 As
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Taking
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As
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Taking
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In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word ‘yes,’ which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in Progress, I’ve tried to do better if I could. This time, I have found the word which is the most slippery, the least accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not even a word, which is scarcely sounded between the teeth, a breath, a nothing, the article the. —James Joyce People
referred to Gertrude Stein as “ahead of her time.” In fact,
Stein—like Joyce or Pound—was entirely of her time: she was living
within twentieth-century assumptions whereas most of the people around her
were living within nineteenth-century assumptions. “Modernism” was in
part an attempt to find forms which expressed the assumptions of the
twentieth century. “The child born in 1900,” wrote Henry Adams at the
very dawn of the century, “would…be born into a new world which would
not be a unity but a multiple. Adams…could not deny that the law of the
new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure . . . .” —Jack
Foley, from a journal
In
December 1978, a few months after Louis Zukofsky’s death, a soon to be
notorious event occurred, shaking the foundations of the
anything-but-homogeneous group of poets living in and near San Francisco.
Outtakes of Louis Zukofsky’s appearance in a 1966 NET television
documentary, USA Poetry,
produced by Richard Moore, were being shown at the San Francisco Art
Institute under the auspices of the Poetry Center. Tom Mandel, director of
the Poetry Center and a poet associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group,
introduced Barrett Watten (himself a prominent L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet) to
speak about Zukofsky’s work. As Watten spoke, the distinguished (and
older) San Francisco poet Robert Duncan—who had championed Zukofsky’s
poetry but who was no friend to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets—grew more and more
impatient. Finally, in an astonishing move, Duncan seized the stage from
Watten and began himself to speak about Zukofsky. “I in no way believe
that there is such a thing as ‘just language,’” Duncan insisted,
“any more than there is ‘just footprints.’” Duncan’s action was
both passionately defended—Watten, Duncan felt, was desecrating
Zukofsky’s work—and passionately rejected. “Duncan’s interference
and reseizure of the stage,” writes Eleana Kim in “Language Poetry:
Dissident Practices and the Makings of a Movement” (1994), “was seen
by some to be indicative of the fear and reactionary censorship
characterizing the general attitude of the New Americans [poets associated
with the 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry] to the Language project. But also at stake
were questions of tradition, the implications of poetic assumptions and
alliances.”
Now, Louis Zukofsky’s work has been edited and selected for the Library
of America’s American Poetry Project by another prominent
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, Charles Bernstein, and he has done a superb job. It
is no easy task to deal with a writer as enigmatic, even chameleonic as
Louis Zukofsky. Zukofsky’s poetry alone ranges from something like light
verse to an immensely complex, dense medium. It operates in both formal
modes and free verse. This amazing passage (eight lines, approximately
five words in each line) is the opening poem of 80
Flowers—a book originally meant to have been published in the year
of the poet’s eightieth birthday, 1984. The passage is reminiscent of
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: Heart us invisibly thyme time round rose bud fire downland bird tread quagmire dry
gill-over-the-ground stem-square leaves-cordate earth
race horsethyme breath neighbors a mace nays sorrow of harness pulses pent thus
fruit pod split four one-fourth ripens
unwithering gaping
In addition to poetry, Zukofsky published a short story, a play, critical
writing (including the formidable Bottom
on Shakespeare), translations, even a novel. His extraordinary early
work, “Poem Beginning ‘The,’” was first printed in 1927 in Ezra
Pound’s magazine, The Exile.
Zukofsky wrote the poem in 1926; when it appeared he was 23 years old. The
poem’s title is generally believed to refer somewhat ironically to The
Waste Land—the phrase, “the waste land” occurs in the work—but
it perhaps also has a relationship to the concluding word of Finnegans Wake. (Joyce’s novel had begun to appear as Work
in Progress in 1924.) James Joyce is perhaps the one modernist whose
work is as various and complex as Zukofsky’s, and it’s as if Zukofsky
simply picks up where Joyce leaves off. (It’s a short step from the
to a.) A more certain influence
on Zukofsky is Henry Adams, whose great book, The
Education of Henry Adams was completed in 1907 and published in 1918,
after the author’s death. Zukofsky wrote a Master’s thesis on Adams
and maintained a lifelong interest in him. One way of seeing the body of
Zukofsky’s work is as a series of attempts to give form to what Adams
called “the multiverse.” Zukofsky’s work may well be—in Adams’
phrase—“not…a unity but a multiple.”
