Poem Beginning 'The', 1st Movement (2:50): MP3 Zukofsky's arrangement is as clean in form as its criticism and the good examples of poetry it offers. It is appraised correctly on the jacket of the book by Clifton Fadiman, Mark Van Doren and William Carlos Williams. Distilled excellence, rich portions from the poets from Homer thru the present, some of these difficult -- poetry is not soft -- supported by Zukofsky's precise interpretive remarks. "The lines of poetry of great emotional significance in any age are rare. To obtain, therefore, an accurate criticism of them and of the lesser work which surrounds them, reading should not shun analysis." To read for pleasure, that is the aim here. Poetry out of the "living processes" of everyday and from there "to always another phase of existence" -- the world needs it. ( or : : Zukofsky is moved, of course, by certain perceptions: the exact word; any word a poetic word "if used in the right order, with the right cadence, with a definite aim in view"; "song, one of the mainsprings of poetry"; a poem: "an emotional object" close to the people and their experiences, i.e., the source, something to put your hands on as against metaphysical rockers; "in any age" . . . "The lasting attraction in the words of a poem and its construction make it classic and contemporary at the same time." )

1. Intro. Your reading of Zukofsky, my reading of Zukofsky. Our reading of Zukofsky? 1970 AN ERA, Valentine, postcards, tricolor sign-off, dedications, 's = z ears and eyes. Little wrists. Drive, fast kisses, a mouth at her ear. Cig crackle at poet's ear. Look into your ear. CZ, see, sea, centum, cento, centuple + 100 lines of "A"-22 "an" song. 1970 is the last big jumping point, intended to take in the millenium. Look at Epigraph and #80 Zinnia. Look at Much Ado About Trees. Consider shape of Complete Short Poetry.

But in order to accomplish this transformation, the words must conjure their own voices (throw their voices, ventriloquize) back through our own reading eyes and ears (across time and across generations), through our eyes not succumbing to errors, through our ears attentive to the music, to Musicks Letters. The idea is the EYED EAR. Z’s scholarly work is a conjuring act, a conjecture—he brings words back to life by rearranging, rescoring, reinscribing and repeating (recurrences) as Pablo Casals rings new changes on the tunes and, in turn, is ‘translat’d’ by the retuning, forked by the tuning fork (diapason), by their notes and ultimately their alphabets—the story of letters.

By the 1970s, however, a relationship that lasted exactly a half-century began to wane at last. When Aram Saroyan's review of the poet's book "A"-13-21 appeared, consisting entirely of quotations from various sections of the poem, one wag wrote to Poetry editor Daryl Hine asking, "Is it too much to hope that you paid Louis Zukofsky for the 'review,' and not Aram Saroyan?" Zukofsky's last publication in Poetry, the second part of "A"-22, was in the April 1974 issue.

1- in my opinion 4 O.C. is unjustly neglected, given that it is the window into the future of LZ's poetic structure. To my mind those endless quatrains help lead to the 5-word lines, which is LZ’s version of the pentameter. In other words, the quatrains (of 4 O.C.) represent my father’s resolve to formally and fully “settle-into” (his reworked version of) traditional poetic form (and to no longer move “16 Times”!). It is that acceptance/return which causes Bill’s amazement when first he sees 4 O.C.. When my father fools around with the sestina, and his (frankly bullshit conic sections) it is what our British friends would call a one-off. Yes, it is brilliant, but leads no place. 4 O.C. lays a foundation. Were I to speak in musical terms, 4 O.C. stands to the late LZ works as “Pulcinella” of Stravinsky stands to “Agon”, which I presume you would perhaps equate with “A”-23. If there is one other Stravinsky work I would compare to 4 O.C., it is the “Cantata on Early English Texts”. It , too, is dismissed as an overly long, not terribly interesting work, but on the contrary, not only is it unbelievably beautiful, but it is the opening to all of the (Stravinsky) serial music that follows it.

To read Louis Zukofsky's poetry is to encounter Zukofsky reading—poetry, philosophy, modern advertisements, even himself. Like Ezra Pound, Zukofsky is an archaeologist of words or, as Hugh Kenner has called Pound, Eliot, and Zukofsky, a "poet of classroom accuracies." Zukofsky's multiple references, his interlayering of one text over another text, explains in part why his poetry has been described as difficult and baffling. It is not only that his poetry is allusive but that the allusions often seem elusive, and his rationale— 12 ―according to some critics—illusive. In Little Zukofsky writes, "I too have been charged with obscurity, tho its a case of listeners wanting to know too much about me, more than the words say."[1] Coming to terms with what "the words say" is much more than an exercise in Zukofskian hermeneutics, in discovering and interpreting all his "hushed sources"; it is also coming to terms with how "the mind constructs the world" (Prepositions, 18).

