Zukofsky

Odds are you never heard of Louis Zukofsky, and the odds are you never will, which is strange. Assuredly, the poets that you like, or liked growing up anyway, read him, studied him, absorbed him, and probably emulated him at some point or another. On content alone, to say nothing of experimental methods and modes, he should be honored and revered. He is not. In fact he is hardly known at all. Who has recommended him to you lately? An integral part of the modernist movement in America, he has become a footnote. How many poets actually attended Ezuversity in Rapallo?

Part of the reason for the obscurity may be that his estate maintains strict control over the rights to his work. He is not as freely accessible as most poets. This may work to his advantage at some point in the future…. Another reason for the obscurity of his work is that it is difficult and complex. His friend George Oppen accused him of intentionally pursuing obscurity to his own detriment. Through the decades (from the 1920s to the 1970s) he does not compromise the poetic sensibility, his own poetic principles. Time and again, Zukofsky tows the line between absolute meaning and total definition and the incomprehensible, the savage absurdity. Of his generation he is the most radical. Harriet Monroe let him edit a volume of Poetry in 1931 where he propounded the “Objectivist” aesthetic. The edition included Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Basil Bunting – heavyweights for their time. Of course, the contributors made it a point to say that they did not consider themselves “Objectivists,” nor did they adhere to any “Objective” principles. The ploy, it seems, was somewhat contrived. The underlying philosophy of the Objectivists was developed by Zukofsky and explored throughout the duration of his life.

With Zukofsky high art reaches new heights. The pure sound of it brings the words to life. Isn’t that the essence of it after all? The poet is playful, funny, observant, and curious. The masterwork, “A”, is a long poem in 24 parts, one for each hour of the day and written between 1924 and 1974. Is there any other poet with such longevity? It is more consistent than Patterson, more accessible than The Cantos. Like the world itself, “A” is daily life, family life, literary and philosophical life, political and aesthetic life. Oftentimes experimental, there are occasional studies in traditional forms like this unusual (and well known) sonnet from Part 7:

               Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words
               Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but
               They have no manes, so there are no airs, birds
               Of words, from me to them no singing gut.
               For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood,
               For their stomachs are logs with print on them;
               Blood red, red lamps hang from necks or where could
               Be necks, two legs stand A, four together M.
               "Street Closed" is what print says on their stomachs;
               That cuts out everybody but the diggers;
               You're cut out, and she's cut out, and the jiggers
               Are cut out. No! we can't have such nor bucks
               As won't, tho they're not here, pass thru a hoop
               Strayed on a manhole — me? Am on a stoop.

This the poet conjectures from wooden work horses on the street. The sonnet is playful, a metaphysical treatment of the reality of the work horses, real horses, poetical horses, and the abstraction of horses. The language is modern, the syllables tight, beat for beat.

Zukofsky’s work can be divided into eras. There is the Objectivist period, the Socialist period, where much of the work is interspersed with Marxist thought, an infatuation with Shakespeare and Henry Adams, an erotic translation of Catullus, obscure and popular periods. One of the last, and most lovely, books he wrote was 80 Flowers, a study of his wife’s garden on Long Island, with language rich and evocative. He was working on one about trees when he passed.

Look up his Selected Poems edited by Charles Bernstein.

The poems there are remarkable.

Self-Interview

What was your dream growing up?
Always thought I’d be a soldier. It seems like my entire childhood revolved around violence, play warfare, and fighting. Watching awful ultraviolent eighties war, ninja and sci-fi movies (we had cable and nobody really monitored what I watched). At a young age Red Dawn was probably my ultimate fantasy. I’d imagined my response to such an event a thousand times. I had a survival plan. I knew a lot about warfare and martial arts at an early age for no particular reason, spent summers in Tennessee with real guns in deep woods, collecting Chinese stars and knives from flea markets. There was a guns and ammo store, Bob’s Sport Shop, in my neighborhood, and friends and I went there obsessively to check everything out, guns, bows, arrows, blowguns, explosives. You know, the usual. (How this was possible I have no idea). I bought a “real” ninja suit for $35, an extraordinary amount of money back then – it had gauntlets, a 2-piece mask, the toe-slit boots and everything – and wore it to shreds emulating Sho Kusugi and other TV masters. One time my dad took me and some friends to the woods to play. We all had on camouflage and painted our faces with authentic black “war” tarnish procured from Bob’s. We came pouring out the side door of the van with our fake weapons as if we were invading Iwo Jima. There were a lot of people there that day, and we must have looked like maniacs running off into the woods. My dad walked over to the picnic tables like it was nothing. Just another day. I love the way he handled the situation. With the greatest of ease.

