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‘The test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art . . . ’
                      (from Zukofsky’s preface to A Test of Poetry: 1948)

Louis ZUKOFSKY, in ‘A Statement for Poetry’ (1950), wrote, ‘The best way to find out about poetry is to read the poems’. This principle hardly applies to his own work. Some introduction is needed — and not of the kind supplied by him or his passionate advocates. Together they have intellectualised his poetry almost out of existence. There is a world of difference between explication and intellectualisation. Zukofsky’s critical prose style is indigestible: ‘. . . How much what is sounded by words has to do with what is seen by them, and how much what is at once sounded and seen by them crosscuts an interplay among themselves — will naturally sustain the scientific definition of poetry we are looking for. To endure it would be compelled to integrate these functions: time, and what is seen in time (as held by a song), and an action whose words are actors or, if you will, mimes composing steps as of a dance that at proper instants calls in the vocal chords to transfer it into plain speech . . .’ (from ‘Poetry A’). The implications become clear, but the expression is almost wilfully exclusive. The poetry, too, is difficult:

(mouth?) —
exult
tally,
wiggle
exult
tally —
(one:
three)
sun
eye

This is the last stanza of ‘A 14 beginning An’. Could the word ‘month’ be substituted for ‘mouth’? The answer should be ‘no’; a poet of Zukofsky’s experimental integrity should deserve our trust. The poem proves to be a love poem, and the words refer hack to an experience.

     Zukofsky is the natural successor to William Carlos Williams, having taken Williams’s theories a step further into committed experimentation. And his poetry has become a starting point for several contemporary poets — Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder, for instance — all of whom have diverted their poetry from the tradition represented by Frost and Aiken and made Williams and Zukofsky their models. Creeley described an attraction: ‘It is a peculiar virtue of Zukofsky’s work that it offers an extraordinary handbook for the writing of poems’.

     Zukofsky’s work first attracted notice in February, 1931, when he edited a special ‘objectivist’ issue of the magazine Poetry in which, among others, he included poems by Williams and Charles Reznikoff which conformed to his idea of an ‘objectivist poem’. Williams describes ‘The Objectivist theory’ in his autobiography: ‘We had had “Imagism” . . . which ran quickly out. That, though it had been useful in ridding the field of verbiage, had no formal necessity implicit in it. It had already dribbled off into so called “free verse” which, as we saw, was a misnomer. There is no such thing as free verse! Verse is a measure of some sort . . . But we argued, the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. Therefore, being an object, it should be so treated and controlled — but not as in the past. For past objects have about them past necessities — like the sonnet — which have conditioned them and from which, as a form itself, they cannot be freed. The poem being an object (like a symphony or a cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day. This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse. ’

     A press was founded, financed by the poet George Oppen, and in 1932 under the name of To Publishers, it brought out An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, edited by Zukofsky, with poems by Basil Bunting, Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Reznikoff and Williams. Pound was represented by ‘Yittischer Charleston’ and Eliot by ‘Marina’. To, under the general editorship of Zukofsky, Williams and Pound became the Objectivist Press. Zukofsky, in the original Objectivist issue of Poetry, specifies as required reading Pound’s XXX Cantos, Williams’s Spring and All, Eliot’s The Waste Land and ‘Marina’, Marianne Moore’s Observations, E. E. Cummings’s Is 5 and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, among others. Helpful to an understanding of Zukofsky’s own poetry is his comment, ‘In contemporary writing the poems of Ezra Pound alone possess objectivication to a most constant degree; his objects are musical shapes’ (my italics). The words: ‘objects’, ‘musical’ and ‘shapes’ provide a key to Zukofsky’s poetry.

     In his Five Statements for Poetry (1958) Zukofsky spoke of his work as moving towards a ‘process of active literary omission’, a conscious rejection of crude metaphor and symbolism and an exploitation of typography to demonstrate ‘how the voice should sound’. His work thus consciously subordinates meaning to sound — in this he recalls Gertrude Stein — for, having admitted the objectiveness of the poem and applied the principle to the word, treating it too as an object, its sound and look become, perhaps, more important than its meaning. The poem becomes a score. As he abandons metaphor, symbol and connotation in language, meaning takes a subordinate place. The clearest example of this approach is in his Catullus, prepared in collaboration with his wife (1969). His ‘translations’ of Catullus are into a language that attempts in his words to ‘breathe the “literal” meaning with him’. In the Latin, Catullus’ poem CXII reads:

Multus homo es, Naso, neque tecum multus homost qui
     descendit: Naso, multus es et pathicus.

