Zukofsky, After All

 

Louis Zukofsky's early published work remains, for me, a guidepost to what Modernism means. The usual models held up as examples--Eliot's The Waste Land and Prufrock, Joyce's Portrait and Ulysses, Pound's Cathay and the early Cantos, Stein's Tender Buttons, Hemingway's In Our Time, Yeats's Tower, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Kafka, Musil, H.D., Stevens and so forth--don't capture an essential element of abbreviation, of ellipsis, of the power to suggest and imply and objectify through image and metaphor with the same efficiency that Zukofsky and Oppen and Rakosi and Reznikoff and Williams discovered, separately or severally, in their early work, during the period 1915-1940. That they should, through accident and circumstance, have come to be associated as members of the Objectivist Movement, strikes me as coincidental rather than the result of some social fact of their association. Each was working in relative obscurity--I say relative, because they were obviously, to some degree, aware of influences (some mutual), as well as of each other. But in a true sense, each came by his style independently, not through some imitation of a popular style (or of each other). The poems appearing in the first section of LZ's All: The Collected Short Poems (Norton, 1971) were not collected until 1941, when James A. Decker brought out (the now quite rare) 55 Poems.

  

Here are collected the precious examples of the early, concise, edgy lyrics upon which LZ's career would be founded. Following the long, parodic Poem Beginning "The" are 28 poems which define, for me, the instigations (a word fond to Pound) to a new vision of the world, one consistent with early Modernism in painting and sculpture, architecture and design, music and the dance. Whenever I've grown tired and despair of poetry, or of everyday life, I turn again to these early experimental pieces for inspiration and delight and renewal. 

  

 

Not much more than being,

Thoughts of isolate, beautiful

being at evening, to expect

                                at a river-front:

 

A shaft dims

With a turning wheel;

 

Men work on a jetty

By a broken wagon;

 

Leopard, glowing-spotted,

         The summer river--

Under: The dragon:

 

 

There is no doubt that a good deal has been said about this poem by now; but when I first read it in the late 1960's, that wouldn't have been true. Then, few in the literary--not to speak of the academic--community, were even aware of it at all; which is, I suppose, a measure of the distance that taste and official sanction has traveled in the last 40 years. I can still recall how fresh and uninhibited these lines seemed to me when I first read them. The use of colons, especially the concluding one (!); the skill to imply, covertly, through the recitation of specific, separate, details; the lack of an explanatory framework connecting the dots; the casual, seemingly relaxed mood initiated with the first stanza, the under-stated not much more than being, which sets an atmosphere of warmth, of flickering (smoldering?) lights in the Summer night evoking a dragon (!)--the whole river's body become a sort of leopard or alligator, spotted, striped, alive. The unexpectedness, vividness, indelible surprise and intensity of the concluding image--made anti-climactic by the colon, followed by...nothing. A poem begun in vagueness, extended in visual and material specificity, then transformed with the utmost simplicity and economy of means--all this in such a short poem. Since this lyric is followed in exact order directly by the poem quoted below, I suppose an argument might be made defending LZ's intention to have these poems linked in sequence. Both might be considered incremental impressions of a Summer evening.    

 

  

Coctails

and signs of

"ads"

 

flashing,

light's waterfalls,

Bacchae

among electric lights

 

will swarm the crowds

streamers of the lighted

 

skyscrapers

 

nor tripping

over underbrush

 

but upon pavement

 

and not with thyrsus

shall they prick

 

the body of their loves

but waist to waist

 

laugh out in gyre--

announced then upon stairs,

 

not upon hills,

will be their flight

 

when passed turnstiles,

having dropped

 

coins   

they've sprinted up

 

where on the air (elevated)

waves flash--and out--

 

leap

signaling--lights below      

             

 

This is urban poetry, and the poet pokes fun at classical tropes: Bacchae--female Dionysian followers walking on pavement, not through underbrush, among neon ads for cocktails, not pricking their dates with magic wands but dancing waist to waist, laughing on the stairs (and not on hills). Streamers from skyscrapers! Lights like waterfalls! Stoplights in sequence signaling in waves tens of stories below! This is as good as Gershwyn! Think of O'Keeffe's vision of New York skyscrapers--      

 

 

 

 

This delicately ironic bacchanalian lyric of the modern city may seem half-serious, but it's so much more up-to-date than anything being written at the time (early- or mid-20's) about American city life. That dragon, those Flappers, all that electricity and commerce (the river)--all that artificial light and streamers and highrise skyscrapers. How shall the tropes of ancient Greek poetry be reinterpreted--re-ignited--twenty centuries later?  

 

For me, it isn't J. Alfred Prufrock or Peter Quince or Stephen Dedalus who personify the effects and atmosphere of the modern world, but the direct representations of the Objectivists--the insistence upon materiality, the incorporation of contemporary language, concision and density, a lack of "filler" or redundant connectedness--no formal decorativeness.

 

The sincerity which was so dear to the Objectivists has to do, in my view, with an investiture in emotion (sentiment) that bears some literal connection to real situations and real people, instead of mythical, ideal or imaginary ones; in economic and material realities of the present, instead of those borrowed from mythology or legend or folklore, or from idealized versions of character or society. But it isn't just the acknowledgment of these things, that matters, but how they are seen. There is an energy transfer from phenomena, an eccentric design in space, which no ready-made traditional artificial formal pattern can describe. Thus, art must respond to this eccentricity or uniqueness of the world, in its particulars, in a way that respects its structure and formula, rather than imposing a posterior order upon it. In this respect, it is empirical, building from specific to general, rather than top down, deductively, forcing subject matter to conform to pre-conceived principles of order.           

  

For me, Zukofsky's All: the collected short poems 1923-1964 is a textbook of examples, the obvious work of a genius, and a feast for the mind. LZ could have written in any time, under any cultural paradigm.