The ending of Zukofsky’s own long
poem A (which consists of a somewhat heterodox masque recited to 239
pages of Handel’s Pièces pour le
Clavecin, hand-copied by the poet’s wife Celia) has a speaker intone the
prolegomenon, “And it is possible in imagination to divorce speech of all
graphic elements, to let it become a movement of sounds.” “The ghost of
Mallarmé nods agreement from the azure,” writes Guy Davenport in his
Geography of the Imagination, citing this. And well he might, for no more
appropriate sponsor might be found to bless so unprosopoetic an enterprise as
that proposed in this preamble to Zukofsky’s lengthy peroration set to music
than the Symboliste whose verse, even
more than Baudelaire’s or Rimbaud’s, amortizes sense to a residuum of
sonorities barely appurtenanced to the ultimates it self-consciously litanizes. Le
son was for these poets, determined to be the uncensorable fount of all that
might importune an unstopped ear (such as Mauberley’s), the unwobbling pivot
hoisting the Sirens’ song into audibility. Speech purely energized as “a
movement of sounds” would successfully reconvert “eyes” back into “I’s,”
those uncommodified recensions of self that once gave succor to foundling melos
in times less distracted by kitsch than post-Whitmanian America, caught in the
toils of a capitalist purgatory and a workers’ hell. The Symbolists—Rimbaud perhaps excepted—had not had to contend
with Marx and the vision his statistician’s eyechart brought into focus.
Mallarmé,
for one, had kept himself free of embroilments at the behest of the embattled:
no Paris communard, he. His verse taunted the abyss with reconnoiterings of its
hitherto repressed sublimities, not in order to resurrect the Mont Blanc-mange
once favored by certain bas-Parnassiens,
but rather to “sound” the vacancies adumbrated by Poe, but left more or less
unplumbed by later laureates of the immaterial. Far from wanting to join Mallarmé
chasing the aleatory into the wild blue yonder, Zukofsky could note the
predilection marked by this French poet’s trademark, l’azur, with a brief homage,
wryly attenuated:
Azure
as ever
adz aver
As
always, Zukofsky is never so aerodynamically aligned with the Averroesian “‘R”’s
lurking in things as when he is adzing away at his favorite sawhorse, the letter
A, with its dovetailing struts and
soup-to-nuts adherencies locked like paradigms en abîme. (Memo to poststructuralists: En abîme can also point away from the Derridean chasm, as in the
French expression un abîme de science, a
man of immense learning. Worn on this, as on innumerable other occasions, this
Zukofskian shoe fits.) What might
Mallarmé have said if he could have seen his trumpeting of the Absolute reduced
to an encoding of lexical enzymes no more prolusive than the veiny distensions
that carry nutriment to a leaf. And uncannily similar, when you come to think of
it, to the force lines proceeding in a Cooper’s adz from handle to arched
blades (all sceptics regarding this being referred to the nearest good
encyclopedia).
Had Mallarmé actually foreseen such
prodigies from the land of Poe (and Disney), might it have resulted in Babbage-like
visions of computer punch cards, stacked like dominos reaching to the Empyrean
and programmed to fall forward at a touch of the poet? Would he, a
dyed-in-the-wool reductio ad absurdist
to the end, have envied the ease with which, so few years later, a Zukofsky
could thaw and resolve his beloved azur
into a brace of slant rhymes efflorescing into crystals on the very Page that
he, most recondite of Symbolistes,
held sacred? (Memo to <the few
remaining> Lévi-Straussians: Some table manners have no origins, just as
certain Oedipal a-sphinxiations (read: traumas) can be parsed in unclubbed feet,
as viz. “Poem beginning ‘The,’” the masterpiece that first brought him
to the attention of Ezra Pound:
1 The
2 Voice of Jesus I.
Rush
singing
3 in
the wilderness
4 A boy’s best friend is his mother,
5 It’s your mother all the time.
6 Residue of Oedipus-faced wrecks
7 Creating out of the dead,---
8 From the candle flames of the souls of dead mothers
9 Vide the legend of thin Christ sending her
out
of the temple,---
und
so weiter.) Recollect now that all of this inspired mumbledy-peg is
subsumable under the aegis of PERI POIETIKES: On
the Making (of Poems). And further recollect that all such folderol of
subsumption is itself a spinoff of the Blakean marriage of the prepositional On
and the conjugational Making of Poems.
