Both knees about to go out from under you

D.A. Prince reviews 'A History of Western Music' by August Kleinzahler (Carcanet, 2025).

CHAPTER 63
(WHITNEY HOUSTON)

They follow you around the store, these power ballads,
you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs,
cookies, 90 fl. oz. containers of antibacterial dishwashing liquid,
buffeting you sideways like a punishing wind.

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.

—Can I help you, sir?
No, no, thank you, I’m afraid not . . .

It’s mostly the one woman who writes these things,
a petite, almost perpetually somber, brunette
in her L.A. studio, undecorated, two cats,
traffic coursing up and down the boulevard outside,

curtains drawn against the unrelenting sun.
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’s good that your parents are no longer alive.

[…]

Read the whole poem on LitHub or archived from the LRB.

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‘CHAPTER 63 (WHITNEY HOUSTON)’ is from A History of Western Music by August Kleinzahler (Carcanet, 2025).

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Don’t be fooled by the title. This isn’t a four-inch thick doorstop of a book, earnestly plodding through the chronology of geographically-defined music. It’s merely Kleinzahler’s fifteenth poetry collection. Fifteenth? Yes. He has a lot of poetry behind him but can’t settle: there’s a restlessness in him, a search for newer and more effective ways to allow his poems to do what they want to do. As he says in an interview with Daisy Fried (Poetry Foundation, 14 October, 2024), “I don’t do rules in poetry. My only rule is to break rules.”

This background reading proved useful. The first rule smashed into pieces is the expectation of numerical order. You see this on the contents page: are these titles really out of order? Here are the first five poems, as listed:

CHAPTER 63 (WHITNEY HOUSTON) 3
CHAPTER 88 (ZIPOLI AND THE PARAGUAY REDUCTIONS) 6
CHAPTER 29 (IN MEMORIAM THOM GUNN) 8
CHAPTER 60 (LITTLE C.R. AND JUDY) 9
CHAPTER 74 (EURYTHMICS) 11

The idea of history as one damn thing after another may have been dismissed as too simplistic but the bookish part of me still wants chapters to line up, logically. Or is it that I’ve missed knowing something that the rest of the world, the whole world, knows? A note of explanation about this imaginative approach to numbers would have been an editorial kindness. Was it, I wonder, ever part of the discussion between Carcanet and Kleinzahler? Perhaps intrigue is part of a new movement, the School of Random Contents?

The answer to this mystery (thank you, Poetry Foundation, and I am deeply grateful for the reassurance) is simpler than expected. In the late 1990s Kleinzahler wrote a weekly column on music for the San Diego Reader, covering whatever musical style, form or artist he wanted to feature. (If you want to read his articles, they were published as Music: I-LLXXIV, Pressed Wafer, 2009). He had freedom to explore his enthusiasms; they were extensive back then and time hasn’t diminished them. The poems in A History of Western Music grew from those roots and what we have here is the culmination of a lifetime’s passion for music. It’s not organised in the dry historical linear way that the sneakily tongue-in-cheek title might suggest. Every poem enjoys equal status. The poet’s taste is richly eclectic – jazz, eighteenth-century harpsichord, opera, bebop, muzak, gamelan, and beyond – and it’s all here. There’s no structure as such, only a recognition that if music is woven into your whole being, it comes at you from all directions, not just as Music but bringing with it a stack of personal memories.

His taste is richly eclectic – jazz, eighteenth-century harpsichord, opera, bebop, muzak, gamelan and beyond – and it’s all here

The Acknowledgements page has only one sentence: “The author wishes to thank the editors of the London Review of Books, where all but a handful of these poems first appeared.” Yes, they did, sporadically, and I duly read them. Then they slipped out of mind. As singletons they had nothing like the impact they have cumulatively: by being grouped here they acquire presence, a weight of importance, without being ponderous. I learned a lot from them, of course, but this was incidental to the core of each poem: its musical effect on Kleinzahler, how it hangs around and becomes a part of him, is the unifying thread – and that becomes a focus for the reader’s responses to music in different forms.

I’ve picked five of the poems (OK, my favourites – for today, anyway) to give something of his variety. The opening poem – ‘Chapter 63 (Whitney Houston)’ – begins with a couple of quatrains that ensure you won’t stop reading until you reach the end of the poem:

They follow you around the store, these power ballads,
you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs,
cookies, 90 fl.oz containers of antibacterial dishwashing liquid,
buffeting you sideways like a punishing wind.

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.

What makes this so compelling? Is it the use of ‘you’? Kleinzahler is talking to his inner self, reflecting, but it’s also inclusive. I may not shop in such a high-end supermarket but I know how muzak can suddenly take me out of the pet food aisle, stirring memories and emotions far more immediately real than my surroundings. This is music with the power to transport you right back into your own emotional core.

The quatrains have one break, an intrusion immediately after the two quoted above:

—Can I help you, sir?
No, no, thank you, I’m afraid not …

Just a little couplet, colloquial, but how neatly it catches the sense of otherness with the repeated ‘no.’ Kleinzahler doesn’t give any anecdotal background – the reader’s sense of fellow-feeling can supply that:

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

We haven’t got to Whitney Houston by name yet though. Kleinzahler detours to the formula for power ballads, then the songwriter’s way of composing – ‘sitting alone in her studio all day, shades drawn, two cats’ – and a list of fellow artists, until the poems swings back and he’s the foreground, directly addressing the reader, with the only ‘I’ in the poem:

You, you’re breathing all funny, nearly paralyzed.
But there’s one song they almost never play
and I’ll tell you why:

And I – with minuscule knowledge of Whitney Houston, or Dolly Parton who now joins the cast – immediately want to know what this one song is? Why don’t they play it? Kleinzahler never gives the title (perhaps he doesn’t need to after all the clues) but he ends on what would happen if this power ballad came over the sound system:

[…] Because if they played that one,
it wouldn’t just be 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.

