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The American poet Louis Zukofsky received little public...)
The American poet Louis Zukofsky received little public attention during his lifetime, though he was regarded by his literary contemporaries as one of the finest writers in the United States. Now in paperback, Complete Short Poetry gathers all of Zukofsky's poetry outside his 800-page magnum opus entitled " A"--including work that appeared in All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964, the experimental transliteration (with Celia Zukofsky) of Catullus, the limited edition 80 Flowers, as well as several fugitive pieces never before collected.
"Zukofsky is the American Mallarmé," writes Hugh Kenner, "and given the peculiar intentness of the American preoccupation with language--obsessive, despite what you may read in the newspapers--his work is more disorienting by far than his exemplar's ever was. Mallarmé had a long poetic tradition from which to deviate into philology. Zukofsky received a philological tradition, which he raised to a higher power."
(Written between 1947 and 1960 and first published in 1963...)
Written between 1947 and 1960 and first published in 1963, the prose work in the first of these two volumes reflects Louis Zukofsky's ongoing obsession with Shakespeare--whose plays he had first seen performed in Yiddish--and is central to understanding Zukofsky's work. Tracing the themes of knowledge, love and physical vision ("the eyes have it") through both Shakespeare's plays and the poetry, Bottom: On Shakespeare is more than a compendious act of homage by one poet to another. In effect, it lays out Zukofsky's poetics and theory of knowledge on a grand scale, tracing his themes through the whole of Western culture, from the Classical Greeks through William Carlos Williams.
The second volume of Bottom: On Shakespeare consists of Celia Thaew Zukofsky's spare operatic setting of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play in which Zukofsky saw Shakespeare rewriting the classic plots and tropes of the Odyssey. The Wesleyan edition features a new foreword by Bob Perelman.
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A gathering of all of Zukofsky’s poems outside of “A” ―...)
A gathering of all of Zukofsky’s poems outside of “A” ― poems that are “absolute clarification, crystal cabinets full of air and angels” (Kenneth Rexroth).
Anew, sun, to fire summer
leaves move toward the air
from the stems of the branches
fire summer fire summer
―from Anew
Here is the complete music-filled arc of Louis Zukofsky’s shorter verse collected in one volume: lyrical love poems written to his wife Celia and son Paul; the groundbreaking “Poem Beginning ‘The,’ ” “which sends up ‘The Waste Land’ and its cultural vision in a cloud of bricolage, a hilarious pastiche of quotes, canon and kitsch, high and low hopelessly intertwined” (Michael Palmer); the boisterous, riotous translations of Catullus; spare, brilliant nature poems as if written by an ancient hokku master; his genius “ ‘Mantis’ ” sestina; the enigmatic, spiraling, and beautiful last poems, “80 Flowers.” Anew: Complete Shorter Poetry is a book of blessings and gifts for any poetry lover.
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The new, authoritative edition of “A”: the monumental l...)
The new, authoritative edition of “A”: the monumental lifepoem by one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, Louis Zukofsky.
River that must turn full after I stop dying
Song, my song, raise grief to music
Light as my loves’ thought, the few sick
So sick of wrangling: thus weeping,
Sounds of light, stay in her keeping
And my son’s face – this much for honor
― from “ ‘A’-11”
At long last, here is the whole of Louis Zukofsky’s epic masterpiece “A” back in print with misprints corrected and a new, fresh introduction by the noted scholar Barry Ahearn. No other poem in the English language is filled with as much daily love, light, intellect, and music. As William Carlos Williams once wrote of Zukofsky’s poetry, “I hear a new music of verse stretching out into the future.”
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Scroggins provides a provocative and advanced introduct...)
Scroggins provides a provocative and advanced introduction to the
thought and writing of Louis Zukofsky, aptly described as one of the "first
postmodernists."
Poet, translator, and editor, Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City
in 1904. Raised to speak first Yiddish and then English, he was fascinated
by language from an early age. This deep preoccupation with language--its
musicality, complex constructions, and fluid meaning--later became a key
component in the development of his poetry. Friend to William Carlos Williams,
Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, mentor to Robert Creeley and influence
on many of the Language Movement poets, Zukofsky and his work stand squarely
at the center of American poetry's transition from modernism to postmodernism.
Mark Scroggins advances thoughtful readings of Zukofsky's key critical
essays, a wide variety of his shorter poems, and his "poem of a life", "A". He carefully situates Zukofsky within his literary and historical
contexts, examining his relationship to Pound, his 1930s Marxist politics,
and his sense of himself as a Jewish modernist poet. Scroggins also places
Zukofsky within an ongoing tradition of American poetry, including the
work of Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer,
and John Taggart.
