The third (of four, I think) installment in my chronology of “essential texts.” 

 

Louis Zukofsky, “A” 22 & 23

What was the single finest volume of poetry in the 20^th century? At least in the U.S. & in English? For my money, it’s one of the next two items & you can take your pick. The first is Louis Zukofsky’s final work on the longpoem “A.”  Written in the early 1970s, some years after his wife Celia presented Zukofsky with the choral collage that is the poem’s concluding “A”-24, these two poems, each composed around a five-word line, offer us as perfect a balance as anyone has ever achieved of verbal density with lyric richness:

 

Late later and much later
surge sea erupts boiling molten
lava island from ice, land
seen into color thru day
and night: voiced, once unheard
earth beginning idola of years
that love well forget late.

 

The five-word line offers a substantial range of metric & syntactic possibilities & Zukofsky takes advantage of every one as this single sentence demonstrates. The text moves between lucid exposition & material opacity almost phrase by phrase, idola (false images) precisely to the degree that we imagine words as transparent, as access to things. Tale & tone are open to anything here, from this creation myth to the most moving poetry written on the death of JFK to Zukofsky’s signature obsession with all matters domestic, ”A”-23 concluding literally with an alphabet that leads to the street on which the poet’s son, violinist Paul Zukofsky, then lived: arbutus. I think of these two works – each roughly 30 pages in this small format – as twin poems & today can see how they not only bring the great longpoem to closure but further connect “A”  to 80 Flowers, Zukofsky’s final sequence of dense lyrics (and itself a greatly underrated masterpiece).

 

Like several of the works in my list, it is virtually impossible now to find “A”22 & 23 in its original format. In each instance, however, that format was an important contributor to the overall power of the reading experience. For the next item, any other format strikes me as unthinkable.

 

 

Robert Grenier, Sentences

When Robert Grenier came to the University of California at Berkeley to teach in 1969, his poems already were telescoping down from the post-Lowell lyrics (still visible in his first book, Dusk Road Games) with which he had originally gone to Iowa City for his graduate degree. Influenced now by Stein, Zukofsky & Creeley, Grenier was seeking the poetic equivalent of sub-atomic particles: what might make language work? Was it actually possible to capture consciousness at the very instant in (and through) which it became language? This quest led Grenier to start a magazine with Barrett Watten entitled This &, in its initial issue, to declare, all in caps, ”I HATE SPEECH.” That was a calculated overstatement, of course – Grenier was obsessed with the spoken as well as the written – but he wanted to identify a language for poetry that was not déjà toujours already encased within the confines of speech as genre.

 

As Grenier filled up notebook after notebook, it seemed unclear how these notes, some of them just verbatim transcriptions of snatches of conversation, might eventually be transformed into poetry. Indeed, with the exception of what we would now call language poetry journals, like This or Tottel’s, Grenier’s own publications of poetry were relatively few until, following a show in a gallery setting at Franconia College, Whale Cloth Press published Sentences in 1975. Sentences was a book in a box: 500 cards, 5 inches high, 8 inches wide, text typed (in “landscape” format) in Courier from an IBM Selectric typewriter, housed in a dark blue cloth covered folding box. Not only could one shuffle the cards, there was a rumor that no two boxes had started with the works in the same order.

 

More important than the presentation was the content. One example:

JOE

 

JOE

One could hardly find, or even imagine, a simpler text, yet it undermines everything people know or, worse, have learned, about titles, repetition, rhyme, naming, immanence. If we read it as challenging the status of the title, then on a second level it is the most completely rhymed poem conceivable. & vice versa. As language, this is actually quite beautiful in a plainspoken manner, the two words hovering without ever resolving into a static balance, never fully title & text, nor call & response, neither the hierarchy of naming nor parataxis of rhyme.

 

There were, of course, other, earlier works that focused on the micropoem, such as Aram Saroyan’s books in the 1960s. Where Grenier differed was in his persistent focus, insisting that that the poem’s responsibility first of all was to the language through which it came into being. So where Saroyan had one or two poems per book that actually expanded what poetry might do, Sentences had hundreds.

 

Sentences was originally published in an edition of only a few hundred copies. Today an electronic edition is available from the Whale Cloth website (www.whalecloth.org), but otherwise this seminal work has never been reprinted. I keep my copy literally next to the OED.