Passport Photograph from The Poem of a Life
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Louis Zukofsky (1904-78) is the author of an enormous poem called simply A, an 800-plus-page work written over the course of more than 50 years in a m lange of styles and forms, from Poundian free verse to Italian canzoni. A -21 the poem was composed of 24 parts, mirroring the hours of the day translates an entire play by Plautus. A -24, the final section, is the score of a masque composed by Zukofsky s wife, Celia. The most hermetic poem in English, a long intent eccentric unread game, was the critic Hugh Kenner s judgment of A, and Kenner liked it.
Reading A is hard; in its time, even getting the chance to try was hard. Until 1979, a year after Zukofsky s death, when it was finally published in its entirety, only privately printed partial editions circulated, including a beautiful A 1-12 set by the poetry impresario Cid Corman in Japan in an edition of 200. (You had to know Corman personally in order to be allowed to buy one.) Zukofsky, who like Joyce died of a perforated ulcer that had long caused him pain, would seem the very model of the cantankerous, obscure, even obscurantist modern poet.
The Poem of a Life, Mark Scroggins s terrific new biography, never strays far from Zukofsky the poet. Though he treats all of Zukofsky s writing respectfully, Scroggins, who teaches literature at Florida Atlantic University, keeps his focus on A, the first seven parts of which were published in 1932. Free of megalomania, touchingly invested in his wife s work as a composer and in the care of his son, Paul, now a pre-eminent violinist (both of whom contributed, Celia substantially, to A ), Zukofsky nevertheless uncompromisingly devoted himself to the composition of his enormous poem. His reputation rests today partly in the hands of the so-called Language poets, who find in Zukofsky s brilliant subversions of syntax, word games and indeterminacy (his poem, after all, is called A, not The ) an augury of their own methods. But A is not about anything as simple as language or life : it is a poem about working on A about the daily elations and impediments of an artist who sought, over the course of decades, to make something really hard really good. Since it takes its own composition as the measure of living, it is a more personal poem, and often a more moving one, than either of its main models, Pound s Cantos or William Carlos Williams s Paterson.
As a child of immigrant Jewish parents on the Lower East Side, Zukofsky recited Yehoash s Yiddish translation of Longfellow s Hiawatha on street corners to gangs of Italian boys. He saw great plays and great mayhem at the Yiddish theater, Scroggins writes, Shakespeare
Aeschylus alongside vaudeville, light opera, melodrama and outright farce. At age 11, Zukofsky won a prize for finishing all of Shakespeare (the reward, to his disappointment, was a book called The Boy Electrician ). The child whose sense of Aeschylus is filtered through Yiddish theater, whose Longfellow was learned in Yiddish and performed for Italian bullies, and whose knack for Shakespeare made him a good bet to become an electrician whose idea of literature is polyglot, hybrid, mongrel is not going to grow up to be Robert Frost.
Anyone who has looked at a page of A will see the joyous language carnival of Zukofsky s childhood there, sometimes only minimally transformed. But Zukofsky s earliest intellectual interests, surprisingly, were two designated mourners for the old, pre-polyglot Anglo-America, Henry Adams and Henry James
Adams was an abiding passion: Zukofsky s 1924 Columbia master s thesis, the first full-length account of Adams s entire career ever written, focused on Adams s detatched mind and his growth, oddly, as a poet. (Adams wrote only two poems in his life.) It gives you a good idea of what Zukofsky meant by poet even at this early stage: a person to whom, or through whom, history happens. Adams s passivity, nearly pathologized in The Education of Henry Adams, made him a conduit for his times, and made his great memoir an account of what it feels like to be a conduit.
Zukofsky s interest in James is even more revealing. In 1905, James had visited the Lower East Side as part of his tour of America after 26 years abroad. H.J. intensely in / New York the year I was born, Zukofsky wrote in A -18. James s remarks on the New York Ghetto where a Jewry ... had burst all bounds, as Scroggins notes, have drawn charges of anti-Semitism. But James also predicted that the accent of the very ultimate future ... may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity ... but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English. Zukofsky, exemplar of that strange English of the future, wrote, I can never ... think of his visit to the East Side as anything but benevolent in the decent sense of that word willing good as against fringe benefits. A poet needs a myth of origin: Zukofsky, born among James s great swarming, located his at the moment when Henry James stood on Rutgers Street with the look of a shaven Chassid.
Zukofsky wrote much besides A a bizarre translation of Catullus (undertaken in partnership with Celia), a treatise on Shakespeare and hundreds of gnomic, attractive lyrics. But his legacy, he knew, was his enormous poem of a life. Scroggins s biography reads like an illumination of A first, and a biography only secondarily. Zukofsky s life was unusually directed toward the poem that was unusually open to absorbing it; you cannot talk about Zukofsky the man without talking about the poem that collected, to an extent few writers have ever attempted, the history of one person s perception of experience, from Bach to Watts, from Spinoza to Kennedy. Like The Cantos, A is a poem containing history, to use Pound s phrase. But it is history humanized, brought down to scale, as when Zukofsky locates the news of Kennedy s assassination first in his son s school classroom ( the teacher / overhearing / a student / thought a stupid jest ), then, a moment later, in the macabre mock piet unfolding in the back seat of that convertible ( the kittenish face / the paragon of fashion / widowed holding her husband s head in a blood soaked stocking. ) The Kennedy passages are among hundreds of moments in A where we get a keen and moving sense that (as Zukofsky later quotes Fidel Castro
Kennedy) a man is small / and relative in society.
Zukofsky invented something called objectivism, a poetic movement that existed for about five minutes in the 1930s before its participants scattered to the winds. That term (usually only partly understood), along with a few really difficult sections of A, made Zukofsky a model for several anti-personal avant-gardes. But despite the grand scale of A, Zukofsky s beauty is an intimate beauty, utterly personal. Ancient philosophy is a child s game: P.Z. Paul Zukofsky remembers the day Aristotle died, Zukofsky writes. I bought him two balloons: Plato and Aristotle. American ancestry, in this poem about perpetually returning to one s point of departure, is a walk at night with your son:
Facing south, I looked
At the ferry at South Ferry
At night, the ruins of Castle Garden
Where Jenny Lind sang
Before my time with the diamonds
Of the songs of the nightingale
Long after the Castle became the Aquarium:
Swung back by my young pulse,
Recalled a seal in teal blue,
A compass in binnacle
Asleep or sleepless
Held on to Paul s hand.
Related: Passport Photograph from The Poem of a Life
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