Prepositions
hold the coats of nouns so they can do battle with the verbs that commit them to
actions that prudence might dictate they avoid. Unless of course the noun in
question is itself a verb mutated into a substantive, like making.
Then, mere action (an isolated event) gives way to process (a grand receptacle
into whose gaping aperture a whole universe of events can be dragged), and it
becomes possible to imagine a lost Mallarmean score for Aeolian harp and voice
within its boundless purview being magically reconstituted in a few fibrils of
sound laid on as Wagnerian motifs in a lambent swell of coercive content—
Azure
as
ever
adz
aver
—much
as Pound managed to capture in a net of 15 lines and rescue from obliterating
sea-wrack an Atlantis of longing still clinging to the Sapphic fragment
Blandula
…………
Tenella
…………..
Vagula
……………,
amid
whose seductive liquidities may be found the following allusion to the
variegated yonders of a blue yet
unspoke:
Will
Will not our cult be founded on the waves,
Clear
sapphire, cobalt, cyanine,
On
triune azures, the impalpable
Mirrors
unstill of the eternal change?
Over
a quarter century ago, in a book titled The
Pound Era (1972), Hugh Kenner marked the stages of this and similar salvage
operations performed by the author of Personae,
pointing out along the way how the rationale underlying them was informed by
Symbolist practice of the sort distinguishing a Mallarmé and a Valéry from
lesser visionaries of the time. Based on the musical principle (capitalized on
by impressionists like Debussy) that an extrapolation of the upper harmonics of
a chord could create in a listener a phantom impression of its lower harmonics
as well (and vice versa), this way of organizing emotional loci classici around a receding edge of palpabilities and redolences
was carried over by early Imagists like T. E. Hulme into the realm of poetic
experimentation as well. There it reigned for a brief time like chung,
the Chinese ideogram for Kung Fu T’su’s
uwobbling pivot, guarantying an unlimited profusion of hard, indissoluble
images whose flame burned brighter than metaphor and whose rights of eminent
domain with regard to the fount of Arethusa were thought to be held in virtual
perpetuity.
Or
so believed the chosen few, which
mostly meant Pound and the scattered remnants of the revisionary company that
included among its elite corps of revolutionary crop dusters Wyndham Lewis and
T. S. Eliot. They all went their separate ways after the “war to end wars,”
mourning in the absence of the loud sucking sound made once by the Great Vortex
in that flyspan of promise and celebrity it enjoyed in 1914-15, a waning of
youth, along with a waxing of enthusiasm for sub-artistic barbarities and Jazz
Age diversions. Well, among those no longer faithful to the cause, at any rate.
Enter Louis Zukofsky—or rather cue
the Objectivists, whose American run would outlast that of any comparable
artistic movement in 20th Century Europe, not excluding the
surrealists—from about 1922, to well into the 1970’s, and even beyond. Their
movement’s frequently mentioned, but little discussed Anthology,
with its usual, famous for being famous suspects—Oppen and Niedecker,
Reznickoff and Rakosi (but most singularly excepting W. C. Williams)—all duly
rounded up, appeared in 1932; but its fanfare exceeded its sales by several
orders of magnitude. And that pretty much describes how the careers of its
contributors fared over the years: a steady trickle of slim volumes, punctuated
by systolic and diastolic blips on the Big Board, and accompanying slippages
from the radar screen—the whole affair having, depressingly, the tenor of
chords of oblivion being muffledly resolved. Zukofsky’s career, especially.
Gradually the obscurity he learned to work in hardened to resentful gloom, and
from the ‘50’s on, a stoicism burnished with single-mindedness, unswerving
devotion to family, and an almost fanatical obsession with the poetic craft that
served to isolate him from less fastidious contemporaries. He continued to write
English as a scrupulous translator of its upper and lower harmonics that no one
but he could accurately hear—for him, the layered sonorities that were at once
English’s buried treasure and distinguishing hallmark.
