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Zukofsky at 100 Zukofsky as a Body of Work Bob Perelman [This piece was originally a talk at the“Zukofsky at 100”at Columbia in September 2004. It echoes “A”-1, minimally, by mentioning a cultural venue at the beginning.] 1. The session title, “Zukofsky at One Hundred,” suggests a crucially ambiguous vantage. 2. Louis Zukofsky, person, would have been 100 this year. 3. But Zukofsky, the body of work, as in “Have you read Zukofsky,” is of indeterminate age. 4. Is a body of work born when the first attested or accepted work appears? If so, then we should start counting with the earliest work, “I Sent Thee Late,” the 1922 poem that appears in “A”-18, and we should be celebrating “Zukofsky at 82.” 5. Or is a body of work a body only when the work stops appearing? In that case, though it feels harshly ironic, we should make the birth year of “Zukofsky the body of work” coincide with the year that “Zukofsky the person” died. 6. So if we count from the date of the last work, 80 Flowers and the publication of the completed “A” then it should be “Zukofsky at 26.” 7. While 26 is poetically significant in the Anglo-American alphabet, 100 is the most august, barely reachable of the human-sized numbers. (The Hebrew alphabet has 24.) 8. For modernists seeking mastery, 100 beckoned. 9. In “An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men” [Useful Knowledge] Stein repeats “and one” 100 times. 9a. Of course, Stein can always be being sarcastic: it isn’t A Hundred Prominent Women after all. 10. For much of the time Pound was writing them, 100 was the magic Zukofsky at 100 41 number for The Cantos given that that was the number of cantos in Dante’s Comedia. 11. In our day, there’s Bruce Andrews’s I Don’t Have Any Paper, So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) and his Lip Service each with 100 sections. 12. Zukofsky was drawn to 100 as well: both “A”-22 and -23 contain 1,000 lines. 13. (1,000 is the epic version of 100.) 14. There’s also the progression of his last planned projects: at the beginning of his 8th decade he begins 80 Flowers with Gamut: 90 Trees planned for the decade after that. Isn’t 100 the teleological goal there? 15.(At this point,it’s hard to resist Ron Silliman’s prediction for the next project : 101 Dalmations.) 16. Why am I so drawn to that joke? 17.Is it because Zukofsky now stands for avant-garde mastery and completion and yet that oxymoron is particularly distorting when applied to him? 18. In resisting the equation Zukofsky = 100 I also am resisting the equation Zukofsky = 1. 19. Also the equation Zukofsky = music. 20. This in the face of the fact that it is hard to miss the ubiquitous instructions to construe his work into a unified, musical totality. 21. I.e., “Each writer writes one long work whose beat he cannot be entirely aware of.” 22. I.e., the last words of “A”-24, the tiny coda written by Louis to Celia Zukofsky ’s LZ Masque; “the gift / she hears / the work / in its recurrence.” 23. I.e., this from the Autobiography:“The form of the poem is organic—that is, involved in history and a life that has found by contrast to history something like perfection in the music of J. S. Bach.” 24. Celia’s basic gesture in “A”-24, composing Louis’s poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism into cadenced musical voices,insists on this analogy and grants Louis’s words, originally written in various genres and various historical circumstances , the retrospective perfection of music. 25. That’s ‘music’ in the Paterian, Poundian sense: poetic ‘music’. 26. My scare quotes around music makes it plain that I am an apostate from this grand synaesthesic synthesis. 27. I am acting as the tritone, the augmented fourth, C/F#, / diabolus in musica / as the medievals had it, and will try to make audible my perception of the value of the dissonance I hear in Zukofsky. 27a. To paraphrase what he writes in “A”-6 [26] perhaps“it has something to do with” his being Jewish. 28.While this dissonance does not accord at all with the emphatic simplicity 42 Perelman of his pronouncements of poetics, nevertheless it continues—in my ear at least—to resound in the deadpan slippages, extravagant layerings and...

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