Book Description

Louis Zukofsky's most important poetic work now returns to print in a new softcover edition.

Customer Reviews (4)

excellent, reflective, broad in scope
This poem is incredible.

"A" is a must read for any reader serious about poetry, literary aesthetics, or modern thought. Zukofsky incorporates immense ideas into his work, and keeps the reader challenged. But though the poem is highly cerebral, it's not just a poem for scholars and academicians. It's emotional and beautiful as well as stimulating. Even if you don't have the time or energy to read all of "A", read bits and pieces of it. You will be caught up in the language. You will be amazed. Read it at leisure, study it, or keep it on your bookshelf for years at a time. You will most definitely get something out of it. Readers who like "The Cantos" will most likely enjoy this as well. It is fantastic.

Zukofsky Opens Ears and Minds
Not only is this justifiably regarded as one of the most important long poems of the 20th Century, it is one of the most enjoyable of them. Peoplesay Zukofsky is difficult, but he's not so difficult if one listens:"The ears have it." Zukofsky says a poem offers pleasure by meansof "sight, sound, and intellection." That's one key in to thiswork. Another is to notice that this is perhaps the first American longpoem, at least in its first half or more, that offers a leftist/Marxistperspective. Another is that it lets us see an important Jewish poetfinding his place as American and modernist/postmodernist. These are realdramas that can be found in *A.* Another key to reading *A* is to enjoyZukofsky's intense pleasure in everyday, family life. There are ways inwhich this great poem is accessible to all readers. Finding one's way incan require patience, but more than anything, it simply requires an act oflistening with open ears and mind.

Not for everybody, it's true, but...
Zukofsky's "A" isn't for the timid--it's long, after all--and it's not for those who don't want to give their minds and ears a workout--in other words, it's difficult, and doesn't sound like...well,like Robert Pinsky, or Robert Frost.But for readers who are patientenough to let the peerless music of the verse sink in, and who don't demandthat poetry give them a prepackaged "message," "A"offers a wonderful range of pleasures.It's a long poem in as many formsas you can imagine, from Shakespearean sonnets, to letter-perfect canzoni,to phonetic translations from the Hebrew.It's a poem that tracks 50 yearsin the life of its writer and 50 years of American history, from theDepression through the space race.It makes the most wonderful sound ofany book in English since Joyce's *Ulysses*.

No Wonder No One Reads It
It's entirely clear from reading "A", the pathetic book over which Louis Zukofsky labored for his entire life, that the man was quite demented.This book is an awful disease, which I've cured after readingall tedious 800+ pages of it with heavy doses of the great masters ofpostmodern American verse: David Lehman, Robert Lowell, and Galway Kinnell. No one should ever be forced to read "A" unless he's comitted anawful crime. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Worm Turns
This book came out the EXACT MONTH I happened to be reading Zukofsky: Man and Poet, a collection of appreciations and essays assembled just after his death in 1979. What's sad is that the essays all start from the assumption that Zukofsky is almost totally unknown except among poets, a fact that caused him some bitterness in his final years. He died just before his masterpiece, "A," came out in a single edition from UC Press.

Flash forward a generation to this handsome Library of America edition. The pros will quibble over the sense of excerpting Zukofsky, which Z. himself tried to prevent in his lifetime. But it's hard to see this book as anything less than a vindication of the quiet, steady devotion Zukofsky showed to poetry over his productive life. Charles Bernstein, who's about the best ambassador the avant-garde's got to the publishing mainstream, is a great choice for the project: his selections are sympathetic and smart, aware of the larger work while giving you enough tantalizing bits to satisfy a healthy curiosity. I doubt Zukofsky's work has ever reached as broad an audience as it will here: it may be just the end run around the growing Zukofsky industry his work needs to find fresh readers. The poems deserve it, and somehow I think he'd be tickled pink to know this is out there.
... Read more

Book Description
Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, published first in 1967 and then in an expanded edition in 1981, was a definitive set of critical statements by Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings ofHenry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others.

Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the "Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Clarity, Economy, Beauty
Louis Zukofsky imbued criticism with the grace of his poetry. He believed that poetry was not a gesture to be revered, but a crystalization of experience, individual and general. Thus his criticism of poetry judges it against vital standards, with reference to philosophy and history, but without reference to critical fashion. The academic formulae which remove poetry from experience to convention are absent from this book: a great writer who takes pains to be an acute reader tells us what sustains him, and can sustain us.