For
once, an American poet’s having spoken a language other than English—in
Zukofsky’s case, Yiddish—for the first 12 years of his life made it possible
for the idiomatic and cadential talents of a Walt Whitman to merge with the
eastern European provincializing catholicity of a Joseph Conrad on the
unlikeliest meeting ground of all: the Jewish soul of a Bach-suffused, but
inordinately frustrated, musical genius. (Bach in Zukofsky: a creek always ready
at a moment’s notice to flashflood into a river of onrushing song.) The end
product was a verse capable of producing sounds never before heard on these or
any other shores; but rather more disquietingly, it proved a fusion plagued by
fissions all too prone to assume critical mass. Some he had managed to keep
under control; others would burst the seams of what already seemed to many an
unconscionable breach of faith with poetic tradition.
IV
Originality
in poetry may in revolutionary times proceed by leaps and bounds, but unless the
bounds rein in the leaps, only boundless leaping reigns. Which, needless to say,
benefits neither poetry nor the role ideally assumed by originality in the arts,
a wild card as difficult to play as that of non-heretical reformer within the
Church of Rome.
When a poet carries originality to an extreme of conventional adaptation—which is
to say, when he becomes more determined to extend the ringing of changes upon
ornamentals and accidentals in Western poetry beyond even the Outer Hebrides of
obscurantist renascencing reached by an Ezra Pound—then it should surprise no
one to find epithets such as “unconscionable” being lobbed about by those
unable to keep the flights of leapers like Zukofsky within acceptable bounds. In
much the way his tilt with cellular Communism in the 1930’s inclined him
toward a quixotic Marxism restrained from Bolshevist folly by a Panzaic
pluralism of uncommon senses, his jousts with Pound would keep his literary ties
old but his vision of America unerringly young, even while he engaged in contretemps
with the elder poet over such matters as Cavalcanti’s real slant on “the nature of commodity.” In “A” –9, Zukofsky’s translation of “Donna mi prega” sounds
like Marx but sings like no economist has since St. Thomas created the dismal
science by dropping all economic pursuits after peaking poetically with his
disquisition, contra usuram, on the
Just Price. (Celia Zukofsky in conversation with Carroll F. Terrell, on the
subject of philosophers her husband read and was influenced by:
C:
Aristotle, he was very fond of Aristotle and Plato. Then Aquinas.
T:
Pound didn’t think very highly of Aquinas.
C:
Well, Louie did. That’s one of their literary differences.)
Zukofsky’s
“Donna mi prega” sets out less particularly than Pound’s “A lady asks me
/ I speak in season / She seeks reason
for an affect . . . ,” preferring to sound a philosophical note rather than
one perfunctorily anecdotal:
An
impulse to action sings of a semblance
Of
things related as equated values,
The
measure all use is time congealed labor
In
which abstraction things keep no resemblance
To
goods created; integrated all hues
Hide
their natural use to one or one’s neighbor. . . .
And
so on, in splendid fettle, for another gross of lines in which not the slightest
touch of grossness may be sensed, Zukofsky’s version of the most celebrated
source-text Pound ever translated (only half of “A” –9 is a reworking of the Cavalcantian centerpiece of “Canto
XXXVI”; the rest is taken up with Zukofsky’s sounding of different depths by
skin-diving in darks where gold was likely to gather about itself pertinent
glooms) coalesces at its own pace into an ormulu of exactitudes keyed to both
the Tuscan poet’s uniquely musical convolutions and the commodification of
labor inspiriting the devil’s dance of modern times—not uncoincidentally, in
precisely the manner foreseen by Marx in his Capital.
In
fact, it reads much more like one of the early Italianate poems of Pound,
translated into language fitfully acceptable to 1930’s readers of the
Communist journal New Masses, than it
does a rendering into contemporary idiom of the Cavalcanti canzone itself. Still, the shift in viewpoint Zukofsky effected from
the world of the Marxian Other to the other-worldly lens grinding of Spinoza,
and from socialist moralism to the ethical shores of light associated with
amatory philosophies of the Middle Ages, can be attributed to blistering from
excessive exposure to solar Pound only in part. Isolation within the cocoon of
an increasingly arcane craft deprived him of both active membership in the
Objectivist fold and the sense that, though laboring in elitist vineyards, he
shared in the conditions keeping down the American working class.