Actually, he never uses Whitney Houston’s name at all in the poem. She’s simply “the one who just died”, and it wasn’t even one of her compositions. But the power in that ending, a song so emotionally powerful it could kill a store-full of shoppers, sent me hunting. As a poem this mixes the mundane with the heart-broken, and a wealth of music reference with the stiletto-precision that one single song can have. Part of the pleasure here is sharing Kleinzahler’s experience, his knowledge. Doing some Googling, listening to what I discovered, strengthened that.

So to ‘Chapter 1 (Mahler/Sinatra)’, which happens to be half-way through the collection, but we’ve nearly stopped worrying about his numbers by now. The central placing is significant; Kleinzahler saw this conjunction as the starting point for pulling his poems together. Again it’s music in public space – background music, snaring the places where it’s heard, the circumstances, other people caught up in it – this time in longer, looser stanzas. One of the rules Kleinzahler was looking to break was the shorter lyric line: he was searching for something freer, longer. Here it’s the structure that’s looser – not exactly rambling because underneath there’s a control of tone and narrative, but the surface drifts, much as our awareness of background music can float the hearer out of the immediate surroundings. First, Sinatra, who “was everywhere that spring, / in the hotel lobbies, toilets, shops”, and even on TV, where:

[…] a computer-generated Weimaraner
sang “I did it my way”
in a gravelly baritone.

Alas, I can’t find this online. Then, Mahler’s Symphony No.5, the adagietto, heard in Ireland, and the contrast between place and music:

But what of this late Romantic excess,
this anthem of the Hapsburg twilight,
in a cruelly served and windswept land?

Kleinzahler takes us into the landscape, the chill mist of evening – an intensely personal evocation of place and companion and conversation that ends somewhere else entirely. That’s what living does, bringing disparate elements together in one place, at one time: “This is a haunted place, I heard her say.”

On to ‘Chapter 49 (McPhee’s Gamelan)’ – although we’ve actually moved backwards in the collection because this is placed much earlier – to another sensuous poem of place overlaid with the Colin McPhee’s Balinese music:

Languor and reverie in these chiming tones,
some soft and liquid, some like the notes of a flute,
other full, like the tones of an organ:
perfume, legend, secrecy.

The word ‘tones’ recurs throughout, echoed by ‘tuning’; these are words striving after the ‘feel’ of the music on the senses, something the poet addresses directly:

Sentences, too, must float,
if you follow what I mean.

Chopin floats: Schubert, as well.
What is it exactly?
I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Although he can’t ‘quite’ do this – or do it to his own satisfaction – he’s having a very good try.

Jazz is one of Kleinzahler’s passions. ‘Chapter 57 (Route 4)’ has no musician in the title but he’s named in the first line:

Coltrane just sits there,
almost expressionless, thoughtful, perhaps even a touch somber,
on the little red stool in my bedroom, listening to the Dodger radio broadcast
from Ebbets Field. We speak not at all.

Did he? Did he really? No: this is an alternative reality, playing with the possibility that Coltrane, recording in Hackensack just down the road, might in another life, have been a family friend:

I never know when John will turn up, but I’m always happy when he does,
more than happy. Mom and Dad seem amenable to his visits,
even Grand, very out of character, who barks like mad when the doorbell rings.
In some ways John Coltrane has replaced Grand,
who would sit watchfully beside me when I was smaller still, my guardian.

There’s the cadence of a child’s voice in this, with “barks like mad”, and “smaller, still” – that careful gradation of growing up, the need for a hero, and the comfort of this ‘memory,’ even though it’s an imaginary one. The range of voices in this collection isn’t immediately noticeable because – like those randomly-numbers chapters – there’s a lot on the surface, but it brings depth.

One more poem: ‘Chapter 74 (Eurythmics)’ in the voice of Annie Lennox, returned to Portugal, musing –

just me and the consul’s driver:
customized Citroën C4 Aircross Picasso, outsize smoked-glass windows,
upholstered like the inside of a leather queen’s crypt

– so we know this is a reflection about time, back to “way back when, before our anthem hit the charts”, starving, struggling, the rain, all the detail of being together. “It moves me still, this place, / the jumble of pastel doorways with their sagging jambs and worn stone sills.” Kleinzahler has found his long lines here: they probe, explore, relish the past – a past so much more vivid than the present.

These drives to the airport are all the same, no matter what town you’re in.

This collection could have been a hotchpotch but it’s not. It’s the way music gets inside composers, performers, artists and listeners – like Kleinzahler, like us – that holds it together, even while the poems feel as though they are fully free-range. I could have quoted far more. If you want to hear how the poet himself delivers ‘Chapter 44 (Bebop)’ with its line “YAHTZEE YAHTZEE YAHTZEE” plus a wild set of onomatopoeic inventions, watch and listen to the Carcanet YouTube recording of the launch event. Also, Kleinzahler discusses the book on YouTube here.

As for the final poem … read the collection, and give it plenty of time. You’ll need it – and it’s worth it.

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D. A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022. A new pamphlet, Continuous Present, is just out with New Walk Editions.

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August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949, and raised in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (2004) which won the Griffin Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (2008) which won the Lannan Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He has also published a non-fiction work, Cutty, One Rock (Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained). Kleinzahler has lived in San Francisco for more than twenty years.

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