Louis Zukofsky

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Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet.

He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

Life

Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City's Lower East Side to Yiddish speaking immigrants from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. His father Pinchos (ca. 1860–1950) immigrated to the United States in 1898, and was followed in 1903 by his wife, Chana (1862–1927), and their three children. Pinchos worked as a pants-presser and night watchman for many decades in New York's garment district.

The only one of his siblings born in the United States, Louis Zukofsky was a precocious student in the local public school system. As a boy he frequented the nearby Yiddish theatres on the Bowery, where he saw classic works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Tolstoy performed in Yiddish. Zukofsky began writing poetry at an early age, and his earliest known publications were in the student literary journal of Stuyvesant High School, from which is graduated at age 15. While when young he translated from the modern Yiddish poetry of Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarten), there is no indication he ever considered writing in Yiddish himself.

Zukofsky attended Columbia University, where he studied English. Some of his teachers and classmates were to become important figures of culture, namely Mark Van Doren, John Dewey, John Erskine, Lionel Trilling and Mortimer Adler. He joined the Boar's Head Society and published in the Morningside, a student literary journal. Zukofsky graduated from Columbia in 1924 with an M.A., writing a thesis on Henry Adams. He would publish a revised version of this thesis as "Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography" in the journal Pagany, and Adams would remain a significant intellectual influence on Zukofsky's work. One of Zukofsky's closest friends during the 1920s was his Columbia classmate, Whittaker Chambers, and throughout the 1930s he aligned himself with Marxism, although he never joined the Communist Party.

Zukofsky taught for one academic year (1930–1931) in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the only time he lived outside the New York City area. In 1934, Zukofsky began work as a researcher with the Works Projects Administration (WPA), and over the course of the rest of the decade he worked on various WPA projects, most notably the Index of American Design, a history of American material culture. In the same year, he met Celia Thaew (1913–1980) and they married in 1939; their only child, Paul Zukofsky (born in 1943), was a child prodigy violinist and went on to become a prominent avant-garde violinist and conductor. During World War II, Zukofsky edited technical manuals at a number of electronics companies working in support of the war effort. In 1947, he took a job as an instructor in the English Department of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he would remain until his retirement at the rank of associate professor in 1965. He subsequently was a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut.

Throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, the Zukofskys lived in Brooklyn Heights, then from 1964 to 1973 in Manhattan, and finally they retired to Port Jefferson, New York, on Long Island, where he completed his magnum opus "A" and his last major work, the highly compressed poetic sequence 80 Flowers. Just a few months after completing the latter work and proof-reading the complete "A", Zukofsky died on May 12, 1978. He had been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1967 and 1968, the National Institute of Arts and Letters "award for creative work in literature" in 1976, and an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 1977.

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Early career

Zukofsky, a student, wrote prolifically in imitation of many styles, including traditional and free verse. Nevertheless, his first distinctive work was his long poem, "Poem Beginning 'The," which was published in 1926 by Ezra Pound in his journal The Exile in 1928. This is an autobiographical portrait of the young poet, depicting a precocious assimilation of modernist styles. The poem satirizes the older modernists for their skepticism, especially T.S. The Waste Land by Eliot is an investigation into his cultural identity and assimilation as the son of immigrant Jews, and he concludes by asserting his poetic independence from family and Jewish roots, opting for a more cosmopolitan poetic identity. Pound remained a key supporter of Zukofsky in the years to come, most notably dedicated to Kulchur (1938) "To Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting, desert thugs." Pound's increasingly radical fascism and anti-semitism also put them in jeopardy, but Zukofsky maintained the highest regard for Pound's poetic abilities.

