The Third Basil Bunting Poetry Award 2011
The Judge
August Kleinzahler was born in New Jersey in 1949. As a student at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island he met Bunting who was visiting professor. Bunting became a significant influence in helping Kleinzahler find his own voice and he said of Bunting’s 'Briggflatts' that it was “everything I wanted in poetry”. Like Bunting he is a great lover of music, blues in particular and the critic Clive Wilmer has observed that he “hears the music inherent in ordinary speech”. Ginsberg called him “A loner. A genius [whose] verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare – that quality of ‘chiselled’ verse memorable in Basil Bunting’s and Ezra Pound’s work”
Kleinzahler is the author of 10 books of poetry, his latest, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, won the 2008 National Critics Circle Award. He has lived in San Francisco for many years but retains a fondness for his home town of Fort Lee in New Jersey who made him their first poet laureate in 2005, an award which carries with it an occasional grand meal with the city’s great and good.
In his poem ‘Gray Light in May’ he remembers his family home with “Away now nearly thirty years... A stranger to my own heart”. Lines reminiscent of Bunting’s
“fifty years a letter unanswered;/a visit postponed for fifty years.”
No stranger to controversy Kleinzahler himself believes poetry “is the realm of fire... the poet taps into a larger, inhuman force, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous.