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Contagion

Essays on the Work & Lives of the Artistic Poplace

An Examination of Louis Zukofsky • Part One

by Eric Hoffman

IntroductionTheVoice of Jesus I. Rush singing                         in the wilderness 1

So begins Louis Zukofsky’s seminal 1927 "Poem beginning ‘The’," the first work the poet did not dismiss as juvenilia he wrote under the amusing pseudonym Dunn Wyth. It is a bravura work, the voice of a Russian Jew singing in the wilderness of New York’s Lower East Side. The poem caught the eye of Ezra Pound, who had all but co-authored T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, the poem Zukofsky’s "The" was, in a way, satirizing. Pound, then editor of The Exile, one of many small magazines dedicated to publishing the highly unprofitable work of modernist writers, received "The" as a submission; he later claimed the decision to accept the poem for publication was made on the basis of the lines The prowl, our prowlOf gentlemen catsWith paws like spats 2

as Pound’s wife Olga had a love of cats. To prove his point, Pound included on his acceptance letter the drawing of a cat. So began one of several important correspondences after Pound introduced the young poet to the other elder statesman of modernist poetics, William Carlos Williams, with whom Zukofsky would collaborate on a number of William’s better mid-and-late career works.

"The" is a highly allusive poem, which makes reference to everyone from Joyce to Eliot to Ibsen, among others, and is, in a sense, a sort of essay on the development of modernism up to the year it was written. Zukofsky had, Pound pleasingly noted, immersed himself in Pound’s modernist credos that had for years appeared in the pages of Poetry, Hound and Horn, and other small magazines sold in metropolitan bookshops. Zukofsky’s own poetics, particularly his later theories concerning "sincerity" and "objectification" were heavily influenced by Pound’s Imagiste and Vorticist programmes. Zukofsky modeled his career on Pound’s when he undertook completion of a long poem, "A", which, at over 800 pages in length, holds the distinction of being, along with Pound’s Cantos, the lengthiest of American long poems. Like the Cantos it utilizes an "ideogrammatic" method, or juxtaposition of groups of discrete images in order to suggest cohesiveness. Unlike the Cantos it is finished. "A" is, as critic Guy Davenport notes, the first completed American long poem since Melville’s Clarel.

Zukofsky came of age during a time of crisis. The crises he followed: world war and economic depression, and the crises through which he persisted: a second world war and its aftermath. He is a modernist poet foremost; like any good modernist he read, interpreted, translated and alluded to the classics. He wrote his poetics, borrowing old forms and breathing into them new life (his rewriting of a song of Shakespeare’s can be seen as the inspiration of all of poet John Taggart’s work from Peace On Earth to the present).3 Despite Zukofsky’s relative obscurity, which persisted until well after his death, his work has, by the end of last century, undergone a major critical re-

evaluation. Zukofsky’s poems, "poet’s poems," have inspired a generation of younger writers, particularly the works of the poets associated with the "Language" school (Charles Bernstein, the Howe sisters and Ron Silliman) and loners Taggart and Ronald Johnson.

Zukofsky was, for most of his life, a hypochondriac that never took pills, "not even aspirin" according to his wife, Celia4. Incredibly thin; an omnipresent cigarette dangled from his bony, spidery fingers. His wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of gray suits; he had a long face and a pale complexion. His voice was thin and reedy; his prodigious eyebrows above black-rimmed glasses made him look somewhat like Groucho Marx. He never played sports and rarely exercised. Aside from a few vacations and excursions, he spent his entire life in New York City. He was, in the estimation of Guy Davenport, "America’s greatest poet" and by the time of his death in 1978, none of his books were in print (though he was overseeing the publication of an edition of "A", a poem he began writing over half a century before).

Early Work — The Image

Can a mote of sunlight defeat its purposeWhen thought shows it to be deep or dark?