Pound put Zukofsky in touch with William Carlos Williams, who would remain a major promoter and influence on the younger poet. Williams found Zukofsky to be a valuable critic and editor of his own work, which he admits to dedicating The Wedge (1944) to L.Z. Pound begged Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, to allow Zukofsky to edit an issue featuring younger writers, resulting in the famed "Objectivists" issue (Feb. 1931), which also included Zukofsky's "Sincerity and Objectification." Although all the poets, including Zukofsky, denied the intention of developing a distinct poetic movement, a core group of the Objectivist poets, which included Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi, as well as Zukofsky's colleagues, Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker, Zukofsky. Zukofsky wrote An "Objectivist" Anthology (1932), published by George Oppen's To, Publishers, and for a short period, but the group attracted only limited attention at the time.

Zukofsky's most notable work was his long poem "A"—he never mentioned it without quotation marks—which he began in 1928 and continued to work on intermittently for the remainder of his life, eventually finishing the poem in 1974. He predicted that the work would have 24 sections, which he referred to as movements, but that the poem would flourish as the occasion dictated. At a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, whose fugal intricacies became one of the poem's formal models. The first six movements are primarily autobiographical, but most of them are directly or indirectly considering the issue of the poem's correct form — "A"-6 ends by asking the question: "With all this information / To what degree distinction—" The preliminary answer is "A"-7, which is often regarded as Zukofsky's first clearly individual poem that tends to be much more to come. This series is a series of seven sonnets that emphasize sawhorses in an area of a street under reconstruction, which are beautifully animated, giving the appearance of the poem as a building site simultaneously built and deconstructed. In a series of later movements, Zukofsky would also use stringed traditional styles with unconventional materials to produce highly compressed poems: "A"-9 takes the exact same form as Guido Cavalcanti's canzone, "Donna me prega," using material mainly borrowed from Karl Marx's Capital. "Mantis" is a related major poem, although outside of "A," and Zukofsky's "An Interpretation" explores contemporary concerns. There are a number of sprawling free-verse movements, including "A"-8, which combines modern world interviews with Marx, Lenin's writings on American history. Modernist formalism was often interwoven in Zukofsky's work of the 1930s, bringing together a Leftist political vision. The "A"-10 is a cry of despair in reaction to France's fall in June 1940, based on Bach's Mass in B minor, after which Zukofsky halted work on "A" for several years.

Zukofsky continued writing shorter poems throughout his life in tandem with "A," although he had trouble publishing outside of journals during the Depression period. 55 Poems' first collection of shorter poems didn't appear until 1941, but it did include poems "Poem beginning 'The'" and "Mantis'" in the mid-1930s, as well as "Mantis." Anew, a new line, came out in 1946. He wrote Arise, Arise, a political dream play, but it wasn't until the 1960s that he performed and unpublished. He wrote a work of experimental prose during the same period as well as thanks to the dictionary's help in determining the vocabulary and terms used in the dictionary. He attempted longer fiction in the early 1940s, of which the novella length Ferdinand is the most notable. Le Style Apollinaire/The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire (1934), one of Zukofsky's most experimental works, was ghostwritten for his friend René Taupin (1934), presenting three interpretations of Apollinaire's art in substantial part through the presentation and arrangement of quotations. Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry, a poetry textbook published in Pound's ABC of Reading, was primarily comparing sample poems or excerpts with no analysis or encouraging the student to draw their own conclusions during much of the 1930s. Despite the fact that this text was first published in 1948 when it was self-published in 1948, it has since been reprinted three times.

