Louis Zukofsky

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.[1]

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 he 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.

As a student Zukofsky wrote prolifically in imitation of many styles, both traditional and free verse. However, his first distinctive work was the long poem, "Poem beginning 'The,'" composed in 1926 and published by Ezra Pound in his journal The Exile in 1928. Demonstrating a precocious assimilation of modernist styles, this is an autobiographical portrait of the young poet. The poem satirizes the older modernists for their pessimism, particularly T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, examines his cultural identity and the question of assimilation as the son of immigrant Jews, and concludes by asserting his poetic independence from the claims of family and his Jewish heritage, opting instead for a more cosmopolitan poetic identity. Pound remained an important supporter of Zukofsky in the following years, famously dedicating Guide to Kulchur (1938) "To Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting strugglers in the desert."[2] Their relationship over the course of the 1930s became severely strained because of Pound's increasingly strident fascism and anti-semitism, yet Zukofsky always maintained the highest regard for Pound's poetic abilities.

In 1948, Zukofsky returned to "A" after a hiatus of eight years with the second half of "A"-9, which again copies the complex form of Cavalcanti's canzone, but now using content primarily derived from Spinoza's Ethics. The distinct concerns of the two-halves of "A"-9 mark a decisive shift of emphasis from the political and social to the more personal and philosophical, but without repudiating the earlier focus. Avoiding pre-determined narratives or themes, Zukofsky always intended that "A"'s development would be determined by historical and personal changes over the time of the poem's composition. This was affirmed with "A"-11, which mimics the form of a ballata by Cavalcanti but directly addresses his wife and son on the topic of mortality. From this point the poet's immediate family will usually play a major role while the poem becomes more expansive in its concerns. This movement was shortly followed up with "A"-12, a sprawling 135-page collage interweaving the personal, current events and philosophy, primarily represented by Aristotle, Paracelsus and Spinoza. However, at the time there was little chance that he could publish a work on this scale, and "A"-12 did not appear complete until the first book publication of "A" 1–12 in 1959. Much of the 1950s was preoccupied with another very large-scale work, Bottom: on Shakespeare, which began as an essay growing out of a summer course on Renaissance literature he taught at Hamilton College in 1947 but grew into a massive critical meditation on Shakespeare, arguing for the priority of the sensuous eye over the abstract mind. This work was as much a statement on poetics as a exegesis of Shakespeare presented in the unorthodox critical manner Zukofsky preferred, marshalling and collaging large numbers of quotations from numerous texts. When finally published in 1964, Bottom was accompanied by a companion volume consisting of Celia Zukofsky's musical setting of Shakespeare's play Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Since the 1930s, Zukofsky worked in obscurity and found it difficult to publish, but gradually from the mid-1950s younger poets, most notably Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, began to seek him out because of their desire to reconnect with the more innovative strands of poetic modernism developing from Pound and Williams. The poets and editors Cid Corman and Jonathan Williams published major works in the late 1950s, especially the first book publication of "A" by Corman's Origin Press. Along with the other "Objectivists", from around 1960 Zukofsky was in considerable demand among these younger poets, and consequently was able to publish numerous volumes over the last decade and half of his life, a period when he wrote prolifically and inventively.

With the completion of Bottom, Zukofsky returned to "A" with "A"-13, a "partita" in five sub-sections using a range of different forms. The late, mostly long, movements of "A" are characterized by the adoption of a diversity of flexible forms capable of absorbing great variation of materials, from the conversational, to newspapers and media, to book reading, and the treatment of these materials ranges from quotation to radical reduction to creative transmutation, including homophonic transcription. A sense of the everyday is interwoven with contemporary events, with "A"-15 responding to the assassination of President Kennedy and "A"-18 darkened by the trauma of the Vietnam War. In contrast to the usually long movements, "A"-16 is just four words scattered across a single page, while "A"-17 is a homage to William Carlos Williams on his death in 1963 in the form of a catalogue of quotations recording the two poets' friendship. "A"-21 is a complete and quirky translation of Plautus' play Rudens (The Rope) interspersed with additional "Voice offs" of Zukofsky's invention. In 1968, Celia Zukofsky presented her husband with an elaborate musical assemblage: against the musical score of Handel's "Hapsichord Pieces" she arranged four voices consisting entirely of quotations from across Zukofsky's writings, suggesting one possible version of a single total work. Zukofsky promptly decided this would be the final movement of "A", although he still had two further movement to write. "A"-22 & -23 were conceived on an epic scale: each 1000 lines, with an 800-line main body framed by 100-line segments, the main bodies each compressed radically reworked materials from history and literature respectively spanning 6000 years in chronological order. In this late work the soundscape tends to predominate over thematic or narrative orders, or as he once put it, "not to fathom time but literally to sound it as on an instrument."[4]