See sun, think shadow.5

Considering Zukofsky¹s dictum in "A" of "Lower Limit Speech/Upper Limit Music"6 as well as his highly concentrated, intellectually rigorous and meticulously structured shorter works, it should hardly be surprising that a poet commonly associated with athe sound and texture of language, was not writing in his first language. Born a Yiddish-speaking American in Manhattan in 1904 to Pinchos Zukofsky (ca. 1860-1950), a pants presser and night watchman, and Chana Pruss (ca. 1862-1927), immigrants to the Americas from an area of Russia now Lithuania, their son’s birth coincided, he happily noted, with the year Henry James last visited the continent. As Zukofsky observed in his Autobiography (actually not much of an autobiography), "The contingency appeals to me as a forecast of the first-generation American infusion into twentieth-century American literature."7 Zukofsky was a perceptive writer of the Jewish immigrant experience in the early part of 20th century New York:Assimilation is not hard,And once the faith’s askewI might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew.8

Arrived mostly with bedding in a sheetSamovar, with tall pitcher of pink glass,With copper mugs, with a beard,Without shaving mug — To America’s land of the pilgrim Jews?To buy, after 20 years in a railroad flat,A living room suite of varnishedMahogany framed chairs andBlue leather upholstery,To be like everybody, with what                                         is about us.And the youngest being born                            here (in New York)Always regretted having as a kidHit his brother’s head with a shoeIn bed one bright Sunday morning.9

Chana, Zukofsky’s mother, is the a primary subject of his "Poem beginning ‘The’," first published in the year of her death, a death chronicled in his one play Arise, Arise (1936) and in the long poem "A." The figure of Pinchos is

central to the poem’s central section, "A-12."10 Pinchos was an Orthodox Jew; by thirteen years of age Louis ended his crisis of faith and was from that point forward avidly non-religious. He was the only child of Pinchos and Chana’s born in America. The family lived in a Yiddish-speaking neighborhood. It was there Louis attended the Yiddish theater where he first encountered Shakespeare (of whom he later claimed he had read in entirety by eleven years of age and of whom he wrote a major critical treatise), Strindberg and Tolstoy in performances in Yiddish on the Yiddish stage of New York’s Lower East Side. He read Longfellow’s Hiawatha and Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound in Yiddish. By comparison, reading Keats and Burns in their original tongues proved problematic for the young reader.

Pinchos and Chana, sensing their son’s precociousness, managed to send Zukofsky to Columbia, despite the fact that he would have been able to attend City College at no expense. At Columbia, Zukofsky met Whittaker Chambers, then a poet and member of the Communist Party. Chambers had until recently been, according to Celia, a devoted admirer of Calvin Coolidge. He sponsored Zukofsky for membership in the Party; Ella Reeve Bloor, one of the founding members of the CPUSA and head of the Party Chapter, vetoed Zukofsky’s membership. The Communists then recommended that he seek membership with a chapter on the Lower East Side. This experience left him with a distaste for Leftist Politics, Communists in particular, though he later came to admire the writings of Karl Marx, as he did of any writer that espoused an all-encompassing system (e.g. Spinoza, Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Pierce and Wittgenstein). Zukofsky was particularly fond of Marx’s "Labor Theory of Value" and page after page of his correspondence with the staunchly anti-Marxist fascist Ezra Pound is filled with Zukofsky’s thoughtful absorption of Marx’s theories. Regardless of Zukofsky’s distaste for Party dictate, he did attempt to heed the Party’s call for proletariat writing and submitted a number of John Reed Club-style poems to the Communist literary magazine New Masses in a failed attempt to adapt his poetry to the aesthetics of the Left. He wrote didactic party-line poems for Lenin and the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Whatever he didn’t abandon he almost entirely revised for book publication.11 A more striking (and less myopic) representation of Zukofsky’s political vision from this period is the admirable "Mantis" and "Mantis," An Interpretation (CSP 65-73). Unlike his peers George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, who by 1935 were members of the American Communist Party, Zukofsky continued to further himself from politics; in 1935 he abandoned his planned Worker’s Anthology.

