Louis Zukofsky: “Laureate of Excision”

Louis Zukofsky called his twenty-four-section long poem “A” “a poem of a life / —and a time.”¹ “A,” a forty-five-year project of constructivist genres and formalist poetic mastery, is the crown among works both singular and unique—including a midrashic gloss on Shakespeare that is at once literary criticism, philosophy, and poetics; many shorter poems of “density, compression, and musicality” (398); projects composing procedural/formalist works of experimental panache; bravura inventions of an abstracting, homophonic translation strategy; some rather mannered fiction; and essays both hermetic and importantly generative. A slightly altered phrase from this little note to “A” becomes the suggestive title of Mark Scroggins’s expert biography The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, which precisely emphasizes the work over a somewhat uneventful though intensely literary life, thus creating “the life story of Zukofsky’s writings” (xi).

The book is concerned with production, dissemination, and reception. Zukofsky’s literary production featured gnomic intensity, formalist challenges, and “uncompromising intellectuality” (201). The dissemination of his work was always difficult, as Zukofsky had trouble getting published, trouble engaging in virtually any strategies of promotion, and trouble (unsurprisingly yet poignantly) coping with the “public indifference” to his literary career (198; see also 215–16 and 357). His reception, along with that of some of his late-modernist cohort, has proven to be a strange “horse race” (10).² Scroggins’s droll remark alludes to Zukofsky’s obsession with horses, to his anti-Pegasus symbol for the figure of a poet, and to the biographer’s own bet on the odds (194–98). This book is also a tour de force of literary history, because it is a biography in which the main figure, an underappreciated, “reticent,” yet forceful and sui generis writer of late modernism, emerges from and folds back into a ground of other literary and cultural figures and materials (6). Louis Zukofsky is now “at the very center of an ‘alternative canon’ of American poetry” (465); this book climaxes with that finding, having traced its many ramifications, never slighting Zukofsky’s isolation, struggle, brilliance, and bitterness.

In this book, the figure-ground relationships are strikingly mobile; one might borrow the word “nexus” from another context and say that this is a biography structured as a nexus—not only about a single figure (though it emphatically is), but about that figure woven into his literary, social, and historical contexts.³ If I were to sum up Zukofsky in one phrase, I’d choose something from his extraordinary work “Poem beginning ‘The’” and say this was a writer who insistently and even arrogantly (and from Shylock out of Shakespeare, yet) tried to “better the instruction.”⁴ Or perhaps I would characterize his scintillating, intransigent work, using the words of his magnificent “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation,” as “thoughts’ torsion.”⁵ Zukofsky was the secular rabbi of late modernist Anglo-American culture, never writing without intricate webbings of reading, never reading without a sense of extended, yet condensed and impacted, gloss, never glossing without some critical edge addressed to an imagined “center.” Zukofsky was an outsider who made challenging literary claims on that center. This book is not really “the Zukofsky era,” but it does figure Zukofsky as emphatically first among equals in his literary time.

Scroggins achieves this nexus biography in several ways. Sometimes he juxtaposes relevant intersections of material in a given chapter in short, essayistic bursts, allowing us to see, for example, where Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and George Oppen all were in, say, 1927 and 1928, to frame their interactions with Zukofsky (61–67). This sense of a collective protagonist (a set of figures each working out a literary career in concert and debate) and the sense of Zukofsky’s oeuvre as a monument of multiplicity (in genres and modes) makes this book a comprehensive literary history of both people and texts. The book treats particularly the figures exemplary for Zukofsky, like Williams and Pound, but also T. S...