by joshua heineman                        ( about cb )

The Rapture of August Kleinzahler

Strange moment, last night, reading August Kleinzahler’s “The Rapture of Vachel Lindsay” in the new Paris Review. Lindsay was a well-known but ultimately penniless poet who wandered from town to town trading his recitations (which were equal parts poetry & performance) for food & shelter in the early quarter of the twentieth century. Kleinzahler builds a vision of Lindsay as a polite Rimbaud chasing his tail in the foreshadow of Depression-era migrations:

“helping himself to pulled taffy in an abandoned farmhouse,
the sweet song of the bird called the Rachel Jane
serenading him from a mulberry tree outside the loft window
of the barn where he’d been sleeping on alfalfa, soft, frangrant&clean,
eating wild strawberries on the way to Emporia,
riding into Pomona on a handcar, likewise to Wellsville, where he engaged
in picturesque talk with a handful of Mexicans,
trading his rhymes for breakfast in Cottonwood,
enjoying a good audience for his rhymes in Elondale,
nearly boo’d off the stage in Newton,
windmills turning, turning on a hill as he approached Spearville,
the barley slick and fishy, the oats green&hairy,
Lindsay, Lindsay, belonging to one of the leisure classes, that of the Rhymer,
dinner in bang-up style at the Sante Fe Station,
sends ten dollars to Mother, buys fifteen cents worth of figs in Cimarron,
barters Rhymes for a sandwich in Insalls,
where the druggist refused him ice cream in return for the same,
sitting down with the rest at Grant Wood’s Dinner for Threshers, 
caught up without warning in John Steuart Curry’s Spring Shower-Lindsay,
all the while ‘hoppers at him like hail, eating holes through his clothing”

Of course, Lindsay’s life as a touring poet in fame wasn’t so simple. Lindsay was a poet, yes, but he was also a man fixed in a world of multitudes (like everyone): hope, love, restlessness, hunger, aching, cold, suffering, &, in the end, a bottle of lye right down the throat, ending his life at 52. I expected to find the seeds of such despondency in Kleinzahler’s verse &, indeed, it was there:

“walkingupanddownSixthStreetinLosAngelesthewhole-night-long-Lindsay,
composing the entirety of “General William Booth…” in his head,
standing on the shore of San Francisco Bay in despair,
ready to throw himself in, like Li Po into the Yang-tze, but sober”

But it was the closing line of the long poem that really caught me:

“Lindsay, Lindsay, in Pullmans, hotel rooms, packed auditoriums
from Brownsville to Bemidji, in flames, coming apart inside…
Poor little calf, good night.”

Bemidji, for those that do not know, is a small town in the far northwoods of Minnesota, a couple hours south from the Canadian border, east from North Dakota, west from Lake Superior & more than four hours north from the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Bemidji is a quiet place with log cabins & lots of winter & endless lakes & trees. Bemidji is also the town of my birth.

Why did Kleinzahler choose to end the poem there? What was the impetus of the line? It turns out that Kleinzahler wrote a collection of autobiographical essays published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2004. A clue comes, I think, in his description of ‘soul sickness’ from this telling excerpt:

“Read as a book or viewed as a movie, this patch of hell-the ten or so miles of University Avenue that the number 7 runs along-is beginning to bring on the soul sickness that I suffer from time to time in places like Toronto and Minneapolis, those Protestant fortresses of boosterism and commerce. Once I nearly had a full-fledged nervous collapse at a Denny’s in Bemidji, Minnesota, my heart breaking into a thousand pieces while I chewed a wooden-tasting BLT. I never know where it will afflict me perhaps it has to do with biorhythms. No, check that: I know it’s not going to afflict me in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore or while dining in the Marais.”

The thing is, there is no Denny’s in Bemidji. There never has been. Kleinzahler is either recounting a false memory or has mixed two memories into one. The beauty & curse of memory is that it doesn’t much matter. Memories become the narrative of our lives. Our lives become the narratives of history. Civilization is built on tall, thin legs such as this & yet we’ve walked on the moon. It doesn’t matter. Does it move? That matters.

After I read Kleinzahler’s verse about Lindsay contemplating death on the edge of San Francisco Bay, I went to the window & looked out over the deceptive smooth blackness of that very bay… immediately connected to both writers in a way I couldn’t have been one hot minute before. That is real communication.

Perhaps Lindsay visited Bemidji, the little town where I was born some sixty years later. Between his birth & death in Illinois, he saw the country like a traveling jazz musician in a way. His visit is possible. But I think “The Rapture of Vachel Lindsay” closes there - in flames, coming apart inside - because of Kleinzahler’s, not Lindsay’s, turmoil. What a world.

The Lucky Grape

Cultivate a grape in the most lavishly kept vineyard, from the beautiful countryside & among even spells of sun & rain. Keep disease, keep the glaring & gathering pests at bay. Recite ‘good morning’ & ‘good night’ at the ends of each day… for the luckiest fruit will still rot away.

Urban Renewal on Memory Lane

If I can be counted on to recall correctly, it was in the shattered afternoon of my second consecutive day staying home from school while feigning ill & my third consecutive day of ingesting nothing into my body except tap water & hallucinogenic mushrooms that things really became out of control.

As a teenager, I’d half-thought it was because I suffered a poorly-timed mental breakdown mixed w/a flare up of an undiagnosed fainting condition that I’d ended up in a hospital room designed by Fellini, circa 1964. Looking back now, more than a decade removed, it seems likely that I just took too many drugs & not enough food. But who knows? Maybe I hadn’t yet tested a real limit & wanted to cross a line.

I find it fascinating (& horrifying) that we cannot even diagnose our own motivations.