The first substantial publication of previously unavailable work by Louis Zukofsky since the private printing of Eighty Flowers shortly after his death in 1978 – as well as hands down the strangest new book by a major modernist in many a year – A Useful Art collects Louis Zukofsky’s writing on design & crafts conducted under the employ of the WPA. Edited by Kenneth Sherwood, with an afterword by John Taggart, A Useful Art contains a 50-page essay on the history of ironwork in America from 1585 to 1856, a second major work on American kitchenware from 1608 to 1875, shorter pieces on chalk, tin & toleware, plus a hodge-podge of radio scripts & research notes on specific items from the smithing traditions as well as on ancillary topics, including carpets & friendship quilts. In short, this is Antiques Roadshow with Louis Zukofsky! Like his other critical writing, it’s both meticulous and quite dry.

 

The relation of A Useful Art to Zukofsky’s poetry is no doubt oblique – not unlike the relation of Kafka’s Measures to Prevent Accidents in Factories and Farms to the short stories & novels that followed. There are specific lines and phrases in “A” that might be traced back to Zukofsky’s day job – which extended from 1936 into 1939 – yet, as Sherwood notes in his introduction, Zukofsky had written “To my wash-stand” in 1932. What strikes me, skimming through this book for the first time, is how Zukofsky’s famed domesticity, his role as the chronicler of the family, can be seen here as related to the lives of the anonymous artisans & craftspeople whose work passes through our hands with our being barely aware of them. The book’s only obvious failing is that only writings from the last two years of Zukofsky’s job appear to have survived.

 

A Useful Art, however, is in one sense just the forerunner of a much more important new Zukofsky volume that is due to be published in September, Le Style Apollinaire, edited by Serge Gavronsky. Two sections of Zukofsky’s booklength examination of the French poet were published in Westminster Magazine in 1932, while a French edition (done in collaboration with Rene Taupin) appeared in 1934. That Zukofsky’s “first book” will arrive finally in English some 25 years after the poet’s death underscores all too clearly the problem of resources that progressive literature continues to face.