In any case, “Language” in one form or another is definitely at the
center of Zukofsky’s work, and translation is a major element of his use
of language. If James Joyce had an uneasy relationship to the oppressor
language, English, so did Louis Zukofsky, whose parents spoke only
Yiddish. Charles Bernstein writes, “For Catullus,
the Zukofskys developed a technique that has come to be called homophonic
translation—translation with special emphasis on the sound rather the
lexical meaning.” The purpose of such translation, writes Mark Scroggins
in “A Biographical Essay on Zukofsky” is “‘to breathe the
“literal” meaning’ of the Latin original, adhering as closely as
possible to the sounds and rhythms of Catullus, and letting the meaning
take a distant back seat.” Scroggins’ comments are accurate and
helpful, but there are many moments in Catullus
when Zukofsky deliberately chooses “lexical meaning” over sound. The
opening line of Catullus 3,
“Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque,” is not sonically very close to the
opening line of Zukofsky’s version: “Lament, o graves of Venus, and
Cupids.” Zukofsky’s version of the poem is in fact a more or less
literal translation, though with some interesting added attractions. This
is the supposedly “literal” Loeb Classical Library version of the
poem; it was written by F.W. Cornish: Mourn,
ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady’s sparrow
is dead, the sparrow my lady’s pet, whom she loved more than her very
eyes; for honey-sweet he was, and knew his mistress as well as a girl
knows her own mother. Nor would he stir from her lap, but hopping now
here, now there, would still chirp to his mistress alone. Now he goes
along the dark road, thither whence they say no one returns. But curse
upon you, cursed shades of Orcus, which devour all pretty things! My
pretty sparrow, you have taken him away. Ah, cruel! Ah, poor little bird!
All because of you my lady’s darling eyes are heavy and red with
weeping. This is Zukofsky’s version (not
included in the Selected Poems): Lament,
o graces of Venus, and Cupids, and
cry out loud, men beloved by Her graces. Pass here, it's dead, meant so much to my girl, the sparrow,
the jewel that delighted my girl, that
lovable in her eyes she loved them less: like
honey so sweet he was sure to know her, with
her ever as a girl’s with her mother; not
seizing a moment to stray from her lap, silly
crazy to hop up here and down there, one
endless solo to his only goddess. Who
now? it's hard to walk thru tenebrous flume down
there, where it is granted not one comes back. On
you be the curse of the blind and dead shade Orcus,
hell that destroys all beautiful things: so
you stole my beautiful sparrow from me. Why
pick evil? why my little fool sparrow It's
your doing—my girl’s own, darling's sweet excellent
eyes a little swollen and red.
“Pass here” is Zukofsky’s version of the Latin “passer,”
sparrow, a word which may have reversed some of its letters as it found
its way into English. (Another example would be the Greek “morph”—m
sound at the beginning, f sound at the end—which became the
English “form”—f sound at the beginning, m sound at
the end.) 1/ Zukofsky’s “one endless solo to his only goddess” is a
marvelous transmutation of Catullus’s “ad solam dominam usque pipiabat”
and far better than the Loeb version of the line. In addition,
Zukofsky’s word “goddess” may be a kind of historical joke. The
Latin word for “lord” is dominus. The corresponding female word is domina, the word Catullus uses. The two words would be accurately
translated into English as “lord” and “lady,” as in “the lady of
the house” or, as the Loeb translation has it, “mistress.” With
Christianity, the word dominus
took on the meaning of “God,” as in the Latin Mass: “Dominus
vobiscum,” “The Lord be with you.” Zukofsky’s translation is
perhaps the only example in English of a corresponding change of meaning
for domina. If dominus
means god, shouldn’t domina
mean goddess? Another marvelous Zukofsky translation occurs in Catullus
115. Catullus calls his acquaintance Mamurra “Mentula.”
“Mentula” is used here as a proper noun, but the joke is that the word
means “penis.” The Loeb translation, acutely aware of propriety,
translates the word only as a proper noun and leaves it at that. Peter
Whigham’s translation is more accurate: “Mentula” becomes
“O’Toole.” But Zukofsky clearly gets the prize: in his version
“Mentula” becomes “Meantool.” (“Non homo sed vero mentula magna
minax” becomes “known homo
said hero Meantool a man gnawn mean ax.”)