Nor,
to return to an earlier stage of the argument, were the Objectivists easily
cued, or cowed. Mavericks all, they shared few of Zukofsky’s pet, and often
Poundian concerns, beyond a Depression-bred belief in the triumphability of
Lenin’s blueprint for Russia on American shores, and a chicken wire-and-lath
clubhouse affability with the aims and procedures of W. C. Williams—when the
on again-off again OB/GYN from Rutherford, New Jersey had his act together and
wasn’t off on some toot somewhere, one of those sabbaticals from reality he
was given to taking, as in the (to put the best face on it) “idiosyncratic” In
the American Grain. George Oppen, Zukosfsky’s long-time feuding partner,
for one, took a dim view of the pantywaist romanticizings of the
“A”-obsessed, bottomed-out Shakespeare from Brooklyn, and an even dimmer one
of the old lore hawked by that guild of aging lore-yers Zukofsky seemed drawn
to, like the then increasingly fascistic Pound, who, besides having little to
say to the only genuine realists on the American poetry scene, the Objectivists,
seemed positively opposed to the social program most of them were laboring to
put in place. Though grateful for Pound’s encomium on his work—that of “a
serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man’s sensibility and
which has not been got out of any other man’s books”—Oppen tended to look
upon his encouragement of his fellow Objectivists from abroad as a form of
grandstanding that was, at best, politically motivated. He was, among other
things, unable to ignore or explain away Pound’s having abandoned the United
States to its local enemies and their foreign partners in trade, not the least
virulent of which was his “Jeffersonian” idol, Mussolini. Certainly by 1930
there could be no question that the highest-profile American modernists appeared
to have lost their bearings, not to mention their moorings, amid the distinctly
American pilings so lovingly catalogued by Walt Whitman in Leaves
of Grass.
As
had also Zukofsky’s other mentor and dark familiar, Henry Adams, himself the
subject of a major excursus on literature and exile written by Zukofsky in 1924,
when he was only 20 years old. To cite a poem of Oppen’s in juxtaposition to
the attitudinal dislocations of Zukofsky’s poet of the Education (1918) is like dousing candles lit to the Virgin in a
hushed cathedral with barbecue lighter, courtesy of the Dynamo. At the onset of
his piece on Adams, Zukofsky promised to illustrate “two actuating forces in
his nature.” He identified “poetic intellect as its undertow, and detached
mind the strong surface current in the contrary direction.” Among the many
admirable qualities he found particularly noteworthy in the author of the Education
was the genius of a poet able to meld into scrutinizable wholes wildly
centrifugal histories—of the United States during the Administrations of
Jefferson and Madison; of Documents Relating to New-England Federalism,
1800-1815; of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; of the life
of his friend George Cabot Lodge; and finally, with perhaps the greatest
insight, if the least love, of himself. Rather than reduce it to an aristocratic
and remaindered decorum having fiercely withstood the vicissitudes of
speculative fever and civil war, Zukofsky—against the odds—read Adams’s
achievement as that of a poster child for an age in which nature, in the
historian’s own words, “had educated herself to a singular sympathy for
death.”
Oppen,
to seize upon another contrarian, also swam against the current, though in much
different waters than had the Harvard Brahmin whose father had served as U. S.
Ambassador to Great Britain during the tumultuous—and politically
duplicitous—years of the War Between the States. Even more than Zukofsky’s,
his background and heritage were defiantly Jewish and unapologetically Marxist:
the world, its devil and its flesh might all be capitalist and gentile, but the
never-weakening spirit-in-opposition, however besieged by harassment and
oppression, was, beyond all opprobrium, Semitic. And so the perceptions of that
spirit, ever new-minted from each period’s coinage of grief, were, for poets
like Oppen and Reznickoff at least, struck from precious metals salvaged from
slagheaps of unrefined misery and suffering. Such suffering seemed not unlike
the drunken man’s in “Night Scene,” where strangers are mistaken for
parents seeing him off before his tour of oblivion’s not to be missed sights:
The drunken man
On an old pier
In the Hudson River,
Tightening his throat, thrust his chin
Forward and the light
Caught his raised face,
His eyes still blind with drink . . .
Said, to my wife,
And to me---
He must have been saying
Again---
Good bye Momma,
Good bye Poppa
On an old pier.
