The cover of the 1978 edition of Zukofsky's long poem A.

Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 РMay 12, 1978) was one of the most important second-generation American modernist poets. He was co-founder and primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and was to be an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad. book cover:fair use taken from http://wings. ... January 23 is the 23rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... // Nobel Prize in Literature is shared by French poet Fr̩d̩ric Mistral and Spanish dramatist Jos̩ Echegaray y Eizaguirre. ... May 12 is the 132nd day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (133rd in leap years). ... // L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, first published Stevie, a film based on a play about the poet Stevie Smith is released Maya Angelou, And Still I Rise Paul Blackburn, translator (posthumous), Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry Odysseus Elytis... Mountebanks ... The poor poet A poet is a person who writes poetry. ... William Carlos Williams, who was the only poet to be published as both an Objectivist and an Imagist The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. ...

Early life and writings

He was born in New York of Lithuanian Jewish parents and grew up speaking Yiddish. His parents were orthodox and Louis reacted against this religious tradition at a young age. Nevertheless, his family figured quite strongly in his later writings. NY redirects here. ... The word Jew ( Hebrew: יהודי) is used in a wide number of ways, but generally refers to a follower of the Jewish faith, a child of a Jewish mother, or someone of Jewish descent with a connection to Jewish culture or ethnicity and often a combination... Yiddish (ייִדיש, Jiddisch) is a Germanic language spoken by about four million Jews throughout the world. ...

As a child, Zukofsky frequented Yiddish theatres in the Bowery where he saw many works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and Tolstoy performed in Yiddish translations. He also read both Longfellow's Hiawatha and Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound in that language. His first real contact with English was when he started school, but he was a quick learner and by the age of 11 had read all of Shakespeare's works in the original. The Bowery is a well-known street in Manhattan that more or less marks the boundary between Chinatown and Little Italy on one side and the Lower East Side on the other—running from Chatham Square in the south to Astor Place in the north. ... Shakespeare redirects here. ... Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828–May 23, 1906) was an extremely influential Norwegian playwright who was largely responsible for the rise of the modern realistic drama. ... August Strindberg, photographic selfportrait Johan August Strindberg (Stockholm, January 22, 1849 - Stockholm, May 14, 1912) was a writer and playwright of Sweden. ... Coat of arms of Count Leo Tolstoy This article is about the Tolstoy family; for the famous novelist, see Leo Tolstoy. ... Baron Longfellow , also named Andy Kim was an artist from the 60s. ... Bust of Aeschylus from the Capitoline Museums, Rome Aeschylus (525 BC—456 BC; Greek: Ασχύλος) was a playwright of Ancient Greece. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

He went on to study English at Columbia. He graduated with a Master's degree in 1924. He began writing at university and joined the college literary society as well as publishing poems in student magazines. One early poem was published in Poetry but never reprinted. A masters degree is an academic degree usually awarded for completion of a postgraduate (or graduate) course of one to three years in duration. ... Poetry, published in Chicago, Illinois, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. ...

Zukofsky considered Ezra Pound to be the most important living poet, and in 1927 he sent his poem Poem beginning "The" to the older man. The poem, most of which is addressed to the poet's mother, was a kind of parody of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. In contrast to Eliot's pessimistic view of the modern world, The suggests a bright future for Western culture based in Zukofsky's belief in the energy of the new immigrants to the U.S. and the socialist experiment then occurring in Russia. Ezra Pound in 1913. ... 1927 (MCMXXVII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965), was a major Modernist Anglo-American poet, dramatist, and literary critic. ... Socialism is a social and economic system (or the political philosophy advocating such a system) in which the economic means of production are owned and controlled collectively by the people. ...

Politics

In his early years, Zukofsky was a committed Marxist. While studying at Columbia, his friend Whittaker Chambers sponsored him for membership in the Communist Party, though it is unclear whether he actually joined. While he associated with Party members and published in Party-associated magazines, his poetry, which while strongly political was resolutely avant-garde and difficult, found little favor in Party circles. Though Zukofsky considered himself a Marxist at least through the end of the 1930s, the focus of his work after 1940 turned from the political to the domestic. Much later, he would claim that reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire finally turned him away from Marx. Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... Whittaker Chambers, 1948 Jay Vivian (David Whittaker) Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer, editor, Communist party member and spy for the Soviet Union who defected and became an outspoken opponent of communism. ... In modern usage, the term communist party is generally used to identify any political party which has adopted communist ideology. ... The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a major literary achievement of Eighteenth Century, was written by the British historian, Edward Gibbon. ...