At Columbia, Zukofsky studied with such luminaries as Mark Van Doren and John Dewey; he graduated in 1926 with a Master’s Degree, having written his thesis on Henry Adams, notably the first work of Adams criticism. The long thesis, slightly revised, is still included among his published essays. Zukofsky was fond of Henry Adams’ "phase" theory of history; like Marx’s Labor Theory and Spinoza’s Propositions (Zukofsky’s collected essays are titled Prepositions) Adams’ theories appealed to the poet’s liking for unified systems. During this time he became enamored of Pound’s writings, particularly his essays and articles on poetics and sent Pound his Poem beginning "The" which Pound published in his 1928 issue of The Exile. The poem caught the attention of William Carlos Williams, to whom Ezra Pound had introduced Zukofsky, and a young George Oppen, who at the age of nineteen had arrived in New York City with his wife Mary, in search of living poets. Oppen read "The" in an aisle at the Gotham Book Mart and by chance met Zukofsky later that night at a party. Zukofsky in turn introduced Oppen to Charles Reznikoff, an older, mostly unknown Jewish poet whom Zukofsky had read in the small magazines and had come to know and admire. A group of like-minded poets was beginning to form and would find its program in a February 1931 issue of Poetry edited by Zukofsky, titled "Program: ‘Objectivists’." With quotes firmly locking the irony in place, he later insisted that the idea of a movement was demanded by the magazine’s publisher Harriet Monroe, looking to capitalize on the "marketability" of a visible poetic school, a lesson well-learned by the success of the Imagiste group published in

her magazine over fifteen years earlier. Pound, an avid self-promoter and believer in the benefits of group-based poetics, was in support of the idea. Zukofsky, who had written a lengthy essay on Reznikoff’s poetic style, with the intent on publishing it in the pages of the Jewish Menorah Journal where he had first read Reznikoff, shortened the essay and focused on two qualities he found in the poet’s work, "sincerity" and "objectification."

While interpretations of Zukofsky’s somewhat abstract "Objectivist" theory are widely divergent, one can fairly approximate Zukofsky’s general idea and intent for the theory, as well as its influences, mostly from his mentors, Pound and Williams. From Pound’s phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia (or image, cadence, and idea) come Zukofsky’s focus on sight, sound and intellection. Zukofsky found much in Pound’s 1912 statement on Imagist principles:

1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the

metronome.12

Pound’s advice to "go in fear of abstractions" and to use "either no ornament or good ornament" can also be applied to Zukofsky’s "Objectivist" theory. Above all, it is Pound’s attention to craftsmanship that most appealed to Zukofsky. From Williams comes the value of the thing itself being its own best metaphor; in Williams’ terminology "no ideas but in things." Williams himself had been influenced by readings in Alfred North Whitehead, a popular philosopher among modernist writers, whose influential 1925 book Science and the Modern World includes the following:[. . .] the actual elements perceived by our senses are in themselves the elements of a common world; and that this world is a complex of things, including indeed our acts of cognition, but transcending them. According to this point of view the things experienced are to be distinguished from our knowledge of them. So far as there is dependence, the things pave the way for the cognition, rather than vice versa. But the point is that the actual things experienced enter into a common world which transcends knowledge, though it includes knowledge. The intermediate subjectivists would hold that the things experienced only indirectly enter into the common world by reason of their dependence on the subject who is cognizing. The objectivist holds that the things experienced and the cognizant subject enter into the common world on equal terms.13

Or, as George Santayana, another philosopher read by the modernists, observed in 1910 of the Epicurean poet Lucretius: We seem to be reading not the poetry of a poet about things, but the poetry of things themselves. That things have their poetry, not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of their own movement and life, is what Lucretius proves once and all for mankind.14

From his readings in Pound, Williams and elsewhere, Zukofsky formulated the twin poles of his "Objectivist" theory, "sincerity and objectification." A poet must apprehend an object of the world with "clarity;" their attention to the object and their observations must be "sincere," by which Zukofsky means must be free of abstraction, cliché and other tired poetic conventions. "Objectification" is obtained by the apprehension of "minor units of sincerity" the appropriate combination of which will achieve unity and therefore, "perfect rest." According to Zukofsky, an objectivist poem occurs when it exhibits "the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody." Or, in Pound’s terminology: image, idea and cadence, the "dance of the intellect." 15