The language of invention, of discovery must always seem strange at first, but time has brought us closer to these original explorations of sincerity in poetry. Zukofsky wrote about his contemporaries as they appeared, and helped many of them to appear. He was there. If you want to know what poetry can do, unfettered by prejudice, you can find it here. I urge you to. Prepositions, in conjuction with his poetry, can change and illuminate how you see, feel, hear, think. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Louis Zukofsky was a writer's writer. Largely ignored by the general readingpublic, he counted Kenneth Rexroth andWilliamCarlos Williams among his admirers, and the Beloit Literary Journal insiststhat his poems are "essential for anyone hoping to understand the whole modernmovement, especially the Objectivist branch." This complete collection ofZukofsky's short poems gives readers a good sense of what all the fuss was about.Zukofsky's great gift was in finding the words to let the moment tell itself, as in "ASong for the Year's End": "Daughter of music / and her sweet son / so thatnone rule / the dew to his own hurt / with the year's last sigh / awake / the starry sky andbird." The visuals create a collage effect, so that the poem's rhythms move thesame way one's eyes move in viewing a collage: from details to the overall impressionand back, in a continuous cycle. The collection of pieces based on various flowers isespecially beautiful and melodic. Book Description

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 inAll: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964, the experimental transliteration (with Celia Zukofsky) of Catullus, the limited edition80 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."

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Zukofsky Lives Again
Avant-garde poet Louis Zukofsky is the subject of a splendid new biography, one I scurried through, with barely a moment's pause for rest or water, over the past four and a half hours, and you shut the book exhilarated wanting nothing but more, more of this wonderful blend of exposition, narrative drive, and critical analysis all hand in hand like the heroic girls striding the battlefield in Henry Darger's painting.LOUIS ZUKOFSKY THE POEM OF A LIFE is a masterwork of storytelling, and beyond that I expect it will do what any number of concentrated studies have done, open its subject wide up to a mass audience, which may or may not have appealed to LZ, but if I read some passages in Scroggins carefully, I think he might very well be glad when his lifework "A", for so long considered a book of grand difficulty, climbs the rungs of the best seller list in this country and wherever high modernism is spoken.

Rich in character development as well as exegesis, LZTPOAL takes us from the crowded tenements of New York's Lower East Side, where Zukofsky was born in 1904, into the world of international poetry and art, a world he took to like duck soup, and finally through a teaching career of the highest interest to those wondering how to combine art and commerce.Along the way he was aided and abetted by a brilliant and scintillating wife, Celia Thaew, with whom he had a son, Paul, a violinist who was the apple of his father's eye.In the green arbors of Port Jefferson, Long Island, Celia and Louis retreated at the end of their lives, but LZ was never to rest for long, composing in late, late middle age a final full length piece, 80 FLOWERS ("his most private project," as Scroggins aptly dubs it) and when that was completed to his satisfaction, made notes for a "90 TREES" piece of which only a tantalizing fragment remains.

Only a life's work, that's all.Scroggins follows John Cage in pointing out that Zukofsky died in exactly the same way as did James Joyce--the "sort of coincidence in which each of them would have delighted."That may be stretching it a bit, but it is true that Joyce and Zukofsky were in correspondence, over a proposed film scenario of ULYSSES.Film buff LZ was "bullish" on this plan, suggesting that Chaplin--or Charles Laughton maybe--would be a good Leopold Bloom.In such a way Scroggis is able to build up, bit by bit, a chain of associations which to my mind fully justify his reading of "A" as a poem deeply indebted to the cinema.Zukofsky like many other writers in the 1930s was polarized vby social upheaval and strongly drawn to the left; he worked for NEW MASSES and wrote convincingly of the need to write poems "that everyone can understtand."Scroggins points out that his bent was otherwise; while he urged poets "to confirm revolutionary theory in sensory values," it wasn't easy to practice what he preached, and yet on the third hand this tension goosed him into writing some of his memorable work between two masters as it were.

What of his much talked about relationship with haunted, Hetty Sorrel lookalike Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)?Did it really end in a squalid Dreiserian tragedy of betrayal and abandonment?The truth is, Scroggins argues, that no one today can know the truth about what really happened between the two geniuses.It was all too long ago.The book will be controversial in its picture of disgruntled schoolteacher Jerry Riesman and what Scroggins considers a tissue of misstatements made by Riesman and given credence by some late comments by addled or airy Mary and George Oppen, two Objectivist writers whom Zukofsky apparently didn't really care for and who probably knew nothing whatever about whatever it was that went down with Niedecker and Zukofsky back in the 1930s.Those of us who gave the pregnancy story any credence get a real slap of cold water in the face here, and expect tears in the days to come!

Otherwise, where Scroggins excels is in exploring the many ways in which Zukofsky took the materials of his own life--and when that failed, the materials of his reading--and turned them into "A" 1-24.