What talent do you wish you had?
Always wanted to be able to swing and flip from a high bar like the guys in the Olympics (or Kevin Bacon in Footloose).

What are you reading?
I usually read 5 to 10 books at a time. Right now: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin, The Confessions by St. Augustine, a biography of Houdini, Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, a truely test of fortitude, An Introduction to Mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead, the poems of Holderlin, Chekhov’s plays, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake by Samuel Bawlf, Umberto Eco’s Serendipities and a book on child rearing.

What is your worst habit?
Too much TV.

Would you give a ride to someone who needed it?
Yes, but probably not to a stranger. Hitchhiking is too dangerous anymore, unless the driver can strip search the rider and vice-versa. The decline of the hitchhiking is definitely one of the great losses in American culture. Andy told me he picked up a couple heading east some years back. I remember thinking he was crazy to put himself in such jeopardy, but it turns out they were harmless hippies headed to the next festival. My grandfather told me he broke down in Los Angeles in the late sixties, and it only took him 72 hours to “thumb a ride” back to Chicago. Impossible anymore.

A few years back, I had some time to kill in Portage, Indiana and decided to go for a run. It was hot, in the upper 90s, and humid. Portage is at the southern tip of Lake Michigan and has a unique ecosystem. Toward the lake there are sand dunes and desert vegetation which turns to deciduous woodland throughout the region. In the summer the area resembles something like a tropical rainforest. I ran along U.S. 20 toward Gary to the point of exhaustion. Walking on the way back, a man in a junker with no rear windshield stopped and offered me a ride. He probably thought I was in distress because I was sweating and exasperated. The man probably had nothing of any value in the world, but he offered me a ride. Nothing could have been nicer or of deeper human significance to me than this man’s gesture. I'll never forget him. He was like the Buddha, a saint of conscience riding through Gary.

The essence and nature of friendship is of fundamental importance. I subscribe to Whitman’s conjecture that a democracy, in any form, cannot exist without true friendship. Politics, societal ills, government are insignificant in relation to this natural human bond. Suspecting each other of dissention, xenophobia, being criminal or morally deviant is an indication of a collapse of a profound kind. The function of civic life loses its purpose and foundation. The moral compass becomes frozen. And the loss of hitchhiking is the symptom of a greater moral, metaphysical disease.

What’s your favorite sport?
Football or boxing.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
Listened to other people when I should have trusted myself and followed my instincts, a result of misunderstanding the nature of the true self, which is the Poetic Genius.

Name a weird fact about yourself.
I have webbed toes. I’ve run the gamut of evolutionary explanations for this phenomenon but have come up with nothing.

What would you change about yourself?
I really don’t know. I should have studied foreign languages in college, but that’s more like a regret. I don’t know if we can change. Why would anyone want to? We are who we are. We might pick up or drop a bad habit or two but the same core person remains. The universe exists in order to inspire thought. “The stars were meant for you to feel them,” first and foremost. Understanding comes after this initial impression and the thinking, which at all times suggests itself. In understanding arises a possibility to find harmony in the confluence of things. But deeds and actions do not always correspond to our understanding, and most problems are a result of this discrepancy. The discrepancy, however, resides in our lack of understanding our own understanding, or, a misconception of the nature of the true self, which is bound to instinct, governed by conscious and inferior to nothing. The Poetic Genius is always right. One significant driving force behind the universe is resistance to conformity of any kind. If we are all manifestations of the driving will inherent in the universe, then there is no way to keep it all clear cut and organized. It is chaotic and subject to incomprehensible change.

Do you believe in ghosts?
No. I can’t bring myself to believe in them. I am an empiricist to the bone. If you can’t see it or experience it then it cannot exist, and it doesn’t matter if it does. The idea of ghosts challenges biblical tradition. When you die you either go to heaven or hell, are reincarnated or into the ground. In Catholicism there is a purgatory, which allows for the existence of ghosts because it is an intermediary phase and not an ultimate destination. In Islam there are djinn, which may explain spirits in some way. Still, I’ve never seen one. I live and grew up next to a haunted cemetery, with one of the more popular ghost legends in all of Chicagoland. Not one single occurrence.

What do you do in your spare time?
Play and study music.