Critical response to Zukofsky’s Poetry issue, which published Reznikoff, Oppen, Whittaker Chambers, T.S. Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting and a wealth of Williams and Zukofsky’s "A", among many others, was mostly antagonistic; publisher Harriet Monroe issued a statement in a subsequent issue questioning Zukofsky’s aesthetics, motives and wholesale rejection of a number of poets the magazine supported and considered important. Many readers appeared to be interested in Zukofsky’s theories; however, the fall of 1931 Zukofsky was telling audiences at readings to drop the issue. Many of the poets Zukofsky included in the Poetry

issue and the subsequent anthology did not consider themselves part of any ‘movement,’ most notably Kenneth Rexroth. The following year, however, Zukofsky edited an anthology of "Objectivist" poems, along with a new preface, titled An "Objectivist" Anthology, this time including Richard Aldington and Mary Butts, along with Eliot, Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi, Bunting, Rexroth, a considerable amount of Williams, Zukofsky’s first seven sections of "A" and a wildly anti-Semitic contribution from Pound (which Rexroth, among many others, found in extremely bad taste and indicative of Zukofsky’s perceived idiotic devotion to the elder poet). The anthology, published by George and Mary Oppen, while the couple was living in southern France, came on the heels of Williams’ A Novelette and Other Prose, edited by Zukofsky, and the first volume of a planned complete prose of Pound, Prolegomena Volume One: How to Read. The press folded soon after for lack of funds and inexperience at sales and marketing (it was, after all, the height of the Great Depression); subsequently, George and Mary returned to the United States. A future publication for the press would have been Zukofsky’s first collection of poems, a distinction that would have to wait several more years.

Another attempt at publication was made the following year when Zukofsky, the Oppens, Williams and Reznikoff started the Objectivist Press. The collaborative, which consisted of the group of poets sharing the cost of publishing the work of one of the group’s members, published Williams’ moderately successful Collected Poems 1921-1931, which Zukofsky had helped Williams select and edit. Following volumes included Oppen’s first book of poetry Discrete Series, a gathering of experimental, "Objectivist"-influenced poems, and three volumes by Reznikoff (which made sense as Reznikoff owned and operated the press the books were printed with). Again, a volume by Zukofsky was planned, but never realized; the press dissolved soon after 1936 thanks partly to economics, partly to the writer’s disinterest.

During this tumultuous time Zukofsky found work writing a study of Guillaume Apollinaire, written with French critic René Taupin and published in France;16 he translated a popular biography of Albert Einstein, taught for a year in Madison at the University of Wisconsin (where Kenneth Rexroth was his colleague) during 1930-1931, worked for the Oppens as editor of TO, Publishers during 1931-1932. As with many other artists and writers, Zukofsky found employment with the Works Progress Administration during the Depression years 1935-1942 writing essays on American furniture and kitchenware; these studies helped to reinforce Zukofsky’s perception of the poet as craftsman and nicely correlated to his idea of the poem as object, as much an object as a chair or frying pan.17 During this time Zukofsky began to assemble his poetics manual A Test of Poetry (compiled 1935 to 1940, published 1948) in which he furthers his "Objectivist" concerns together with the importance of craftsmanship, and continued to write his excellent "Objectivist" style poems, including the emblematic "Ferry":Hour-gongs and the greenOf the lamp.

Plash. Night. Plash. Sky.

and "To My Washstand":      To my washstandin which I wash      My left handand my right hand

      To my washstandwhose base is Greek      whose shaft is marbleand is fluted18

During this period he also completed parts seven through ten of his epic "A". While the first six sections of "A" concentrate on subjects as grandiose and abstract as art, death, religion and modern malaise, sections seven and eight focused on economic, social and political matters, including readings in Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Henry Adams, Einstein and Poincaré; section nine is a poem in two halves, the first composed between 1938 and 1940,

is a sort of summation of Zukofsky’s reading of Marx, composed of extremely structured, highly dense lines. Indicative of Zukofsky’s growing allusiveness and density, the first half of "A-9" is also a translation of Cavalcanti’s canzone "Donna mi priegha"; Cavalcanti’s rhyme scheme is intact, regardless of phrases lifted from Das Kapital:We flee people who made us as a right isWhose sight is quick to choose us as frequenters,But see our centers do not show the changesOf human labor our value estranges.19

Next Month: The Middle Work — The Music, Late Works — The Intellect, and Epilogue