Zukofsky’s playfulness and his interest in sound—in evidence
throughout his Catullus translation—is matched by a deeply historical
consciousness which constantly interrogates the words he uses. In the
television documentary the poet remarks, “[Erik] Satie said it very
nicely: he was born very young in a world that was already very old.”
What is a poet’s relationship to history—to the entire burden of
poetry he inherits? Zukofsky’s historical consciousness also takes the
form of what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence.” Catullus
is one of many “precursor poets” for Zukofsky. (Another is William
Shakespeare. Still another is the Yiddish-American poet, cited and
translated in A, Solomon
Bloomgarden or “Yehoash.”) Zukofsky’s Catullus
insists on both the similarity
of his American English to the Latin and its utter, appalling distance.
The American poet “breathes with” Catullus as he makes similar sounds
to the Latin, but he also frequently creates a “meaning” which has
nothing to do with anything Catullus meant to say—a “meaning” which
is in some ways liberating but in others approaches nonsense.
In the television documentary, Zukofsky quotes "To Daffadils" by
the English poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674): When a daffadil I see Hanging down his head t’wards
me, Guess I may what I must be: First, I shall decline my head; Secondly, I shall be dead; Lastly, safely buried. Zukofsky
comments, “I wanted to do something as good as that, if possible.” He
then reads his own “Little Wrists” (later titled “So That Even a
Lover”): Little wrists, Is your content My sight or hold, Or your small air That lights and trysts? Red alder berry Will singly break; But you—how slight—do: So that even A lover exists.
Grousing about “this horror of
explaining a text—especially one’s own,” Zukofsky comments ruefully,
“You think I made it. I just wonder.” (The two poems are also
juxtaposed in Zukofsky’s book, A
Test of Poetry.) Zukofsky’s poem, which is about his son Paul, is
quite beautiful and complex, playing on various meanings of the word
“do,” a word emphasized by the sudden shift in the poem’s rhythm.
(Paul may “break” in various senses—as he “does” in various
senses.) The poem is different
from Herrick’s. It’s not a question of whether Zukofsky succeeded in
equaling Herrick, whether he “made it.” The more interesting point is
that Zukofsky initially felt himself to be in competition with Herrick,
and, even upon completion of the poem, he wasn’t sure that he had won
the competition. The poet’s sense of competitiveness is very likely part
of what led him to the “bitterness” he experienced in his later
years—years in which he was nonetheless enthusiastically
“discovered” by younger poets such as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley.
Zukofsky “seemed to many to have become irremediably bitter,” writes
Mark Scroggins, “convinced that he had somehow been unreasonably passed
over by the powers that conveyed poetic recognition.” The poet’s sense
of exile from those powers—not to mention his equally intense sense of
exile from the dominant power structures of America—was, among other
things, linguistic. He was not
only born young into a world that was already very old; he was born as a
necessarily English-speaking American into a household of Yiddish-speaking
immigrants. The “past” was palpably present in every sound his parents
made. He experienced Shakespeare’s works in Yiddish before he
experienced them in English. In “Poem Beginning ‘The’”—sometimes
directly addressed to his mother, who would not have been able to read
it—Zukofsky momentarily (and ironically) takes on the persona of
Shakespeare’s Shylock: 251
Assimilation
is not hard, 252
And
once the Faith’s askew 253
I
might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew 254
I’ll
read their Donne as mine, 255
And
leopard in their spots 256
I’ll
do what says their Coleridge, 257
Twist
red hot pokers into knots. 258
The
villainy they teach me I will execute 259
And
it shall go hard with them, 260
For
I’ll better the instruction, 261
Having
learned, so to speak, in their colleges… 266
I,
Senora, am the Son of the Respected Rabbi, 267
Israel
of Saragossa, 268
Not
that the Rabbis give a damn, 269
Keine
Kadish wird man sagen. The
concluding line is a quotation from Heine and is simultaneously defiant
and submissive: after all, wasn’t Heine also a Jew?
In his later years Zukofsky moved away from the radical political
consciousness of his youth—a consciousness which sometimes shows up in
the extremely complex context of his poetry—into the comforts of his
immediate family life, as his musician wife Celia and his son Paul (later
to become a well-known violinist) became (in all senses of the word)
figures in his poetry: for Celia and Paul 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…
Honor His voice in me, the river’s turn that finds the Grace in you, four notes first too
full for talk, leaf Lighting stem, stems bound to the
branch that binds the Tree, and then as from the same
root we talk, leaf After leaf of your mind’s music,
page, walk leaf Over leaf of his thought, sounding The grace that comes from knowing Things, her love our own showing Her love in all her honor.