How
easy to miss the idiosyncrasies abounding in such scrapings of inelegance
destined at best for the trousseau of Memory in her arranged conjugalities with
the Zeus of swooping trysts and never less than fateful couplings. A W. C.
Williams would have hardened this inebriate into an intaglio shorn of all
sentiment not germane to his manifesting enough of the Voici
factor ideally latent in every image’s Voilà!—by
which is meant that point of indistinguishability where curd and whey meet and
are underscored by the textures of their own similarity:
STAYING
HERE in the country
on an old farm
we eat our breakfasts
on
a balcony under an elm.
The shrubs below us
are neglected. And
there,
penned in,
or he would eat the garden,
lives a goose who
tilts
his head
sidewise
and looks up at us,
a
very quiet old fellow
who writes no poems.
Fine mornings we sit there
while
birds
come and go. . . .
The
Oppen poem hinges on the isolating italics of “Again---“
and its capacity for swallowing up what occurs on either side of it into a
beckoning vortex of repetitions and enervations: what the drunk’s drinking
both emanates from and seeks to avoid at any cost. On the other hand, the
Williams fragment from Journey to Love’s
“Daphne and Virginia” cannot not accord the voracious yet taciturn goose in
this frame his separate laurel as Most Limnable Image-Geneator within the
broader emotional scene the poet is at pains to lock into. The much-touted
triadic stanza of Williams’s last stroke-filled years does not determine here
the goose’s eidolon so much as
highlight the fowl’s already shapely presence. Having escaped a slew of
dinners he is a fit drainer of any slough of despond diverted to the proceedings
by the poet. But he is front and center, not centerable as a front for feelings
like unto the eidolon’s capacity for summoning forth analogies of
themselves. The Oppen poem is about the plangencies of grief unalloyed by
change or temperament; the Williams poem is about
the business of thematizing self-evading instances the poet is lucky enough
to lure into his depth of field and contain there imagistically. The one hobbles
on a clubfoot of artificially discovered pain, the other opens out onto a vista
of eternizing conceits framed equally by a rapacious sensibility and a Jamesian
determination to be an observer on whom nothing—not even a goose penned in by
poemless authorship—is lost.
Zukofsky’s
metier is in essence as distant from both these practices as a
neurologist’s is from a rheumatologist’s. This may sound strange but its
obliquities are worth the parsing. The latter sort of practitioner presides over
a relatively mappable demesne of joints, and as one might expect, he affects
lordship over the mysterious Middle Earth of articulations that make up their
range of motion. Because joints are the parts of the body that facilitate
motion, the dysfunctional face they present is one of stiffness, immobility,
pain. Rather than garnering notice for smooth operation, they attract most
attention when hurtfully startled into inflammation and pathology. Not so for
neurologists, who bag the malfunctioning bird from another—its blind—side.
If rheumatologists seek the company of orthopedists and bone doctors of this
sort or that, neurologists tend to court the more quantumized dispensers of
medical supposition and pharmacology. With their gaze riveted on the disruptions
to which the body’s network of web sites is prone, they ply an undersea
kingdom of sheaths, pulses and reflexes, all suspended from a thread as elusive
as a mesonic felon in a crowd of sympathetic particles.
What
has all this to do with how Zukofsky differs from his Objectivist
contemporaries? Just this: the subletter of those museless haunts of Brooklyn
once tenanted by Whitman conceived of language as an articulational network
within which all words could be viewed as essentially “foreign” terms and
therefore rife with adherences that placed the lexical on an unfathomable par
with the cellular realm of centrospheres and centrosomes. Indifferent to the
joints and cartileges of conventional arche-beams
and arche-motes (the superficies
playing between the “I’s (pronounced
eyes)” and “After I’s” of poetry), Zukofsky was from the beginning overwhelmed by
the nerves and nerve casings of language at levels even more lowly and intrinsic
than either the morphemic or the phonemic. Out of that conscription of letters
from which his universe assumes its shape, everything begins with “A”
for Aleph-Alpha, the endlessly pulsing Omega towards which all bendings of light and human refraction
gravitate. The only endings in his ecosystem of sounds and soundings are
nerve-endings, at whose extremities incomings from the ecosystem’s signal loop
can be sensed by a poet who works hard to attune himself to their vibrations.
