring at the braised lamb shanks, the patterns

those tiny, coagulated rivulets of fat make,

both knees about to go out from under you.

It’s a familiar tune: aisle 5, one old love song after another swimming out of the speakers. But for Kleinzahler, a poet—someone who, on occasion, really notices and really says what he sees—even a universal experience like this one takes on fresh meaning.

Because of your unconventional lifestyle

you have been shopping among women your entire life,

young mothers and matrons,

almost no other males around except staff and seniors,

the old men squinching their eyes, scowling at the prices.

What sort of life have you led

that you find yourself, an adult male of late middle age,

about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits

in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma

with her sparkly, extravagant eyewear?

It may not be poetry, per se, but there’s an arrhythmic heart thumping around inside it, and, even if the ear’s left wanting more, the eye sees through to a real scene.

You, you’re breathing all funny, nearly paralyzed.

But there’s one song they almost never play

and I’ll tell you why: it’s the one Dolly Parton wrote,

not the brunette, but it’s not Dolly who's doing the singing.

It’s the one who just died. Because if they played that one,

it wouldn’t be just you dying in aisle 5.

All the girls would be dropping there like it was sarin gas

pouring from the speakers up there hidden behind the lights.

There’s no denying all that’s good and right about a poem like this one: its lingering rhythm, its casual rhymes and half rhymes, the supermarket regularity of its quatrains. Yet the drop off that follows is something fierce. Too many of the book’s other poems simply drift, accumulating whole pocketsful of nothing lines, the poetic equivalent of chewing gum, paper clips, and string, as in “Chapter 18” (“He stared for hours / at the cat / taking his ease under the calla leaf / or fog / pour in late afternoon / whelming the tower on the hill,” etc.). Others suffer from what, at first, might make the appearance of handsome, broad-shouldered hexameters, long, long lines that stretch to the margins, but even these ultimately evidence a simple lack of discipline, their length drawn for the sake of extent itself, the poetic equivalent of putting on unwelcome weight, as in “Chapter 33” (the overfed, inescapably ironic first line of which goes, “He seldom spoke, even when well, and when he did it was misterioso, brief”).

In short, most of the book does what most of the current poetry does: thumb its nose at the reader, remaining hopelessly uphill, where no degree of generosity on that same spurned reader’s part seems sufficient to bridge the approach. It’s possible this particular volume wanted to be one of those works that presents several variations on a theme (in this case, music). Such a book—what a delight they are!—can’t help but propose the gradual revelation of a systematic mind at work. This is not that book.

True, these poems were written over the course of many years, on and for many occasions. They touch on and tap along with a whole bevy of composers, musicians, and rhythmic minds, ranging over the names and works of Bill Evans and Ingram Marshall, Thelonius Monk and Mozart. Even Thom Gunn makes the list, a poet’s poet in memoriam. And yet the author of these poems had no inkling, as he wrote them, of some grand future synthesis; his eyes did not seize (not a chance) on the sweeping vision of a work sufficiently authoritative to earn such an august title as . . . well, you know what it’s called. Once more, this is not that book.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.