As both these lines and “Little Wrists” suggest, the poetry about
family is not sentimental but frequently daunting, difficult, if
ultimately positive. Charles
Bernstein remarks, “Often Zukofsky’s poems have no speaker”—the
poems in 80 Flowers would be a
good example—but it is also true that the figure of “Zukofsky the
poet” haunts the poet’s work. The opening poem of A
depends on our understanding exactly who the speaker is and his
relationship not only to “A / Round of fiddles playing Bach” but to
the “Black full dress of the audience.” And there are many other poems
in which persona is important: “A Song for the Year’s End,” Section
9 of “Light,” “The Old Poet Moves to a New Apartment 14 Times,”
the title poem of Barely and Widely.
There is even a poem (happily included in Selected
Poems) which imitates the sound of a person sneezing: TO
FRIENDS, FOR GOOD HEALTH
(Sneezing on it:) And the
best
To
you
too
In his introduction to the Selected
Poems Charles Bernstein remarks on “the intricate patterning of
sound that everywhere pervades [Zukofsky’s] work,” on “the
microtonal shifting of vowels,” and goes on to write of “the syntactic
rotation of the same words shifting to different parts of speech.” One
of the great examples of this latter technique is Zukofsky’s famous,
kaleidoscopic “A Song of Degrees”: Hear her (Clear mirror) Care. His error. In her care— Is clear. Hear, her Clear Mirror, Care His error. In her, Care Is clear. Hear her Clear mirror Care his error In her care Is clear Hear Her Clear Mirror Care His Error in Her Care Is clear Hear Her Clear, Mirror, Care His Error in Her— Care Is Clear.
In the TV documentary Zukofsky recites the poem and adds, “The
effect—I don’t know if you pray these days—is something like a
prayer.” It is not the content which gives the poem a religious quality—the content
perhaps has something to do with a family argument or Celia’s
relationship to Louis—but the sound
and the repetition of the words.
Zukofsky’s title emphasizes the religious aspect of the poem. In the Old
Testament, Psalms 120 to 134 are each called “A Song of Degrees.” The New Scofield Reference Bible comments that the word
“degrees” is better rendered by “ascents”: “these Psalms were
either sung by pilgrims on the ascending march from the Babylonian
captivity to Jerusalem, or…were sung by worshipers from all parts of
Palestine as they went up to Jerusalem for the great festivals. An
alternate view is that the headings, ‘A Song of Ascents,’ refer to the
fifteen steps leading to Court of Israel in the Temple, and that these
Psalms were sung on these steps.” In Zukofsky’s case, the poem
suggests some sort of purification process—a movement from “error”
to “clarity”—and the “degrees” are perhaps the different modes
of understanding we have as the poem’s syntax constantly causes the
words to change contexts. The twelve individual words of the poem are each
understood, as Henry Adams puts it, as a “multiple.”
Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems is an absolutely necessary book for anyone seeking
to understand twentieth-century American poetry. Zukofsky is a master, but
he is definitely a formidable master. Charles Bernstein’s selection
guides us through both accessible and “difficult” aspects of Zukofsky
and does it in a way that constantly sheds light on the work as a whole.
Bernstein’s introduction is also excellent: well written and, in
general, compelling. I do have some problems with some of his specific
readings, however. Often the difficulty of dealing with Zukofsky is the
difficulty of why Zukofsky chooses to use the words he does. Bernstein quotes this
short poem (which, he notes, arose from the poet’s thinking of a
tugboat), THE The desire of towing and
offers this commentary: I love the simple fact of the
title, The, by the author of “A”…Is
the title pronounced thuh or thee? Beats me. Both. Syllable count: 1/2/1/2. [I hear “desire”
as three syllables, not two—JF] Tow the line?; but, they say it’s
supposed to be toe the line. So
much depends upon…whether you want to be towed, since this is the desire, not a desire.
Now, go back to the image: Tiny tug
drags large barge. Perhaps this poem’s a counter-poetics: Do you
want a poem to tow you or to do some towing yourself? A Zukofsky poem does
not tow you along for a ride; that’s what [Peter] Quartermain means by
emphasizing “thinking with the
poem.” In contrast to the
desire of towing, we might speak of a
desire not to be towed. Or anyway, told.