After a time one learns to divest oneself of the Aristotelian expectation of
beginnings followed by middles followed by ends and to accept the fact of there
being only beginnings, endlessly pulsing along pathways stirringly alive with
encrypted impulses and stimuli, each outfitted with the means to effect its
translation into sounds, that when suitably grammatized, supervene magically as
poems.
Sometimes
the signal loop sends on a lengthy and involved brief of concupiscence; at other
times one care barely discern the gists for the piths, as in the coupling of
onsets energizing the 26 lines of “Que J’ay Dit Devant.” Part I splits
differences without ever really stipulating a deal to be formalized:
Day that passes,
Day that stays,
Day that passes
Other days’
Crow’s-foot sieges,
Tears, bare way,
A god’s aegis, --
Catspaw spray.
All
ways of alluding—via alternate routes of designation, some forking, some
relatively straight—to tears,
blossoms of sorrow, eye-juice. As I (pronounced
eye) said
before (Que j’ay dit devant):
There’s gold veining those hills of regret, of transitory loss, of perduring
grief. The eyes have it, secreting rivulets of salt-wash that deepen
crow’s-feet, suggest with each descending ovule fertilized by rue a shield of
godly provenance, or an airy lightness to watery ruffles beat, in patches of
thinning wind about the edges of an unsqually calm. And could any pair of sounds
sound more like something briefly indecipherable said through tears than “bare
way”? The voice catching at glottal straws has seldom been accorded such
generic, yet riskily moving, “onomatopoeia by other means.” What American
poet—with the fitful exception, perhaps, of Emily Dickinson—has offered up
for our elucidation, with an incisiveness and brio comparable to Zukofsky’s,
so many “signatures of things” of the sort that figure in the boast made by
Joyce’s alter-ego Stephen Dedalus about having been put here on the planet
specifically to read them?
Nor
has speculation as to their provenance been halted when the provocation in
question is thought to “lie too deep for tears.” Willy nilly, and as a
consequence, such depths have given rise, since at least the Songs
& Sonets of Donne (1597), to like bouts of reading—if only of those
portents their mirror-like convexities can be imagined sending into regressus
ad infinitum, like so many Parmigianinos careening through wilds of
self-portraiture. Their watery association with pangs of the heart feeds readily
into that salty redoubt (once popularly epitomized as “run silent, run
deep”) which leads to oceanic immersions, and ultimately to cimetières
marins, though not always in a straight line.
Zukofsky
was just the man to make hay out from such fortuitously shining suns.
It coincided with his call on Objectivism in ‘’’Recencies’ of
Poetry” (1932) to recognize that “Poems are only acts upon
particulars”—that is, strings of things laid out in “gists and piths,”
to cite Pound’s phrase, out beyond Whitman’s catalogues toward the
logosphere of etonyms and pure syllabic resonance. But it is Zukofsky’s almost
unworldly grasp of syllabics as nodes of radiance so intense they crystallize,
as though bent on colloidal apotheosis, into images that makes the poems in All
appear like manna dropped from poets’ heaven. How much Trecento
beauty—and fiddle—are alembicated into these few lines from I’s
(pronounced eyes), and all with nary a hint of the unearthly being unearthed
by a trouvère of great gifts:
Or again—
As where cheek touches forehead,
of
face
My father’s boot
by a lute
with eight courses—
I have rhymed
it:
To her face. Love delights, the book of praises.
What
empowers such verse? It is the timbral broaching of tonality at first blush, of
concentration ignited, suffused with giddy exaltation at being plucked nimbly
out of reverence, bound for glory in the ear. What enables it? Its power to
convey, beyond all late Baroque and other bungholes, the economy of grandeur as a thing of words no less easeful with
time and its hidden springs than a fine watch. If the result is less than
Poundian it totals up to rather more than Pound—if you credit the exceeding of
beauty mongering for its own sake, what the expatriate hellion from Hailey could
never bring himself to lay aside, with a still laudable cachet. Allow that
Frost’s poetry partakes of the dramatic, Eliot’s of the agonic, Stevens’s
of the festive, and Williams’s of the dance of hand-eye coordination
choreographed on a Pollock-like canvas of words, then it must as surely be
granted that the poetry of Zukofsky purchases its elegance of means at the cost
of involvement with the world of affairs (human and between men and fauna,
rather than just flora). It was this same world, that of relations between
relations, which the Marx of that same Capital
the alembicator of All once had a
go at translating into verse made a point of designating not objective but materialistic.
