Track Conditions
Michael Klein
Michael Klein is a poet. As the author of 1990 and Day and Paper and the editor of three anthologies of AIDS-related verse, he has made his name—and spoken his identity—through the language of poetry. While Klein's sublime new book, Track Conditions, is subtitled "A Memoir," it, too, is best appreciated as poetry. In rich, brief, sorrowful chapters, Klein sketches five years, from 1979 to 1983, in which he abandoned Manhattan's bohemian life and crawled along the strange underbelly of the horse racing world, as a walker, a groomer and an all around lost soul.
Out of the starting gate, Klein has two reasons to run from New York: he's chasing Richard, the lover who's left him for the tracks, and trying to flee his own pitifully destructive alcoholism. Dramatic tension seems to be established. The reader realizes rather quickly, however, that neither the drinking nor the romance will ever come to resolution. Instead, marbled with recollections of the author's troubled childhood, the instability of his life in the stables and his development of a near-mystic relationship with a Derby-winning horse named Swale, they become touchstones for obliquely lyrical meditations. So, while laced with intriguing anecdotes, Track Conditions is ultimately less about storytelling than it is about poetic perception.
Rather than trying to see life as a building, linear narrative, Klein views it through a kaleidoscope: the juxtaposition of elements is ever-shifting, each moment is quickly transformed. It may not have the straight-ahead velocity of a horse race (or a commercial bestseller), but in the realm of impassioned, highly personal art, Track Conditions makes a glorious run for the roses.
Here is Klein, grooming a horse:
"I imagined I was rubbing light into him, and this made me feel there was only the present tense to think about...Sometimes I had a hard brush in one hand, a soft one in the other and backed up one hard stroke with one soft—major to minor, a light went on, a light went off, like the light in a child's bedroom after the prayer to God not to take his soul while he sleeps."
And here he is, having inebriated sex with Richard in a hayloft:
"This was where our shadows were...and where I could claim the image of a struck match in the bottom of drunkeness' hollow well—that I still had enough life in me, that didn't have to swim through the hard river of alchohol or get burned up by the dark. Enough life to have the jewel without swallowing it."
Such breathtaking presentations of language and sensuality give Track Conditions a strange, almost inexplicable power. Allowed unquestioned entrance to the reader's subconscious, Klein's waves of vaporous imagery have intoxicating force; looked at more literally, they are utterly confounding. This book demands to be read on its own poetic terms.
On occasion Klein changes pace to offer mordant social commentary, such as his take on men cruising:
"They are trying to figure out if they would like to be with someone like you when you are naked. That balanced on top of calculating if you would like to be with them naked. I wonder what they think about more: themselves or you."
Usually, though, when the author breaks from his overall elegaic musing, it's to drop in sudden hairpin plot turns: Beloved horses become ill and are put down in the course of single paragraphs. Klein announces, almost out-of-the-blue, that he's contemplating suicide. While quickly are eclipsed by stronger passages, these whiplash moments snap the reader from an intensely pleasurable trance, provoking questions about what Klein is attempting to do with Track Conditions.
The lot of the poet in today's world is a grim one. It's tough just getting read, let alone paid. Michael Klein has taken his fine talent and applied it to the memoir, a far more popular form these days. The result, while flawed, is a book of tremendous beauty; a sort of beauty rarely encountered by readers who limit themselves to prose. If the skeletal plot beneath Track Conditions' supple poetic flesh brings Michael Klein a broader audience, he will have done well by both himself and his new readers. And to the inevitable poetry-purists surely hissing "Sell-out! Sell-out!" over their steaming cups of chai, please consider: There are no perfect poems. And if every poem in the form of a poem is flawed, isn't a poem in the form of a memoir daringly ambitious to boot?
