While Alan Golding, Norman Finkelstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Bob Perelman covered Louis Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry from a wide range of perspectives, I was struck that not one of them addressed what has always seemed to me to be its most visible formal feature – the presence of a low dash, an underscore at the head of every example. Thus:
23a______
Hedge-crickets sing;
Zukofsky himself addresses it only in a footnote, albeit the lone footnote in Test:
This space may be used by the reader who enjoys marking up his copy for evaluating the compared examples of similar object matter under each cardinal number in some such way as great, good, fair, poor.
Flinching as we note the gendered language that is so 1940s, this smirking footnote suggests that this line is a kind of joke. This makes some sense on the first page, perhaps, with two poems, but the device is carried through for each of the anthology’s 186 pieces. That suggests that Test might be read as a kind of parody of a textbook, and at some very distant level, that also may be an element here, but it’s important to keep in mind that this form of satire is in fact far more commonplace today that it was 56 years ago – let alone 70 years ago, when much of Test appears to have been put together.
But these seem like uncharacteristically broad strokes for a poet so attentive to particulars that he would send typesetters individual instructions on the number of dots to use for each ellipsis (thus the occasional two-dot ellipsis is neither a typo nor an antiquarian convention but an instance of ellipsis interuptus). I think we need to look instead at where these lines are and what they in face do, formally. Boldfaced and in a larger san serif type than the “body text” of these poems, these lines transform the numbering of these texts from functioning as separators into serving instead as surrogate titles.
What after all is a title? What is its relation to the body of a text? Zukofsky after all is a poet whose major work “A” has a title in quotation marks because it quotes the first word of the poem itself, a strategy Zukofsky employed in his earliest acknowledged work, “Poem beginning ‘The’”.*
The poems in display in A Test of Poetry are unidentified in the first & third sections of the anthology, but even in the second, where Zukofsky names poet & poem & comments after each grouping, the work’s author & title are appended after the body text, essentially as a kind of textual “tail” at its lower right.
Yet our eyes are attuned to see, feel titles even when, as is so often the case for me, we mostly read them after we read the text, particularly for texts of the size included in this anthology, most
of which are sonnet length or less – that Keats excerpt above is complete.
Titles, as Walter Benjamin has noted, operate in one of two ways – they name the work as a whole or else they function as a caption, foregrounding a single internal element within the text (think, for example, of David Ignatow, an obsessive captionist, most often farming his last line for a title word or phrase). These curious lines of Zukofsky’s, however, suspend the title as a name or caption, while retaining its role as a graphic weight at the head of a text, leaving the numbering system for the most part to generate groupings.
So that line at the top of the poem is a title . . . performing the role the eye expects a title to play. This acknowledges that titles have functions that are extra-linguistic & that the graphic elements of the printed text themselves carry a kind of meaning. Grouped with their numbers, these lines fulfill one part of the social contract of the printed text.
Think, for instance of all those poems entitled “Untitled,” or where editors have, as often they do with Emily Dickinson, imposed titles or simply boldfaced first lines. Each is an acknowledgement of this same line as we find in A Test of Poetry, the dark brow of the poem.
* There are, we learned from Tim Woods, even earlier poems published in student journals at Columbia under the ironic pseudonym, Dunn Wyth.
