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On Louis Zukofsky's "A"-14

The fourteenth section of Louis Zukofsky's massive poem, "A," "A"-14 contains a passage that deserves to be called the first poetic erasure in English, composed primarily as a new poem, not an illustration or a pedagogical exercise.¹ In the passage, Zukofsky erases passages about horses chronologically taken from the index to his monograph, Bottom: On Shakespeare. In the subsequent decades, erasure has developed into a major technique of contemporary poetry, as poets have erased a staggering number and variety of source texts, including Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, and contemporary poems, novels, biographies, legal, political, religious, journalistic, and military documents, and diaries. Even as erasure grew in popularity and influence, though, few readers beyond Zukofsky experts recognize "A"-14 as an important work in its development. A number of later accounts of the technique do not mention "A"-14, let alone discuss it, and erasure poets rarely cite it as an influence. Instead of erasure, poets are more likely to associate "A"-14 with the other innovation it introduces: the organization of lines by word count, what Zukofsky called "words / you count."

The poem's initial publication, however, could not have been more promising. Poetry Magazine de-voted its entire October 1965 issue to "A"-14, supplemented with appreciative essays about Zukofsky's poetry and criticism. In what must have been a welcome break from his history of publishing difficulties, Zukofsky "had"—as the editors put it—the "full issue of Poetry" "to himself."

Zukofsky painstakingly developed the method he employed in "A"-14. Inspired by the index for Bottom, which he prepared, Zukofsky selected words and phrases from the various references to "horses" that the index catalogues and composed lines for his new poem, "A"-14, from them. The quotations follow the chronology of their appearance in Bottom. The majority originate in Shakespeare's plays, but others arise from source texts as different as George Bernard Shaw's recently revived play, The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza, The Book of Enoch, and, most revealingly, one of Zukofsky's own comments from Bottom. The phrases from Shakespeare are italicized; those from other sources are not. The italics obscure a greater distinction. In one sense, "A"-14 erases multiple source texts, with Shakespeare as the base. In another sense, "A-14" erases a single text as all the quotations, even Zukofsky's own words, are taken from the indexed references in Bottom. In this respect, the poem tests a new technique of erasure—the creation of a text by cutting words from a single preexisting source—and departs from the previous model of Modernist poetic collage, the juxtaposition of disparate materials taken from multiple sources, most famously, in "The Waste Land" and "The Cantos."

The passage begins self-deprecatingly, with Celia Zukofsky jokingly referring to her husband's "horse complex," but horses are more than Zukofsky's favorite motif. Their erasures achieve multiple, wide-ranging effects. The fact that so many other writers depicted horses offers Zukofsky ample opportunities and materials for erasure. The animal's appearance throughout different historical periods, genres, and cultures also supports his belief in creative "recurrence," the principle that artists return to the same images and concerns, both deliberately and unknowingly, as an earlier section in "A" puts it:

The horse sees he is repeatingAll known culturesAnd suspects repeatingOthers unknown to him.

Some of Zukofsky's most interesting erasures strain to make this rather expansive point. They reveal the difficulty of aligning different cultures so they might "look back at one another" in agreement, not contestation or condescension.

One passage, for instance, describes horses' transformative experience of music then abruptly insists on its strict limits:

music touch theirears, eyes turn'd

modest gaze—destroyed if changedinto a man.

An examination of Zukofsky's erasures clarifies his method. The first part culls phrases from an excerpt of Lorenzo's famous speech in The Merchant of Venice, where Lorenzo praises "the sweet power of music." The arts—foremost, music and poetry—civilize but not indiscriminately. They only civilize those capable of accepting their influence. As Lorenzo makes clear, this responsiveness...