Indeed, he tired of Marxism, of the narrowness of its vision, because if life
was not a meeting of minds, it was for him, as well as for everyone else,
nothing at all. Either that, or a cockpit tailor-made for the contusions of
class or those grudge matches of History impresarioed by Hegel (with halls
rented by Bakunin and Sorel), which, if Zukofsky had lived to think about it,
was not all that distinguishable from the Verso Paperback of today.
Just
as Frost, in his biographer Lawrance Thompson’s words, took “his inspiration
from the Sermones of Horace . . . [and
sung} New Hampshire by praising it for having nothing to sell—just ‘one each
of everything as in a showcase,’” Zukofsky, most light-fingered of pickpoets,
sang his Brooklyn to within a cobbler’s inch of an Objectivist’s
singularity, in full possession of Horatian grace, but with an overplus of
Jonsonian elegiac lissomeness as well. If he stole anything, it was a march on
the modernists’ program to force the reform of the poetic line by cutting off
its header quality shared with the topic sentence reduced to running clausal
interference. Where an Edwin Arlington Robinson could write in his 1925 sonnet
“The Sheaves,”
Where long the shadows of the wind had
rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change
assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into
gold. . . ;
—and
Frost in a poem as brief as the four lines of “Bravado” could unravel its
Gordian knot of prose into conversational leadstrings aflame with the spangles
of loosed drama:
Have
I not walked without an upward look
Of
caution under stars that very well
Might
not have missed me when they shot and fell?
It
was a risk I had to take—and took
—Zukofsky,
in poems such as “1959 Valentine,” breaks the line down further into
smithereens of sense whose sounds reverberate like loose change on a new
church’s collection plate:
The
more that—
who? the world
seeks
me so
to speak
the
more
will I
seek
you.
An incredible amount of concision has
entered that process by which Zukofsky’s earliest gleanings from the tree of
verse have ripened into these brief, but in no way tenuous, prunings from the
Tree of Life. Who but he, and he in this particular and peculiar incarnation
dredged for embodiment by the confluence of Valentine sentiments within the
heart of a middle-aged poet (in February 1959 Zukofsky was going on 55)? “. .
. the world / seeks me so / to speak” leaves nothing to chance but the
effusions of paranomasia circling about the formula “so to speak,” which add
corruscations to the context without needlessly stranding his reader in the
glare of the gratuitous. “The world seeks me as a manner of (its) speaking”
vies with a generous handful of alternate readings of what Zukofsky’s
pinwheeling performative may be interpreted as saying. Of course the declaration
of love reduced beyond words to a distillate of understanding is this poet’s
particular specialty, a Grand Tour de force conducted over a lifetime of country
matters with his wife and constant companion, Celia. No known poet could
actualize a poem with the great good taste or reserves of anabolic
“boplicity” (the term is from jazz, and it designates that quality of
improvisational composure attributable to a bop instrumentalist when he or she
is “in the groove” and notes played—and underplayed—fall into place as
if bidden) as could Zukofsky when he’d imbibed a measure from the appropriate
spring. (A propos of nothing, one further loopiness encountered in writing about
Louis Zukofsky: either as subject he encourages the stockpiling of
“epitheticals” beginning with the letter “a,” or it only appears that he
does. One way or the other, the risky pretentiousness attending the use of
“Arethusan” in the preceding sentence seems—in terms of style at
least—less tacky a device for preempting the charge of pretentious riskiness
in this connection than any other one could dream up. Just why this might be so
the reader must be left to ponder. . . )
Which
brings us (by a route—and on this it is possible that opinions might differ—insufficiently
circuitous) back somewhere near to where we started in this Zukofskian ramble in
quest of just what it is that All is
all of—if such a Kapellmeister of poetic precisions could ever have anything
as unchoreographed as a ramble associated with him. First, we need to remain
true to Zukofsky’s own sense of the poem as “a context associated with
musical shape.” Second, we cannot afford to ignore what Zukofsky chose to
highlight in his introduction to the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry from 1931, that aligned poetry with the “desire for what is
objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary
particulars.” And finally, there can be no circumventing of one cardinal fact
about this most extraordinary poet: while he would not have turned his nose up at
literary fame, he never sought celebrity or courted even the most benign
notoriety for himself or his work. It was his both his fortune and misfortune to
have been linked indissolubly, and from very early on, with the fortunes and
misfortunes of his mentor Ezra Pound. Hence fame did not so much elude him as
become less and less a possibility as efforts made by friends and students on
his behalf were increasingly blindsided by events and the rise and fall of some
very unpredictable stars in the American literary heavens.