The poetics that produced "A"-22 and -23 is pretty much identical to that which generated 80 Flowers, Zukofsky's last completed collection. This volume of eighty-one poems, each of eight five-word lines, takes to new extremes of density Zukofsky's methods of composition by quotation, transliteration, and compression. Each poem focuses on a particular flower (or class of flowers) and each aims to draw in and allude to as much knowledge as possible pertaining to that flower: botanical, commercial, historical, alchemical, literary, etymological, and personal knowledges are all compacted into these enormously resonant little poems. What they in the end suggest--and one wonders whether Zukofsky himself was wholly conscious of working towards such a goal--is the possibility of the word set free from meaning-determining context, liberated to interact with its neighbors in any or all of the combinations possible. The compression and foreshortening of syntax in the Flowers, far from making the poems meaningless, opens them up to a far broader range of potential meanings and connotations. Even an exhaustive ferreting out of the source-texts and original contexts from which the words of the Flowers are drawn does not pin the poems down to a determinate meaning or set of meanings, but serves to enrich and expand our multidirectional, polysemic experience of the text.

Part of this was simply my perception that what made "A" work in sharp contrast to the other long poems of the first two-thirds of the last century was that its individual sections were both self-contained and yet logically related. There is an entropy inherent in Passages, The Maximus Poems and The Cantos that the reader doesn't find in "A" and it really lies in that part:whole relationship. Oddly, one still does find it in the actual writing of the work itself – Zukofsky appears to have spent more than half of the time he worked on "A" writing very little or nothing.

In effect, Zukofsky is trying here to find a way of refusing the hard conceptualizations of ideology and theory, so that he may return the act of poem-making to something that is simultaneously open-ended and analytical--not so much to deny his own Marxist insights as to prevent any "philosophy" from having a hegemonic hold over existence. Because the world in its entirety is beyond a single conception, so the poem must find its own unified form. The complexity of that form demands that the poem strive, as Zukofsky says in the brilliant final strophe of "Mantis" to hold "the simultaneous, / the diaphanous, historical / in one head."

A. Someone else might have done it differently, but for me that's what it led to. I have that kind of mind. Somehow, you know, the thing can become kind of horrible—to connect a thing with everything. But how can you avoid it? And it's not that I want to be long-winded; I want to be very concise.

the words of an insoluble sentence          a24 771

“The sound of words,” Zukofsky says in A Test of Poetry, “is sometimes 95% of poetic presentation” (58). What he repeatedly called the “music” of poetry really does have close connections to played music: after an evening at a friend’s in 1936 or 7 listening to records of Bach and Mozart, Zukofsky found (as usual) that the music gave him an awful itch to get back to writing “A”-8.[2] Bunting commented that “when [Zukofsky] wanted to imitate a fugue, he determined that the actual sounds” – rather than thematic recurrences or reiterative rhythm – “should be the substance of it” (On Poetry 155) – there may be a “music of ideas” in this poetry, but there’s also an actual music. Bunting commented that “no other [twentieth-century] poet has stated or followed more clearly the closeness of poetry to music.” We are so used to zooming in on the meaning of poems that we still down-play the immensely complex relationship of poems to music;[3] critics and readers pay so little attention to the tone-value of vowels that they forget how difficult it is even to say the vowels A E I O U in a flat monotone – that takes hard practice and great concentration. There is quite explicitly and distinctly a music in speech, each vowel sounding its own note. But we don’t have a vocabulary to trace the subtle interactions and patterns of pitch, stress, duration, the movements of breath through voice, and we certainly don’t have a notation. All we have is the ear. Part Two of Bottom: On Shakespeare gives us sixty-two detailed pages (33-94) on prosody considered as speech, the music of speaking. In it, a footnote (37) tells us that Celia Thaew [Zukofsky]’s setting of Pericles is “the one excuse for all that follows in this part.” In October 1963, after Bottom had been published, Zukofsky told Corman “yes I mean that footnote . . . & will mean it more & more as the world understands less & less how much I mean it” (Corman 168).

What also seemed fresh – and the degree of its freshness only became clear to me later – was the entry into Louie’s mix (his grand collage of cultures, times, and places) of the deep tradition of Jewish lore and mysticism – even against its dismissal or erasure by his masters. Here was something different from Reznikoff’s judaica and from that of many far lesser poets, something that set him apart also from the other big writers of his time, both Jew and Gentile. I can’t say that it was a direct influence on my own work – much less on that of Meltzer or Tarn or Hirschman or others: Robert Kelly, who was so good at it, and Robert Duncan, who knew “that lute of Zukofsky” and its airs as well as anyone. What Zukofsky gave us, then, wasn’t so much ethnic writing in the ordinary sense (though Louie, like others of us, could do that too) as an addition to an ethnopoetics on a grand scale, diving into the poetic and near-poetic past with the charge to make-it-new (“contemporaneous in the mind”) and to carry it freshly into the present. In doing so, he found a place for himself (and for all of us), where he could hunker down and leave his masters well behind.

[4] As Tim Woods argues, in general, early Zukofsky “is a writer who is caught between two conflicting demands—those of high modernism and those of the socialist realists of the 1930s. The attempt to resolve this dilemma leads Zukofsky to make language the site of his politics.” The Poetic of the Limit; Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. NY: Palgrave, 2002, 13.

One last thing as to method: one way to learn how to read Zukofsky is to watch him read — read and quote.

22. I.e., the last words of /”A”/-24, the tiny coda written by Louis to Celia’s /LZ Masque/; “the gift / she hears / the work / in its recurrence.”