A Useful Art: Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design (The Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)
(A Useful Art is an invaluable chronicle of a major Americ...)
A Useful Art is an invaluable chronicle of a major American poet’s engagement with this country’s indigenous tradition of design. In 1936, the Federal Arts Project (a division of the WPA) hired Louis Zukofsky, along with many others, to prepare a compendium of information on traditional American crafts. The Index of American Design aimed to define original U.S. culture at a time when interest in handicrafts had just begun to emerge. These previously unpublished essays and radio scripts are scrupulously researched investigations of various American handicrafts: the topics they cover include ironwork, tin ware, furniture maker Duncan Phyfe and friendship quilts. They also reflect Zukofsky’s sense of the poem as a crafted object and his attempt to reconcile the labor theory of value with aesthetic production. This book, which can be seen in the context of kindred work by William Carlos William (In the American Grain) and Ezra Pound (Guide to Kulchur), will be of special interest to readers of 20th-century poetry, cultural critics, social historians, and scholars of design.
Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #22)
(With an ear tuned to the most delicate musical effects, a...)
With an ear tuned to the most delicate musical effects, an eye for exact and heterogeneous details, and a mind bent on experiment, Louis Zukofsky was preeminent among the radical Objectivist poets of the 1930s. This is the first collection to draw on the full range of Zukofsky’s poetry——containing short lyrics, versions of Catullus, and generous selections from “A”, his 24-part “poem of a life”—and provides a superb introduction to a modern master of whom the critic Guy Davenport has written: “Every living American poet worth a hoot has stood aghast before the steel of his integrity.”
The most formally radical poet to emerge among the second wave of American modernists, Louis Zukofsky continues to influence younger poets attracted to the rigor, inventiveness, and formal clarity of his work. Born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1904 to emigrant parents, Zukofsky achieved early recognition when he edited an issue of Poetry devoted to the Objectivist poets, including George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. In addition to an abundance of short lyrics and a sound-based version of the complete poems of Catullus, he worked for most of his adult life on the long poem “A” of which he said: “In a sense the poem is an autobiography: the words are my life.”
Zukofsky’s work has been described as difficult although he himself said: “I try to be as simple as possible.” In the words of editor Charles Bernstein, “This poetry leads with sound and you can never go wrong following the sound sense. . . . Zukofsky loved to create patterns, some of which are apparent and some of which operate subliminally. . . . Each word, like a stone dropped in a pond, creates a ripple around it. The intersecting ripples on the surface of the pond are the pattern of the poem.” Here for the first time is a selection designed to introduce the full range of Zukofsky’s extraordinary poetry.
About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
Zukofsky was born on January 23, 1904 in New York, one of five children of Pinchos Zukofsky, a night watchman and a pants presser in a men's clothing factory, and Chana Pruss. His parents were immigrants from the town of Most in the province of Kovna in what later became Lithuania.
Education
A precocious child, Zukofsky learned Longfellow's "Hiawatha" by heart at age five. He attended public elementary school and Stuyvesant High School, making excellent marks. In 1919, Zukofsky entered Columbia University, where he began to write poetry. Zukofsky absorbed the lessons of the European modernists quickly, reading Hilda Doolittle (H. D. ) and the Imagists in 1920.