1 The Complete Short Poetry, p.9. Hereafter cited as CSP.2 Ibid, 143 "Julia¹s Wild" in Bottom: On Shakespeare, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2002) p.3934 Carroll Terrell, ed. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation), p. 695 CSP, 886 "A" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 1387 Autobiography, 138 CSP, 17 9 "A", p. 8310 Zukofsky, like Pound and Dante before him, was somewhat superstitious when it came to numbers; when conceiving of his long poem "A" he arbitrarily chose the number 24 for the number of parts and when writing the 12th, or middle section of the poem, he arguably wrote the most important, or central, part, certainly it is the most autobiographical and, aside from "A-24," the longest.11 See "Memory of V.I. Ulianov" CSP 21-22, "During the Passaic Strike of 1926" CSP 26, and "D.R." CSP 38-39.12 Pound, Literary Essays (New York: New Directions Press, 1968), p.313 I am indebted to Tom Sharp¹s note in his Ph.D. dissertation "Objectivists" 1927-1934, p. 25 for passage, who in his notes refers to Robert von Hallberg¹s essay "Olson, Whitehead and the Objectivists" in Boundary 2 1 &2 (Fall 1973/Winter 1974) 85-111. The passage from Whitehead is quoted from Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 124.14 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945), p.34.15 For further writings of Zukofsky on "Objectivist" theory see Zukofsky¹s "Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Poetry of Charles Reznikoff" in Poetry 37.5 (February 1931), p. 272-285, "Program: ŒObjectivists¹ 1931" in Poetry 37.5 (February 1931) p. 268-272, "Preface-ŒRecencies¹ in Poetry" in An "Objectivists" Anthology, ed. Louis Zukofsky. (LeBeausset: TO Publishers, 1932), p. 9-25 and "An Objective" in Prepositions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) p. 12-18.16 Titled Le Style Apollinaire the book was only recently published in English as volume five of the Wesleyan Centennial Edition of Zukofsky¹s Complete Critical Writings.17 A number of these essays have been published as Contributions to the Index of American Design, volume six of the Wesleyan Centennial Edition of Zukofsky¹s Complete Critical Writings, with a perceptive analysis by John Taggart.18 "Ferry," CSP p. 24, "To My Washstand," CSP, 52-53.19 "A" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) p. 106

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ExaminationsMental

Contagion

Essays on the Work & Lives of the Artistic Poplace

An Examination of Louis Zukofsky - Part Two

by Eric Hoffman

The Middle Work - The Music

A Round of fiddles playing Bach20

The urgency of the Depression and the Second World War interrupted the progress of modern, experimental poetry (even interrupted the composition of Zukofsky's ninth section of "A"; he did not work on the poem, except for revisions, from 1940 to 1948); the audience for even popular poetry, mostly considered a distraction, significantly dwindled. Zukofsky and others like him lapsed into relative obscurity for many years. During this period he managed to publish, in an extremely limited edition by a small Illinois press, a single volume of poetry, 55 Poems (1941). He found work at a number of jobs, including substitute teaching in the public schools and editing instruction books for a variety of companies before landing a position as instructor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, his longest held job, from 1947 to his retirement in 1966.

The war had its victims; most notably among modernist poets was the fall of Ezra Pound into blind fascism. While Pound was standing trial for treason following the war, Zukofsky was, with Williams, one of many poets who attested to Pound's literary significance, whatever his political beliefs. While Zukofsky and Pound's relationship never recovered the intensity it had in the crucially productive years before the war, the two didn't have a total falling out; in later years Zukofsky even brought his wife Celia and son Paul to St. Elizabeth's where Paul, a child prodigy on the violin, serenaded the elder poet on the asylum's lawn.

Following the war, increased conservatism and an outright rejection of modernist experiment led to a new formalism in the academy as the New Critics and confessionalist poets returned to classic forms, subject matters and Romantic navel-gazing. Modernism appeared to have failed, despite continued efforts by Williams and Pound, until the mid-1950s when the Beat Poets of San Francisco, led by Kenneth Rexroth (once an "Objectivist" though he had long since renounced membership) and the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, the latter an admirer (and emulator) of Zukofsky's highly concentrated, knotty and musical poems from the 1920s and 1930s, helped resuscitate avant-garde experimentalism. Allen Ginsberg visited Zukofsky at Brooklyn Polytechnic to show Zukofsky his early poems. Charles Olson requested Zukofsky teach at Black Mountain but the salary offered was pitiable. Two publishers associated with the Black Mountain School, Cid Corman and Jonathan Williams, began to publish Zukofsky's poetry in the former's influential journal Origin (which also returned fellow "Objectivists" Lorine Niedecker and Carl Rakosi to print and was among the first to publish young writers influenced by Zukofsky, including Creeley and Taggart) and the latter's Jargon Press which published a beautiful, limited edition of Zukofsky's Some Time in 1956, a book that contains some of Zukofsky's finest work:

Little wrists,

Is your contentMy sight or hold, Or your small airThat lights and trysts?

