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."
from The Guardian: Writing in the realm of fire: August Kleinzahler
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