Career
After sending Zukofsky several rejections, Harriet Monroe's prestigious Poetry magazine published his sonnet "Of Dying Beauty" in its January 1924 issue. In 1926 he wrote "Poem Beginning 'The', " his first major work. He sent the piece to Ezra Pound, who published it in the spring 1928 issue of his journal Exile. At Pound's insistence, Zukofsky traveled to Rutherford, New Jersey, to meet William Carlos Williams, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. With Pound's encouragement, Monroe published more of Zukofsky's poetry. In 1928 he finished the first four "movements, " as he called them, of a long work that would contain twenty-four movements in all and engage his attention for many decades. Titled "A, " the work was very much in the experimentalist, high modernist mode prevalent in the 1920's and showed the influence of Pound's Cantos. In 1929 Zukofsky wrote a perceptive essay, "Ezra Pound: His Cantos, " which was published in the short-lived French literary journal Echanges. Zukofsky had difficulty finding a suitable job after graduation from Columbia in 1923. With Pound's assistance he was given a teaching assistantship in English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin for the 1930-1931 academic year. He continued his work on "A, " finishing the next three movements in 1930. In Madison he received an extraordinary invitation from Monroe, instigated by Pound, to edit a special issue of Poetry devoted to those poets of his generation whom he respected and read. With contributions from Robert McAlmon, S. Theodore Hecht, George Oppen, Williams, and Carl Rakosi, the February 1931 "Objectivists" issue of Poetry gave birth to a new movement. Zukofsky's assistantship at the University of Wisconsin was renewed, but despite new friends in Madison, such as poet Lorine Niedecker, he turned it down and moved back to New York City in June 1931. At the height of the Great Depression, Zukofsky subsisted through various writing and editorial jobs, among them working for George Oppen and To Press, which published An "Objectivists" Anthology in 1932. Pound and Tibor Serly, a violinist and composer, provided him with money for a European trip. He sailed for France in the summer of 1933, to spend time in Paris, Budapest, and in Rapallo, Italy, where he visited Pound. In 1934 he wrote his brilliant poems "Mantis" and "'Mantis, ' An Interpretation" about the helplessness of the poor. Like many artists of this time, Zukofsky escaped poverty himself by working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1937 he completed the eighth movement of "A, " and in 1938 he began the first half of the ninth movement, which he finished the following year. He finished the tenth movement of "A" the following year and was encouraged when a collection of his work, 55 Poems, was published in 1941. Zukofsky wrote little poetry during the 1940's. He quit the WPA in April 1942 and spent that summer and early fall with his wife in Diamond Point, New York. He worked at various jobs until he found a position in February 1947 as instructor of English at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, from which he retired nearly twenty years later as associate professor. In 1947 he began his long critical and philosophical piece, Bottom: On Shakespeare, and in 1948 he published his anthology A Test of Poetry. He returned to "A, " finishing the second half of the ninth movement and the eleventh movement in 1950. After his father's death in 1950 he started the twelfth movement of "A, " a moving portrayal of his father and family that, when finished the following year, had become longer than the previous eleven movements. Zukofsky taught a course in poetry at San Francisco State College. While the local poetry community celebrated his visit, he was becoming disappointed at his failure to reach a wider audience. In the summer of 1959 the Zukofskys traveled to Mexico with Oppen, resuming their acquaintance after almost thirty years. Another friendship grew through correspondence with Cid Gorman, who published the first half of "A" in 1959. The following year Zukofsky finished Bottom: On Shakespeare. One section of it, Pericles, was set to music by Celia Zukofsky. During the 1960's Zukofsky continued work on "A" and on a translation of the Latin poet Catullus. Recognition was slow in coming. His book of short poetry, After I's, was published in 1964. In 1965 he published the first volume of ALL, The Collected Shorter Poems, 1923-1958. Zukofsky retired in 1965. He moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and eventually to suburban Port Jefferson on Long Island, New York. ALL, The Collected Short Poems 1956-1964 appeared in 1966, and Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky was published in 1967. Two of his important works of fiction, Ferdinand and It Was, were published together in 1968. In his final years in Port Jefferson, Zukofsky worked on his experimental collection 80 Flowers, which was published posthumously. He died unexpectedly while the complete "A" was being prepared for publication.
Achievements
Louis Zukofsky has been listed as a noteworthy poet. by Marquis Who's Who.
(A Useful Art is an invaluable chronicle of a major Americ...)
Politics
In his early years, Zukofsky was a committed Marxist. While studying at Columbia, his friend, Whittaker Chambers, sponsored him for membership in the Communist Party, though it is unclear whether he actually joined. While he associated with Party members and published in Party-associated magazines, his poetry, which while strongly political was resolutely avant-garde and difficult, found little favor in Party circles. Though Zukofsky considered himself a Marxist at least through the end of the 1930s, the focus of his work after 1940 turned from the political to the domestic. Much later, he would claim that reading Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire finally turned him away from Marx.
Connections
While supervising one WPA project in 1934, Zukofsky met a young musician and composer, Celia Thaew, whom he began to date. They were married on August 20, 1939, and had one child. His son Paul began to demonstrate remarkable gifts as a violinist, and his parents spent time and money encouraging him. Paul made his debut at Carnegie Hall when he was only thirteen.
Father:
Pinchos Zukofsky
Mother:
Chana Pruss
Spouse:
Celia Thaew
Son:
Paul Zukofsky
Friend:
Jay Vivian Chambers
He was an American editor who denounced his Communist spying and became respected by the American Conservative movement during the 1950s.
Friend:
William Hugh Kenner
He was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.