The
all-in-All
then is both an inclusivity and an exclusivity, a summa and a uniquely partitive 20th Century gestalt along
distinctly American lines. Its pair of volumes contain neither outtakes from “A”
nor doubletakes on matters thought unworthy of notice by more noticed but less
worthy poets than Louis Zukofsky. They constitute an intimate journal of things
registered on the most sensitively calibrated sensibility in modern letters, bar
none. Some poets breathe so rarified an air that they require the cultivation of
a special taste to make their ambrosial droppings seem to those not inclined to
go along with transubstantiation not the droppings they actually are but the
ambrosia they would have themselves be. Not Zukofsky. In him we have more than
just that denatured freak of literary experimentation, read by few and loved by
less, a “poet’s poet.” These poems, with the exception of “Poem
beginning ‘The’” and some of the pieces in Barely
and widely (1956-58), though not major, are anything but minor. Nutritively,
they occupy a middle position between a clear and universally acknowledged
influence on the poetry of his time and an energizing obliquity who managed to
inspire from afar numerous younger poets, even though many of them never read
anything by him. As Robert Creeley put it, “It is [Zukofsky’s] belief that
that a poet writes one poem all his life, a continuing song,
so that no division of its own existence can be thought of as being more or less
than its sum. This is to say, it all
is.” His verse will always be, in his own telling phrase, “Wut wuz in the
air”: which is to affirm, once and for all, a voice fashioned out of love that
never once simpered, but rather rose songfully and proportionately, over the
modicums and makeweights of a not a few “low, dishonest decades.”
Not with loudness, but with ardor; and not with arrogance either, but out
of fealty to the ear and the comeliness of its assuagings. Only that.
Postlude
Jorge Luis Borges might well have been right to insist that we create our own
predecessors rather than the other way round. That being so, one might also
consider this: If Walt Whitman is the father of us all, then without question
Louis Zukofsky is the father of the all in all of us—the All in all (and all in All),
as it were—without which we would be as tinkling cymbals, the prey, as for so
many in the Europe of the 1930’s, of grand designs and even grander designers.
The original version of All in two
volumes, though in no way matching the weightlifter’s grip on the non
pareil shown in “A,” brought
its author out of vaunting obscurity into that light of day his poetry had so
long stood in for the limited but discerning body of readers which only began
swelling to crowd proportions just before his death. The new wood that Pound
credited Whitman with having broken (and himself with having readied for
carving) found in Zukofsky a sublime wielder not of an axe or chisel, but of an
instantly recognizable awl from whose sharp tip marks indelible flowed with a
pointedness to which air and light clung as friend and helpmate. That awl is
what we honor in that Zukofsky who minored in the discipline that would
underwrite the sublime outpouring of “A,”
the heftiest and most prodigious mowings Whitman’s Leaves
has generated thus far. Since the degrees of lineage separating Zukofsky from
subsequent generations of American poets who continue to lumber in his wake have
shrunk from the nominal six to somewhat less than that number due to the
pervasive, if largely unacknowledged, influence of his style, the wood Pound
spoke of has wound up being displayed in shapes and in venues which he could
scarcely have imagined when the Cantos
were on track for being rounded off and squared away. The engineer who laid down
the most durable rail between the there of then and the here of now is
undoubtedly the master bricoleur and
tangent pianist of Time, who saw Pound coming and seconded his revolution
without putting harm in his own way or letting others drive him from the decency
on which his craft, nourished over years in which both it and he were shunted
aside and ignored, so richly devolved.
E-mail