Frankly I thought I knew as much about Louis Zukofsky as any other ordinary, educated person, but as the pages of the biography melted in my hand, I realized I knew nothing, insofar as everything I thought I knew was dead wrong.I suppose there are still a few areas in which debate is possible, especially in the final Port Jefferson years, years in which Zukofsky seems to have been playing a sort of Cheshire cat game with his admirers, retreating into his own legend and letting Celia step up more and more.In the end, Scroggins' book becomes a sort of bewitched and sustained threnody on Celia's brilliance and loyalty, sort of the way biographies of Nabokov always have to paint a new picture of Ada in the days after VN's death.Sad to say, she outlived him for only a year or two; they both slipped out of life without really knowing how much their war on the world would affect the life of poetry in our time.

For strategic reasons Scroggins chooses to breach the gap between Zukofsky's era and our own by concentrating on three well oiled hinges: the fact that poet Bob Grenier engineered one of LZ's last full length readings (at Franconia); the Poets Theater reading at San Francisco's Poetry Center of the Celia/Louis "A"-24 in the summer of 1978; and at greatest length the contretemps over Zukofsky's legacy fought by Barrett Watten and the late Robert Duncan at another Poetry Center event in the same time period.This makes Zukofsky relevant to today's readers is, I guess, the reasoning behind this move.It's elegant and simple and for me, it works, though I'm prejudiced.

I must say the book itself is a gorgeous physical object and David Bullen its designer is marvelous but he made one decision I hate, and that is, placing the page numbers on the inside of each page, close to the spine, compact and neat but pretty much useless to those of us with opposable thumbs.You really have to dig in there with a pick ax to find what page you're on, a shame in a book that's going to be thoroughly quoted and argued about for decades to come.Oh well, Post It Notes might help and they come in cheery colors too. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Thought as Music
Of all the (countless) responses to the Bard by writers over the last four hundred years or so, this one may be the most idiosyncratic; it may also be the most intelligent, insightful and inspired.BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE reminds me a little bit of Burton's THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, first, in its encyclopedic bulk, and, second, in the preponderance of quotes in its pages.Louis Zukofsky was a world-class quoter (he's spiritual kin to Walter Benjamin, I think, who dreamed of writing-if that's the right word-a book composed entirely of quotations), and in BOTTOM, he cites everyone from Homer to Wittgenstein, and whole pages of Shakespeare, for the central purpose of elucidating what may be thought of as the book's thesis, which Zukofsky puts thus:

"Love is to reason as the eyes are to mind."

I don't pretend to understand entirely what that means.But the idea that to perceive something as it truly is requires love, or is the beginning of love, or both, is beautiful.

It's important to keep in mind that although he was a professor of English, widely read, and had an acute literary-critical gift, Zukofsky was, above all, an artist.A staggering amount of scholarship went into BOTTOM, but it is, in the end, a poetic response to Shakespeare, a poet's reply to a poet.By academic standards, therefore, BOTTOM is downright eccentric.An example.Elsewhere, Zukofsky writes, "And it is possible in imagination to divorce speech of all graphic elements, to let it become a movement of sounds."Thought as music.A writer as deeply ethical as Zukofsky would never say something like that if he didn't mean it, and so we find that the second part of BOTTOM, the culmination of his thought on Shakespeare, isn't critical prose, but a musical setting for PERICLES, composed by Celia Zukofsky, Louis's wife.

Obviously, this book isn't an introduction to Shakespeare.The student coming to grips with the Bard won't get much help here.Like Zukofsky's poetry, of which it's very much an extension, BOTTOM can be obscure and taxing.On the other hand, it's as beautiful as it is difficult.At every turn, some idea or turn of phrase will make the patient reader gasp (or sigh, I suppose, depending on one's temperament).For anyone really, vitally engaged with Shakespeare, for any fan of Zukofsky, and for anyone who really cares about poetry, five stars is too few to recommend BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE. ... Read more

Book Description
Renowned poet William Carlos Williams and literary innovator Louis Zukofsky maintained a relationship through correspondence as both collaborators and friends between 1928 and 1963. Their letters have remained largely unpublished until now. Edited by Barry Ahearn, The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky chronicles the professional and personal relationship between Williams and Zukofsky as they present one another with criticism, suggestions and confidences that are at turns touching and astonishingly candid. In addition to delving into the creative processes of the two men, this exciting and extensive collection provides insight into such literary icons as Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. The analytical voice of Zukofsky and the experimental style of Williams radiate in these letters, creating a vivid and invaluable document of American literature."This is quite simply an indispensable collection for anyone who cares about the daily life as well as the ethos of Modernist American poetics in the middle years of the century."-Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder"The correspondence provides a cross section or X-ray of American culture in action during one of its most creative eras. Ahearn is a thorough and conscientious scholar, with an excellent knowledge of the period."-Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico ... Read more

Book Description
By juxtaposing several translations of the same passage from Homer; an elegy from Ovid and lines from Herrick that read like an adaptation of Ovid; or a 15th-century poem about a rooster and a contemporary poem about white chickens, Louis Zukofsky has established a means for judging the values of poetic writing.