Swanson’s translation reads:

You’re a made man, Naso, nor is he who lays you made:
     you’re a made man, Naso, and a — maid.

Zukofsky’s version is:

Mool ‘tis homos’ ‘Naso, ‘n’ queer take ‘im mool ‘tis ho most he
     descended: Naso, mool’tis — is it pathic, cuss.

Which is nearer the Latin? But that begs the question: what is Latin? What do we mean by ‘being nearer’? The larger question Zukofsky has spent a lifetime probing is, What is language?

     The point is that Zukofsky — along with Bunting — recognised that the order and movement of sound in a poem might itself create a cohesion of the emotions underlying the literal meaning of the words. This is no new discovery. We need only think of certain lines in Shakespeare to see the truth of it. In Richard III Lady Anne kneels before the corpse of Henry VI and begins her lamentation, ‘Poor key-cold figure of a holy king’. The stiffness of ‘key-cold’, the warm devotion of ‘holy king’, are sufficient in themselves to convey the emotion, complex though it is; but Shakespeare is generous, allowing the line to accommodate visual imagery and metaphor as well. This is the danger in Zukofsky’s approach: that by stressing the sound at the expense of meaning he is limiting his poetry, indeed sterilising it.

     But he is persistent and courageous. We do best to concentrate on his difficult work, where his integrity is most clear. Anthologies have naturally tended to serve up his shorter, more accessible poems. They sometimes resemble imagist verse, as parts of ‘All of December toward New Year’ show:

Not the branches
half in shadow

But the length
of each branch

Half in shadow

As if it had snowed
on each upper half

But it is his main poem, A, that deserves close attention. There is no compromise in that still evolving work, though there are passages with literal meanings:

An
   hinny
by
   stallion
out of
   she-ass

He neigh halie low h’who y’he gall mood
So roar cruel hire
Lo to achieve an eye leer rot off
Mass th’lo low o loam echo
How deal me many coeval yammer
Naked on face of white rock-sea.

The poem is a continuous day-book of Zukofsky’s marriage and life:

An
orange
our
sun
fire
pulp
whets
us
(everyday)
for
us
eat
it
its
fire’s
unconsumed

In one section the music (notation) takes over. A masque by Celia Zukofsky is introduced, to music by Handel to be played (and danced) as words taken from Zukofsky’s writings. ‘The speed at which each voice speaks is correlated to the time-space factor of the music’, writes Celia Zukofsky. ‘The words are NEVER SUNG to the music.’ This is central to Zukofsky’s work: the words carry their own music, it must not be imposed on them by a singing voice.

     And yet there is no centre to A, nor could there be, since a continuous, open-ended work of this nature remains a reaction rather than a comment. As such, the commonplace takes equal weight with the exultant, the good with the bad; it is life — for Zukofsky, ‘the words are my life’. It shares something with Williams’s Paterson and remains, like it, unfinished. It has so far reached part 24 with ‘A’ — 24, but ‘A’— 23 is in progress and ‘A’ — 22 is, although complete, only partly published. ‘A’ — 1-21 has appeared in two volumes (1959, 1969). Zukofsky’s other poetic works include Some Time (1956), I’s (pronounced eyes) (1963), After I’s (1964) and Found Objects 1962-1926 (1964). All: The Collected Shorter Poems 1923-1958 appeared in 1965 and All: The Collected Shorter Poems 1956-1964 in 1967. His main prose work is Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963) in two volumes. The first is a study of Shakespeare, the second a musical setting of Pericles by Celia Zukofsky. Prepositions (1967) is a collection of his critical essays and Ferdinand (published with It Was in 1968) is fiction.

     Ezra Pound dedicated his Guide to Kulchur (1938) to Zukofsky and Bunting: ‘To /LOUIS ZUKOFSKY /and /BASIL BUNTING /strugglers /in the /desert’. It is a tribute to the early ambitions of these experimental writers. Courageous though Zukofsky has been in developing one area of the poetic voice, striving for a fine musical purity, the limitations he has imposed on his writing may be helping to perpetuate that ‘desert’, or create a new one.