Writing in the realm of fire: August Kleinzahler

Kleinzahler himself has gained the reputation of someone willing to "hit" potential rivals in the poetry racket. In a piece published in the Chicago journal Poetry, he whacked Garrison Keillor, who hosts a popular poetry slot on American National Public Radio. Keillor favours simple, homely poems, in keeping with his anecdotal literary style, avoiding anything "airy" that can't be understood by listeners while they are are "frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper". To Kleinzahler, poetry is "the realm of fire" upon which Keillor has trespassed and therefore "must be burned". "The poet taps into a larger, inhuman force," Kleinzahler says, "unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. Like Eros. The Greeks designated gods for these forces - they're not particularly nice." The Keillor article drew more attention to the New Jersey poet than any other he has written.

More recently, Kleinzahler whacked the admired poet-critic Adam Kirsch, calling him and his contemporary William Logan "wannabe poets, reactionary buffoons", among other insults (in the Paris Review, in 2007). Logan shrugs it off lightheartedly: "He has every right to be vituperative. If I were August, I'd burst a gasket two or three times a day." Others have wondered whether Kleinzahler, whose father worked in real estate and sent his son to the elite Horace Mann school in New York, assumes a bad-boy mask shaped for the authentically pock-marked features of Charles Bukowski or Gregory Corso. To Kirsch, the "roughneck persona" appears to be "the product of a persistent American neurosis about poetry and art being unmasculine. To compensate for their presumed loss of masculine status, certain writers make alcohol and fighting part of their literary persona."