"A"
by Louis Zukofsky

Reviewed by Mary Wilson

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Published: February 13, 2012

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In the world of poetry, the links between readership and long-term influence have always been tenuous. This is particularly true of the long poems of American modernism—such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson—which may be referenced more frequently than read. Yet few poems have seen as great a disparity in influence and readership as Louis Zukofsky’s masterwork, “A.” In his own time, Zukofsky was credited with spearheading the “Objectivist” movement in poetry, which included writers such as William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff and Kenneth Rexroth. Since then he’s been labeled a forebear of the language poets, and writers as diverse as Robert Creeley, Lorine Niedecker, Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein have named him as a major influence. Yet “A,” which Zukofsky wrote from 1928 until 1973, has fallen out of print twice since its posthumous publication in 1978. Pound critic Hugh Kenner has called it “the most hermetic poem in English,” and Zukofsky himself has been described as “a poet’s poet’s poet.” In the past few years, even those readers who are undeterred by such warnings have had little chance to test their veracity. John Hopkins University Press took it off their list in 2006, and lately the book has been hard to come by. Only now, with the release of a new edition from New Directions, (which is famous for keeping its books in print) has “A” has finally found itself a permanent home.

Why the long delay? The reasons are debatable, and the debate is ongoing. In his introduction to the new edition of “A,” Barry Ahearn cites the poem’s most obvious barrier to success: its difficulty. He writes: “Readers approaching “A” for the first time often presume they can only hope to understand the poem if they assail it with battering rams, nutcrackers, and tweezers.” Ahearn is at pains to account for the difference between the public reception of “A” and that of the equally hermetic Cantos of Ezra Pound, a work to which it is often compared. Both poems are groundbreaking in their musicality, overwhelming in their scope, and variably thick with cultural references. At roughly eight-hundred pages, both are considered among the masterworks of American modernist poetry. But if a battering ram is required, its surprising that readers have been more willing to apply it to The Cantos than to “A.” For as Ahearn points out, “A” is full of the autobiographical details that readers seem to love. In the course of its twenty-four sections (Zukofsky called them “movements”) we catch glimpses of Zukofsky’s childhood on New York’s Lower East Side, where he was born to a family of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants. We hear how his brother used to take him (“the baby”) to the theater, where he first saw Shakespeare and Ibsen performed in Yiddish. We see his reaction to World War II, the surrender of Paris, the death of his father and the birth of his son. Zukofsky, Ahearn tells us, “was quite serious in stressing the degree to which his poem was ‘of a life’– his life.”

That may be true, but readers who approach “A” with hopes of finding an autobiographical narrative will be sorely disappointed. The poem is “of a life,” but the life that it presents is closer to life-as-experienced than life as narrated or told. And that, in the final analysis, is precisely the essence of Zukofsky’s genius. The life we see is fragmented, interrupted, at times overwhelmed by its own detail. Zukofsky isn’t aiming for the coherence of a linear narrative. What he wants is distinction, emphasis, something more like a chord emerging from a string of grace notes in a piece of music. If the grace notes weren’t there, the climax wouldn’t ring out quite so forcefully.

“A” gives us both the climax and the grace notes. Recollection is distracted by the present moment, and thoughts are constantly invaded by the material world. At times Zukofsky is boldly lyrical (“while in the sea / the seals pearled for a minute / in the sun as they sank”), at others he is colloquial, or obtuse. There is a tension in his constructions. His focus widens and contracts, as he moves between the big picture (“history”) and the particular: “History: the records of taste and economy of a / civilization. / Particular: every fall season, every spring, he needs / a new coat / he loses his job…” In this way, one man’s loss of a job opens onto the history of the Great Depression, and does so without the need for narrative or description. There is meaning here, and history, but not in the documentary sense. As Bob Perelman puts it, “the continual reappearance of minute personal details amid capacious generalities makes “A,”—unlike The Cantos—narrative, assuming one’s microscope is in focus.”

Given Zukofsky’s particular aesthetics, a microscope may prove far more useful than a nutcracker. In the 1931 edition of Poetry, which he guest-edited on the suggestion of Ezra Pound, Zukofsky defined “Objectivist” poetics as follows: “An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use) – That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.” Here Zukofsky emphasizes the visual element of writing, a choice that reveals the lingering influence of Pound’s “Imagiste” movement. But for readers who are new to Zukofsky, this emphasis may prove misleading. For in “A,” as in all of Zukofsky’s work, the driving force is ultimately music: music as heard, overheard, sounded and sung. The first movement begins with “A / round of fiddles playing Bach” (particularly the St. Mathew Passion). Yet within this opening movement, there are also particulars that one would not expect, interruptions in the sound of European high culture. In the background we hear “the autos parked, honking,” and later, we are told, “it was also Passover.” The voices of the concertgoers give way to others, as on a side street we hear “The Pennsylvania miners were again on the lockout, / We must send relief to the wives and children.”

For Zukofsky, music is both matter and mode. A-24 is a collage created by Zukofsky’s wife, who pieced together fragments from his earlier writings and set them to a five part musical score taken from Handel’s “Harpsichord Pieces.” Zukofsky also experiments with different metrical forms: some traditional, some invented. A-7 is made up of seven sonnets arranged like an Italian Canzone, and A-11 was intended to be set to music by Zukofsky’s wife, Celia, and performed on the violin by their son Paul. Even without the accompaniment, its music is easily heard:

…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…

“A” is, as Zukofsky writes, “one song / of many voices.” Perhaps this is the reason its title is in quotation marks. It is a poem of a life, but also of a time, a place, a society. Zukofsky began “A” during the Great Depression, and continued it through World War II, McCarthyism and the civil rights movement. It was not a time for a poet—especially one with a Marxist bent—to preach down to the masses, yet it was also not a time to speak for them. Zukofsky understood this, and in doing so he set himself apart from his predecessors: Pound, Elliot, and Whitman. He was never comfortable with the figure of the poet as prophet or teacher. As a Jew he could not easily insert himself within the European poetic tradition, nor could he position himself as a Whitmanesque everyman or spokesperson for American society. Yet he also could not set himself apart from it. As he writes in A-6:

He who creates

Is a mode of these intertial systems—

The flower—leaf around leaf wrapped

around the center leaf

“A” is therefore a polyphonic collage of disparate voices, languages and dialects. Readers may pull out the tweezers and attempt to parse them, but they would risk missing the symphony in the process. Ultimately, as Zukofsky writes in “A Statement for Poetry,” “the best way to find out about poetry is to read the poems.” His own are no exception.

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