The first panel at the LZ / 100 conference was a superb affair on the topic of A Test of Poetry, Zukofsky’s curious – and relatively brief – anthology of exemplars, groups of poems clustered together, anonymously in two of its three sections, tho with a pedagogical grid at the rear. It was an all-star panel, with Alan Golding, Norman Finkelstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Bob Perelman. All four talks were excellent, but two fundamentally transformed my understanding of this cryptic book originally published in 1948, but largely constructed during the 1930s – two very different moments in the history of American & world politics for this most political of late modernists.

 

First, Golding, as often he is want to do (and a feature of his critical writing that I admire & have mimicked in my own work more than once), went back to counting specifics, in this case books, literally copies, both of Test & other volumes Golding argued were in some sense comparable. Thus, for example, Golding recounted the history of editions of Brooks & Warren’s market making Understanding Poetry, first issued in 1938, but traceable in terms of sales only from 1949 to 1976, a period during which some 294,000 copies were released.

 

Golding reads A Test of Poetry – and indeed Pound’s ABC of Reading (first published in 1934 but which by 1967 had resulted in editions totaling less than 30,000 copies) as competitors in an academic textual market, one created & saturated by Understanding Poetry. I wonder, if only because in my life, coming into the writing of poetic theory in & around 1965, an alternative non- or even anti-academic tradition already existed, including not just these books, but D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Human Universe & The Mayan Letters, the critical works of Gertrude Stein & Laura Riding. The idea – implicit in Golding’s comparison – that the target audience envisioned for these books was so many undergraduates seems to me problematic, more so especially for those volumes that were written or at least begun before Brooks & Warren functionally created the academic market segment.

 

My test simply is this: would these books still have been written if the academic market never existed? In every case, the answer is a resounding Yes. Indeed, without exception, all the works of poetics that I would consider of primary value were composed without one eye – let alone both – fixated on the textbook marketplace. An example just beyond the boundaries of critical composition, per se, would be the late Don Allen’s The New American Poetry, aimed at reaching & influencing an audience of poets. A counter example, though, just to demonstrate the impact of target audiences, would be Allen’s own later collection (co-edited with George Butterick), The Postmoderns, intended for undergraduates but more useful as a demonstration of how the same writing that once turned the world of poetry on its ear can be presented as lifeless, simply through its desire everywhere to be representative rather than polemic.

 

Even if, as Golding notes, the first draft of Test was constructed by Zukofsky in a series of 16 blue examination books, it doesn’t follow that that this work was gathered – or published – for undergraduates.

 

One question here that I would take back to Golding & to his own intellectual project is precisely this division between polemic & pedagogic writing. Polemic writing presumes its reader is a peer, an equal, someone to be persuaded the way one persuades a neighbor in an election. Pedagogic writing, however, presumes just the opposite, that there is a hierarchy of knowledge, information & meaning and that expository writing is fundamentally the transmission of proprietary data to an audience of blank slates.

 

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ talk unveiled the constructedness of the examples used by Louis Zukofsky in A Test of Poetry. Rather than being complete texts or even complete quotations from extended passages of longer works, Zukofsky often built these lyrics, at times using ellipses to indicate gaps of entire pages are two or more passages are yoked out of context in order to foreground elements that may not have been prominent in the original.

 

Thus, for example, political rage & class resentment become major themes in what appears to be “classic literature,” an act of turning the courtly constraints of literary history on their head. Indeed, at one point in the 1930s, Zukofsky was working on two parallel anthologies, the other being A Worker’s Anthology. While this second project was abandoned – its existence is documented in a 54-page manuscript in the Basil Bunting archives – 35 of its 38 poems ultimately find their way into Test, 33 of them in exactly the form they took in the Worker’s manuscript.

 

This, for me, was one of those wonderful moments when doing one’s homework – which DuPlessis executes impeccably – yields whole new layers of the work at hand. The result is revelatory – I’ll never look at A Test of Poetry the same way again.