Red alder berryWill singly break;But you-how slight-do:So that evenA lover exists.21

In addition to poems published in Origin, Corman published in 1959, in a limited edition, the first twelve movements of "A". Though it quickly went out of print, it remained the only major collection of Zukofsky's work until Norton press published All: The Collected Short Poems in two volumes in 1965 and 1971. Zukofsky's short poetry from this period, as with sections of "A", show an artist increasingly concerned with achieving the effects of music in poetry; "A-12" is perhaps the closest Zukofsky came to achieving the goal of "A-6":

CanThe designOf the fugueBe transferredTo poetry?22

By 1948, when Zukofsky returned to "A", specifically to the ninth part, which remained incomplete since 1940, rather than return to Marx he chose Spinoza:

Love speaks: "in wracked cities there is less action,Sweet alyssum sometimes is not of time; nowWeep, love's heir, rhyme no how song's exactionIs your distraction - related is equated,How else is love's distance approximated.23

One year earlier Zukofsky began writing Bottom: On Shakespeare, which, like Poe and his Eureka, is a work of dense prose its author insisted was poetry (Zukofsky, unlike Poe, later retracted the claim). Bottom consists of a collage of quotes from, among others, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Henry James, and especially Baruch Spinoza. Zukofsky's theme is "love : reason :: eyes : mind" and the work is a seven hundred page explication of the statement (232 pages consists of Celia's operatic setting of Shakespeare's Pericles). The work, mostly unacknowledged by Shakespeare scholars, took nearly thirteen years to complete and was for editors dense and difficult enough that Zukofsky had to donate his papers to the University of Texas in return for its publication in 1963. It is an interesting work that has found admirers (particularly among writers and critics such as Guy Davenport, John Taggart and Hugh Kenner). A recent symposium on the work of Zukofsky focused on Bottom, possibly due to Wesleyan University's lovingly reprinted edition in 2002 as part of their effort at bringing the complete critical work of Zukofsky into print. As Bob Perelman observes in his introduction to the work, "Bottom is central" to the "efflorescence" of work Zukofsky completed "midway through the final twenty years of [his] career, a period during which he often felt isolated."24 For Perelman, Bottom's single theme is (in Zukofsky's words) "simply that Shakespeare's text throughout favors the clear physical eye against the erring brain." As Zukofsky described the work to critic L.S. Dembo, Perelman notes that "Bottom is a long poem; it does away with epistemology; it is an autobiography."25 As with most of Zukofsky's work, it is as frustrating as it is rewarding.

Bottom was completed during a period that also included the writing of the central sections of "A", most notably "A-12", as well as his controversial phonetic translations, with his wife Celia, of Catallus. Where the first half dozen sections of "A" treated major abstract themes like art, death and music in the style of Pound's

ideogrammatic method, and the following three parts had dealt with public life (politics, culture and society), the middle sections trace a growing concern with private life, from his interpretations of love and the recovering of sanity by way of Spinoza's Ethics in the second half of "A-9" (which shares a similar concern with Bottom), to his treatment of family life in the eleventh and the aforementioned twelfth sections.

Zukofsky had by now been married to Celia Thaew, a composer, for over a decade; their only son, Paul, was a gifted violinist. Much of "A-12" deals with an idealized presentation of their life together, Zukofsky's memories of his mother and father, with borrowings from the by now usual suspects of the Zukofsky pantheon, Bach, Spinoza, Aristotle, Paraclesus. To fit within his schema of "B.A.C.H." he includes Blest (Spinoza), Aristotle, his wife Celia, and Hohenheim (Paraclesus). The notable difference is that the poet has now elevated his wife to the level of the poet's chosen few noble minds. Part of the reason for this concern with the private world was that the poet's world had grown increasingly cloistered.