A wonderful education for the fledgling poet, this handbook, first published in 1948, is the best elucidation ofZukofsky's "objectivist" premises for recognizing value in specific instances of poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Give It All The Stars In The Sky
Poor poetry. Either it smothers under tons of academic pretension, or it is retailed as pop entertainment in poetry slams. It seems sometimes that Robert Pinsky is the only one with a good handle on the popular appeal of this emotional/intellectual art. But I bet you Pinsky has this book and refers to it regularly. This is the most hard-headed, economical poetry criticism, completely free of cant and pretension; equally free of stylishness. Zukovsky gives us, as Donald Barthelme once wrote, "the red meat on the rug."The form of the book is disarmingly simple: Selected quotes, side by side, with the occasional footnote. Zukovsky lets you figure things out yourself, and when you refer to his notes, you are nearly always rewarded with the notion that you and he are at least on the same planet when it comes to deciding what is good and what is not so good about poetry. Some of the selections in Middle English or Scots dialect are tough going, but you soon discover that it is as much sound as meaning that is important. In any event, there are plentiful and helpful footnotes.If you're lucky, you've never read any poetry criticism and can leap into this book unbiased and unafraid. If (like your reviewer) you had to read a lot of it in college, you'll feel positively liberated. ... Read more

Book Description
Viewing Louis Zukofsky as a reader, writer, and innovator of twentieth-century poetry, Sandra Stanley argues that his works serve as a crucial link between American modernism and post- modernism.
Like Ezra Pound, Zukofsky saw himself as a participant in the transformation of a modern American poetics; but unlike Pound, Zukofsky, the ghetto-born son of an immigrant Russian Jew, was keenly aware of his marginal position in society. Championing the importance of the little words, such as a and the, Zukofsky effected his own proletarian "revolution of the word."
Stanley explains how Zukofsky emphasized the materiality of language, refusing to reduce it to a commodity controlled by an "authorial/authoritarian" self. She also describes his legacy to contemporary poets, particularly such Language poets as Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Overview
A Useful Art: Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design, by Louis Zukofsky, 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. The book was edited by and has an introduction by Kenneth Sherwood; the afterword is by John Taggart. ... Read more

Book Description
The work of Louis Zukofsky has been gaining exposure as a new generation of poets and scholars "rediscover" the American avant-garde tradition. Concurrently, interest in Guillaume Apollinaire's work has grown in recent years as English departments re-explore international modernism. In this extended essay, one of the American literary giants of the 20th Century provides deep readings of the French modernist's entire oeuvre and provides insight into his own formative aesthetic. Two sections of the essay were published in Westminster Magazine in 1932; the complete book is available here for the first time in English. The book builds its arguments with extensive quotations from Apollinaire's poems in their orignal French; this bilingual edition is the latest offering in what Publisher's Weekly has hailed as "an essential series." ... Read more

Book Description
Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of noncanonical modern writing is linked to the severe political, social, and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them as they passed through Ellis Island in their hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century, found themselves uprooted from their tradition and disassociated from their culture. The line of American poetry that runs from Gertrude Stein through Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists to the Language Writers, Quartermain contends, is not the constructive but deconstructive aspect that emphasized the materiality and ambiguity of the linguistic medium and the arbitrariness and openess of the creative process. ... Read more

Book Description
Best known as one of the most significant poets of the 20thcentury, Louis Zukofsky was also an accomplished writer of fiction, allof which is collected here for the first time. Included is his onlynovel, "Little" (1970), which John Leonard in the New York Times called"an odd, playful, thoroughly charming novel about a child prodigy." (Thenovel is very autobiographical and Zukofsky's son, violin virtuoso, PaulZukofsky, has written an afterword for this edition.) Also included arethe four stories comprising "It Was," published in 1961 in a limitededition and virtually unobtainable for years. The stories range from thebrief title story in which a writer struggles with the composition of theperfect sentence to the novella length "Ferdinand," which Guy Davenportpraised in the New York Times Book Review as "a finely tuned story from asensibility of extraordinary range and skill." ... Read more