Zukofsky - Mark Scroggins
(I posted the following piece on the Buffalo Poetry list today, as well. It’s here in case you are not on that list and interested in Zukofsky. The piece on the ‘guard’ reading in Fridha Kahlo’s house precedes this entry - if that’s the one for which you are looking).
I’ve been reading Louis Zukofksy for almost 30 years now. Which is really not accurate. When I started with the small poems in the seventies, I found them ’slight’ - or I did not quite have the eye or ear to catch them, or think that they ‘delivered.’ By 1983, the UC Press edition of “A” was published and I began to take the bigger dive - admittedly under the influence of Lyn Hejinian, Barry Watten, Ron Silliman, Ron Johnson and Michael Palmer who were early local adepts in the Bay Area. The persuasion caught on. A-22 and A-23 become a much shaping force in my own writing - and yet, I would have been the first to say I had no real interpretative sense of what I was reading - other than the music and texture of the language was utterly compelling. Recently I decided it was important to take the reading into another level and started a small group to take on all of “A” ,one of two such groups of which I know in the Bay Area - in fact, as I get older I find critical groups as the best way to go into full immersion, at least with the idea of approaching an interpretive grasp, including reading related critical books, etc. (About four of us took two years to read Proust - which, as a proverbial poet slow reader - I would never have done on my own!).
So (as a related book) I recently got “Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge” by Mark Scroggins. (University of Alabama Press, 1998) What a delight to read! Comprehensive: (to paraphrase briefly and, perhaps, poorly) A history of the man, the writing, the politics in the context high modernism and 20th century history; the issue of language and the affirmation of knowledge; the word in relationship to the politics; the challenge of writing as a Jew in an anti-Semitic modernist tradition; a full discussion “A” in the context of musical form and knowledge; Z’s curious affinity with W Stevens; and, generationally, the heritage of the work’s relationship within the different perspectives of R Johnson, Taggart, Bernstein, Silliman, Palmer and others.
Obviously, at 397 pages, a very ambitious book in scope and attention. First it’s very readable and caring of its subject. Scroggins is convinced - as many of us are - that Zukofsky is arguably the most significant American poets of the 20th century. (I say that with the proviso I feel often majorly put off with hierarchal, canonizing statements - preferring , for example, the entire landscape, play and juxtaposition between the cumulative works of the several moderns - the various objectivists, Pound, Williams, etc.)
Part of Scroggins lucidity is his capacity to move from the large historical scope to the the play of immediate tactile elements of a poems’ language (pun, consonant, image, assonance, etc.) and do it for the most part without getting labored with an exhaustive analysis. In fact, as anyone familiar with the work inevitably appreciates, Z’s language does not invite critical closure - if you go one direction with a set of words, the next set may fully betray one interpretive target for another. As Scroggins argues at one point, Z’s transliterations from older texts - some operating one on top of another going down several layers of literary and other kinds of history(botanical, etc., etc.) - keep the work of reading quite open-ended. It’s Scroggins strength to be able open up and point to some of the layers and yet not close the reading process down & keep alive to the work’s internal music. (I guess one should normally give an example here, but, what the hell, trust me!)
I should say that Scroggins is also appreciative and inclusive of others who have written on Zukofsky, or poets (Palmer, Johnson, Taggart, Silliman, etc.) whose work has been shaped by Z. The book is good spirited in that sense, where like Z’s work itself, he brings his critical associates into play.
In any case the book has been a real helpful eye/ear etc. opener for me - and I suspect it will be for others, particularly with the upcoming Z September conference in New York - which I hope to be able to make. (By the way, since its publication in 1998, I have no idea of the book’s critical history, how it was received or whether some knocked it around, or pointed out its limits??)
One last question that emerges from reading “A” - while being led by association to other works of the period such as Patterson, the Cantos, the larger works of Reznikoff, Charles Olson - what was the (heroic?) nature of the American impulse to write the long, and historically comprehensive poem. In Mexico recently, I was also struck by the historic scope and ambition of Diego Rivera’s murals - he (a contemporary of these same folks), also, wants to encompass it all - from the archeological, pre-Columbian eras and depths up to the present contents of North America. In addition, how does the impulse and intention of these earlier twentieth century works vary from, say, those of Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian, among others.
Just a question.