BlestArdent    good,Celia,    speak simply, rarely scarce, seldom - Happy, immeasurable love   heart or head's greater part unhurt and happy,   things that bear harmony   certain in concord with reason.26

As Zukofsky writes in "A-12": "if love exists, why remember it?" From "A-9" to "Bottom" to "A-12" this seems the guiding inquiry, the reason for these works. His answer?

So to light up Whether one moves or is still.27

Or as he observed to L.S. Dembo, "I suppose love means if you do something, that's love; otherwise you don't do anything."28 And this action consists of saying "yes" or "no": "That's about all we have ever done as far as action is concerned."29 So much for the age old philosophical conundrum of freedom versus determination.

Late Works - The Intellect

For you I have emptied the meaningLeaving the song30

Subsequent movements of "A" and the Catallus translations written during the 1960s31 show that Zukofsky's poetry, always difficult, had grown increasingly hermetic. Some critics, like Mark Scroggins, argue that by removing the context for his highly allusive poetry Zukofsky had in fact made his poems more universal. Others, like Zukofsky's "Objectivist" alumni, George Oppen, felt Zukofsky's obscurity to be a "tactic." Zukofsky's argument at the time was, according to Oppen, that no one reads his work anyway, so what does it matter?32 This statement was made at the time Oppen was enjoying considerable success. Following Oppen's comment to Zukofsky that he preferred his own poetry to Zukofsky's, Louis refused to speak to Oppen or even, as in the somewhat famous case of an issue of Stony Brook, to be published along side him. Oppen, inheritor of a considerable estate, had returned to poetry from exile in Mexico after decades of activism in the Communist Party and was writing poems Zukofsky probably felt were a betrayal of the "Objectivist" aesthetics Oppen held prior to his 24 year self-enforced poetic silence, poems being published by Oppen's considerably wealthy sister June Oppen Degnan and New Directions' James Laughlin. That Oppen would win critical and commercial success and, in 1969, the Pulitzer Prize, did little to ingratiate the still somewhat obscure and economically struggling Zukofsky. Oppen apparently tried to convince Laughlin to publish the work of Oppen's one-time mentor; one can imagine that such pity did little to win Zukofsky's endearment.

From "A-22":

Ox world needs put onthe Furniture of a Horse . . . who can make Shadows, nothanks to the Sun? 4 tonesteen blood's tide to thinkor panser, dress wounds orgroom.33

What is a reader to make of the above lines? Even with Pound's Cantos, a dense work if there ever was one, armed properly with encyclopedias, history books, French and Italian poetry and a Sanskrit and Chinese dictionary, one could, in time, come to grasp the poem's many allusions and dense, multi-layered meanings. Yet with Zukofsky, it is clear that no such library exists; if it does, the meaning is absent of context to such an extent that a reader would not know the first place to look for a meaning. The words seem random, almost nonsense. No doubt there appears to be meaning there; the poems make syntactical sense, much in the same way that Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is syntactically correct. Hugh Kenner is correct in his estimation that scholars would be "elucidating" the poem well into the "22nd century," but whether or not any courageous scholar with copious free time will be able to create a guide to the poem as Carroll Terrell did with the Cantos, who can say? Perhaps the only clear result of these last sections of "A" is Zukofsky's development of the five-word-per-line poetic structure, utilized in his 80 Flowers, to have been published on the poet's eightieth birthday in 1984; it was eventually published in an extremely limited edition the year of his death. Consisting of eighty-one poems, it makes the last books of "A" seem somewhat clearer, by contrast:

Wild time liveforever horsethyme iceby shard green red-purple thyrseshadowed stone or a flurrytroth orpine kin acre yellow-redmossy stonecrop love-entangle your kind'sroof houseleek old-man-and-woman who woothatch song quicksilver cold wouldwon't know All sedum no34

This is the poem in its entirety. The eighty-one page book 80 Flowers notably inspired a 400-page book of criticism by Michelle Leggot titled Reading Zukofsky's 80 Flowers; she only interprets sixty or so. Despite Kenner's prediction, the amount of criticism written on Zukofsky is considerably less than it could be, especially by comparison to other, more established modernist poets such as Eliot, Pound and Williams. But the essays, explications, studies, symposiums, and books are being written. A biography is in preparation, to be published later this year by Wesleyan University.