Another major work that preoccupied Zukofsky for much of the 1960s was the controversial Catullus, a homophonic translation from Latin done in collaboration with his wife of the entire existent works of Catullus. Although it outraged many when first published, this has been one of the most discussed and debated of Zukofsky's works. He also finished a novel begun in the early 1950s, Little, an autobiographical account centered on a child violin prodigy, based on his son Paul. Aside from "A", several collections of mostly short poems were published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and particularly notable is the long poem "4 Other Countries" included in Barely and widely (1958), a travelogue of the Zukofskys' 1957 trip to Europe, written in a more relaxed and accessible manner than is typical of his poetry. As his reputation rose, Zukofsky collected short poetry in two volumes (1965, 1966) was published by Norton, his first books with a commercial publisher. Soon after his collected critical essay were gathered into Prepositions (1968). On finally completing "A" in 1974, Zukofsky promptly started on his last major work, 80 Flowers, a sequence of eighty-one short poems (8 lines of five words each), highly compressed reworkings of botanical and literary materials. Although planned for completion for his 80th birthday, he as usual worked ahead of schedule and finished the sequence in January 1978, already planning a follow-up sequence on trees to be entitled Gamut: 90 trees. However, he only composed the epigraph to this latter work when he died in May 1978.

Although Zukofsky and the "Objectivists" would have little impact in the 1930s, their later rediscovery around 1960 would have a major influence on a broad range of younger poets known as the New American Poets. This was particularly the case because most of the Objectivists produced their most mature and innovative work during the 1960s and 1970s, which in many respects represented a salutatory formal emphasis that contrasted with the looseness of most Beat and projectivist verse. Aside from Duncan and Creeley, among the many American poets who have acknowledged the influence of Zukofsky in their work include Theodore Enslin, Ronald Johnson, John Taggart and Michael Palmer.[5] In the 1970s, Zukofsky's formalism was a major model for many of the Language poets, and the prominent Language writer, Charles Bernstein, edited a volume of selected poems for the Library of America (2006).

During his lifetime, Zukofsky had some contact and interaction with Augusto de Campos and the Brazilian Concrete poetry movement. French poets in particular have been attracted to Zukofsky's example. Anne-Marie Albiach composed an intricate and much admired translation of "A"-9 in 1970, which helped bring Zukofsky to French attention. Other French poets engaged in translating Zukofsky include Jacques Roubaud and Pierre Alféri.[6] A complete French translation of "A" (except for "A"-24) by François Dominique and Serge Gavronsky came out to considerable acclaim in 2020.

• Ahearn, Barry. Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction, University of California Press, 1983.
• Jennison, Ruth. The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins and the Avant-Garde, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
• Perelman, Bob. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1994.
• Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Scroggins, Mark. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, University of Alabama Press, 1998.
• Scroggins, Mark (editor). Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, University of Alabama Press, 1997.
• Scroggins, Mark. The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.
• Stanley, Sandra Kumanoto. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics, University of California Press, 1994.
• Terrell, Carroll F. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet, National Poetry Foundation, 1979,

• Z-site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky
• extensive selection of Zukofsky recordings at PennSound
• Zukofsky at the Electronic Poetry Center
• Zukofsky page at the Poetry Foundation
• Feature: Zukofsky Webmag "Jacket Magazine" (#30: July 2006), devotes a prominent section to Zukofsky