Later career

After a break of eight years on the second half of "A"-9, which often imitates Cavalcanti's canzone's elaborate layout, but now using material mainly derived from Spinoza's Ethics, Zukofsky returned to "A" in 1948. The two halves of "A"-9 mark a significant shift in attention from the social to the more personal and philosophical, but not dismissing the earlier focus. Zukofsky's decision would be determined by historical and personal changes during the poem's creation. This was confirmed with "A"-11, which mimics a ballata by Cavalcanti, but it specifically addresses his wife and son on the topic of mortality. The poet's immediate family will usually play a significant part in the story, although the poem's more general concerns emerges. This movement was immediately followed by "A"-12, a sprawling 135-page collage that weaves personal, current, and philosophy, mainly represented by Aristotle, Paracelsus, and Spinoza. However, at the time, there was little chance that he would publish a work on this scale, and "A"-12 did not appear complete until the first book publication of "A" 1–12. 1959. Much of the 1950s was preoccupied with another large-scale work, Bottom: Shakespeare, which began as an essay that was growing out of a summer course on Renaissance literature he taught at Hamilton College in 1947, but it developed into a large critical reflection on Shakespeare, advocating for the sensuous eye over abstract thought. This work was as much a reflection on poetry as an exegesis of Shakespeare performed in an unorthodox critical manner by Zukofsky, marshalling and collaging large amounts of quotations from several texts. Bottom was accompanied by a companion volume consisting of Celia Zukofsky's musical adaptation of Shakespeare's play Perpetles, Prince of Tyre, when it was first published in 1964.

Zukofsky has been working in obscurity since the 1930s, and it was impossible to publish, but younger writers, most notably Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, began to seek him out in the mid-1950s, eager to reconnect with the more contemporary strands of poetic modernism that have emerged from Pound and Williams. Cid Corman and Jonathan Williams, poets and editors, published major works in the late 1950s, including Corman's Origin Press's first book release "A" in the first book edition. Around 1960, Zukofsky and the other "Objectivists" were in great demand, and so he was able to publish volumes throughout the last decade and a half of his life, a period when he wrote prolifically and inventively.

Zukofsky returned to "A"-13, a "partita" in five sub-sections, in a variety of ways with the completion of Bottom. The late, mostly long-running movements of "A" are characterized by the adoption of a multitude of flexible forms capable of absorption a wide variety of materials, from the speechal, to newspapers and journals, to book reading, and bibliographic transcription to linguistic transcription. A sense of the everyday is interwoven with current events, with "A"-15 responding to President Kennedy's assassination and "A"-18 being dimmer from the Vietnam War's traumatic trauma. "A"-16 is just four words scattered over a single page, while "A"-17 is a homage to William Carlos Williams on his death in 1963 in the form of a collection of quotations describing the two poets' friendship. "A"-21 is a complete and quirky interpretation of Plautus' play Rudens (The Rope) interspersed with additional "Voice offs" of Zukofsky's invention. Celia Zukofsky's marriage in 1968 featured four voices, including purely quotations from Handel's "Hapsichord Pieces," implying one particular interpretation of a single complete work. Zukofsky immediately knew this would be the final movement of "A," though he still had two more movements to write. Each 1000 lines are framed by 100-line segments, and the main bodies' respective timelines span 6000 years. The soundscape tends to predominate in this late work over thematic or narrative orders, or as he once put it, "not to fathom time but literally to sound it as on a piano."

The turbulent Catullus, a nonlinear translation from Latin created in collaboration with his wife of Catullus' entire existing works, was another major work that preoccupied Zukofsky for a considerable period of the 1960s. Although it offended many people when first published, this has been one of the most discussed and debated of Zukofsky's works. He finished Little, an autobiographical account focusing on a child violinist based on his son Paul, based on his son Paul's. Aside from "A" -- several collections of mostly short poems were published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most notable was the long poem "4 Other Countries," which was published in Barely and heavily (1958), a travelogue of the Zukofskys' 1957 visit to Europe written in a more relaxed and accessible style than his poetry's. Zukofsky's first books with a commercial publisher appeared in two volumes (1965, 1966). Prepositions were soon after his gathered critical essays were published in Prepositions (1968). Zukofsky, a writer who conceived "A" in 1974, began working on 80 Flowers, a series of eighty-one short poems (8 lines of five words per each), immediately beginning with a series of eighty-one short poems (8 lines of five words each), which culminated in compressed reworkings of botanical and literary material. Despite a planned completion date for his 80th birthday, he managed to finish the sequence in January 1978 and is now planning a sequel to trees named Gamut: 90 trees. However, he only contributed the epigraph to this later work when he died in May 1978.

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