Epilogue

Twenty years ago, Louis Zukofsky, retired, was busying himself in his garden, formulating the extremely dense poems that appeared in 80 Flowers, a book that was to be followed by 90 Trees, to have been published on his ninetieth birthday. He had no major collection in print, the prior major collections having quickly disappeared from the shelves. Some progress had been made: his "Objectivist" theories from a half century before had finally found critical reception, inaugurated by a series of perceptive interviews conducted by the critic L.S. Dembo at the University of Wisconsin in 1968. Younger poets like Allen Ginbserg and Robert Creeley considered him a poet of great importance and a powerful influence. Zukofsky had some successes to look forward to, as well: the single volume publication of the whole of "A", completed one year before, and a collection of his critical essays, Prepositions (as in "before positioning one's self"), for which he had been editing the essays over a half-century

old in an attempt to make some final statement on his theories of "sincerity and objectification" and statements on Pound, Williams, Henry James, Spinoza, and his late-career fondness for the work of Wallace Stevens.

The final essay in that book, "About the Gas Age," was a transcript of a question-and-response session following a reading he made at London's American Embassy in 1969. In the spirit of Vico, Zukofsky formulates his theory of the three stages of existence: solid, liquid and gas. Images are solid, music is liquid and the intellect is gas (or, to put it another way, sight, sound, and intellect). We are living, Zukofsky explains, in a gas age, an intellectual age. He admits his admiration for Spinoza, emblematic of the "gas stage." Shakespeare stood at the turning point of the transition from liquid to gas, or from music to intellect. "The wonderful thing about Spinoza's philosophy," Zukofsky observes, "is that out of 8 definitions and 7 axioms he builds the whole system." He then goes on to explain,

When I was a kid I started the Objectivist movement in poetry. There were a few poets who felt sympathetic towards each other and Harriet Monroe at the time insisted, we'd better have a title for it, call it something. I said, I didn't want to. She insisted; so I said, all right, if I can define it in an essay, and I used two words, sincerity and objectification, and I was sorry immediately. But it's gone down into the history books; they forgot the founder, thank heaven, and kept the terms, and of course, I said objectivist and they said objectivism and that makes all the difference. Well that was pretty bad, so then I spent the next thirty years trying to make it simple.35

In retrospect, that last adjective seems painfully ironic. Zukofsky, like Spinoza, developed a system, and for Zukofsky it is a whole system. He discovered it at a young age; he spent the next thirty years making it increasingly precise, maddening, beautiful, dense, brilliant and difficult. The forgotten founder, tending to his flowers, remembering love.

Who may not anymoreshow his writing to friendsnot till it's printor his dreamed wordsof trooped galaxiesa night of the daythey move in

glad some envystopped showingits writing to himart is not covetouswhose life is long 36

20 "A", p. 121 "So that Even a Lover," CSP p. 114.22 "A", p. 3823 Ibid, 110-11124 Zukofsky for the most part avoided literary companionship besides forming informal groups with a number of his students at Brooklyn Polytechnic, among them Hugh Seidman and Fielding Dawson.25 Bottom: On Shakespeare, p.vii-ix26 "A", p. 12727 Ibid, 17028 L.S. Dembo, ed. The Contemporary Writer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), p. 23029 Ibid, 21930 CSP, 8131 The list includes parts 13 through 21 of "A", the most dense and difficult parts until the appearance of the notoriously difficult parts 22nd and 23rd in the mid-1970s shortly before Zukofsky's death. I will not discuss the works in any detail here; suffice to say there have been numerous perceptive studies written on "A". The best introduction by far is Barry Ahearn's Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California, 1983); I am clearly indebted to his reading of Zukofsky's long poem. Also notable is Mark Scroggins' Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998) and the Scroggins-edited Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997).32 As Zukofsky wrote in his novel Little, "I too have been charged with obscurity, tho it's a case of listeners wanting to know too much about me, more than words can say."33 "A", 532

34 "Liveforever," CSP, 32635 Prepositions, 170-171.36 From a poem with the distinctly Stevens-like title "The Old Poet Moves to a New Apartment 14 Times" CSP, 229

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