From the perspective of its organizers, the Louis Zukofsky / 100 – it sounds like an auto race, or possibly a mass arrest (“Free the LZ 100!”) – was wildly successful, drawing 250 attendees when 70 would have been considered a very respectable turnout. Indeed, the conference closed registration several days in advance because the numbers had reached the physical limits of the rooms involved at Columbia & Barnard.

 

Yet of the 250 attendees, no more than 30 appeared to be women — & hardly a random selection. Marjorie Perloff, Lee Ann Brown, Joan Retallack, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Madeline Gins, Anne Waldman, Barbara Cole, Marjorie Welish, Jennifer Ashton, Erica Hunt, Ulla Dydo, Susan Wheeler, Jessica Smith, Ruth Jennison, Meredith Quartermain, Tonya Foster, Helene Aji, Jena Osman, Diane Rosenberg, Brenda Iijima, all poets & scholars who practice, with no hesitation or apology, their role as intellectuals.   

 

To be at a conference in 2004 in which the attendees are over 80 percent male is unsettling. An absolute majority of poets writing & publishing today are women, & the academy – this was after all a professional conference of scholars even more than it was a gathering of poets, tho it was also always a collaboration of both sides of the community. Even the academy, at least the human sciences, hasn’t been 80 percent male since the 1960s. I was told that the imbalance would have been worse had not the organizers done some active outreach to several women speakers on the agenda.

 

All I can conclude is that there is something about Louis Zukofsky &/or his work to account for this gendered response. But what?

 

Sharing a cab with Marjorie Perloff Friday night, we discussed this. It is not, she reassures me, that women don’t choose to present or attend academic conferences. Zukofsky, she suggests, is not only a sexist – a man of his generation, born in 1904 – but also ideally suited to be taken as a “man’s poet.” (I envision Robert Bly doing his Iron John routine & try to imagine LZ likewise – it’s a preposterous image, tho it’s also clearly not what Perloff was suggesting.) One possible reading of this is that the tight-nit family represented in his poems is hardly the valorized ideal Zukofsky himself portrays it as. The wife types the poems, makes possible the careers of husband & son alike. She even finishes LZ’s long poem for him!  

 

Harder to fathom is whether or how LZ’s difficulty in his poetry is, or may be, more “male” in some sense than, say, the uses of difficulty in the poetry & prose of Gertrude Stein. Does Zukofsky’s use of number as a method for inbuilding opacity differ materially from Stein’s more improvisational interventions into linguistic and grammatic surfaces? Is it a question of methodology?

 

I don’t know and I’m pretty sure I’m not the right person to try and answer that question. Barbara Cole gave a talk that I didn’t hear at the conference on just this topic, or rather on the “dim tide” of feminist criticism and gendered readings of his work. Her abstract is online at the LZ / 100 website, but I wish I’d heard the entire talk.