This seems to me more to trivialize the poem than it does to illuminate
it. Everyone knows that Zukofsky plays on various meanings of words, so
often critics do a kind of free-associating around a particular word in a
poem. But what if the critic chooses the wrong word? The problem, I think,
is that Bernstein thinks the operative word of “THE” is “towing,”
and so he expends all his critical energy on that word. (Zukofsky does pun
on “tow” in section 9 of “Light,” but it’s “two” and
“tow-headed” that he chooses, not “toe.”) What if the operative
word of “THE” is “desire”—a word which shows up on the very
first page of Bottom on Shakespeare and, as the index indicates,
is repeated frequently throughout the book. Zukofsky quotes Spinoza,
“Desire which arises from reason can have no excess” and insists that
“the art of the poet must be to inform and delight with Love’s
strength”; he cites Aristotle on “those things, which we desire with
such affection that nothing can obliterate them from the mind.” Why does
a tugboat tow? Is it because the boat or its captain is being paid to do
it? Or is there a “desire of towing”? Does a tugboat operate the way a
poem does—through desire, love, and not through money? The tugboat,
Zukofsky suggests, tows not through economic necessity but for another
reason—and the poet writes for that very same reason. Desire is central
to any genuine activity. The title of the poem suggests that it can go in
any direction: the… whatever. This
happens to be the subject matter the poet chooses, but other subject
matter is possible. There are myriad modes of desire. Of course the poem
may also “tug at your heartstrings,” and if this sounds like an overly
sentimental formulation for such a radically experimental poet, we should
remember that Zukofsky specialized in writing “valentines”—poems of
love, poems which “inform and delight with Love’s strength.”
Louis Zukofsky’s deep interest in text, in the complexities of
scholarship, is, like his sense of language, in part a reflection of his
Jewishness. There is a definite Kabalistic side to this poet. (A
is partly a playful title: the poem is A
by Z….) But the poet’s interest in breath, in sound, points in a
somewhat different direction from his interest in the “literal.” In
the TV documentary Zukofsky refers to his Catullus translation as
“noise.” An insistence on the poet’s “breath”—on
“voices”—on “noise”—suggests an emphasis on what the voice
proceeds out of: the body. It suggests as well an emphasis on immediacy
and on the aliveness of the present moment—the moment in which we are
breathing and speaking. Such an emphasis necessarily moves towards
“performance,” a condition in which the speaker’s “breath” is
immediately present and no longer dependent upon the text-interpreting
actions of “eyes.” (Homer, one remembers, was blind.) The performative
element which haunts modernism—and which was ignored by most of
modernism’s explainers—haunts this poet as well. Zukofsky’s son Paul
became not a poet but a performer, and the grand concluding movement of
Louis’s life-poem, A, is a
complex performance piece utilizing texts by the poet but entirely
“composed” by Celia and meant to be presented aloud.
The following poem from Bottom on
Shakespeare is Louis’s take on a line from Two
Gentlemen of Verona—significantly, a line from a play. Like much
(but not all) of his work, it cries out to be spoken, to be heard. Just
before reciting it Zukofsky remarked, “I’ve taken liberties.” Come shadow, come, and take this
shadow up, Come shadow shadow, come and take
this up, Come, shadow, come, and take this
shadow up, Come, come shadow, and take this
shadow up, Come, come and shadow, take this
shadow up, Come, up, come shadow and take
this shadow, And up, come, take shadow, come
this shadow, And up, come, come shadow, take
this shadow, And come shadow, come up, take
this shadow, Come up, come shadow this, and
take shadow, Up, shadow this, come and take
shadow, come Shadow this, take and come up
shadow, come Take and come, shadow, come up,
shadow this, Up, come and take shadow, come
this shadow, Come up, take shadow, and come
this shadow, Come and take shadow, come up this
shadow, Shadow, shadow come, come and take
this up, Come, shadow, take, and come this
shadow, up, Come shadow, come, and take this
shadow up, Come, shadow, come, and take this
shadow up.
Whatever “liberties” this poet takes—with texts, with history, with
his own life—are always in the interests of the beauty of language and
of what Robert Duncan called in The
Opening of the Field “the double-play of the mind.”
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