Zukofsky the Objectivist

Pound was impressed by Poem beginning "The" and promoted Zukofsky's work, putting him in contact with other like-minded poets, including William Carlos Williams. The two poets influenced each other's work significantly, and Williams regularly sent his new work to Zukofsky for editing and improvement. Zukofsky was one of the founders of the Objectivist group of poets and of To Publishers, later the Objectivist Press, along with Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen. Thanks to Pound's insistence, he was able to edit an Objectivist issue of Poetry, in which he both coined the term and defined the two main characteristics of Objectivist poetry as sincerity and clarification. Other poets associated with this group included Williams, Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff and Kenneth Rexroth. William Carlos Williams Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. ... William Carlos Williams, who was the only poet to be published as both an Objectivist and an Imagist The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. ... Charles Reznikoff (August 31, 1894 - January 22, 1976) was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. ... George Oppen, a picture now used as the cover for the recently published Selected Poems George Oppen (April 24, 1908 - July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. ... Basil Cheesman Bunting (March 3, 1900 – 1985) was a British modernist poet. ... Lorine Niedecker (May 12, 1903 - December 31, 1970) was born on the Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. ... Carl Rakosi (November 6, 1903 – June 24, 2004) was the last surviving member of the Objectivist poets. ... Charles Reznikoff (August 31, 1894 - January 22, 1976) was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. ... Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982) was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. ...

"A"

Zukofsky's major work was the long poem "A" - Zukofsky never referred to it without the quotation marks - which he began in 1927 and was to work on for the rest of his life, albeit with an eight-year hiatus between 1940 and 1948. The poem was written in 24 sections, reflecting the hours of the day, and the figure of the poet's father is a major theme. The first 11 sections contain much that is overtly political but interweave this matter with formal concerns and models that range from medieval Italian canzone through sonnets to free verse and the music of Bach. Section 12, which is longer than the first 11 sections combined, introduces materials from the poet's family life, and from there on "A" interweaves the political, historical and personal in more or less equal measure. The extensive use of music in this work reflects the importance of Zukofsky's collaborations with his wife Celia, a professional musician. Their son Paul Zukofsky became a noted violinist and conductor. The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. ... Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, one of the best-known early Italian sonnet writers. ... Free verse (also at times referred to as vers libre) is a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers will perceive to be... Places in which Bach resided throughout his life Johann Sebastian Bach (pronounced ) (21 March 1685 O.S. – 28 July 1750 N.S.) was a prolific German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought...

Shorter poems and other writings

In tandem with "A", Zukofsky continued writing shorter poems throughout his life. Many of these shared the political and formal concerns of the longer poem, but they also include more personal lyrics, including a series of Valentines addressed to Celia. The first book publication of these shorter poems was 55 Poems (1941). He continued to write and publish shorter poems and these were eventually collected in All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964 (1971). // G. S. Fraser - The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems Frost Medal: Robert Frost Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Leonard Bacon: Sunderland Capture October 2 - John Sinclair, poet October 13 - John Snow, cricketer and poet Billy Collins January 6 - F. R. Higgins, poet January 23 - John Oxenham, novelist and poet February 7... Aleksandr Tvardovsky, who died this year, was a Soviet poet who, as editor of Novy Mir, fought for more independence and published Alexandr Solzhenitsyns One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 // This Magazine founded by Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten The Canterbury Tales, a film directed...

Zukofsky also wrote critical essays, many of which were collected in Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (1968) and the book-length study Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963) which was accompanied by a second volume containing a setting by Celia of Shakespeare's play Pericles, Prince of Tyre . His prose fiction includes Ferdinand (1968) and Little: For Careenagers (1970). He also wrote a play Arise, Arise (1962/1973) and, in 1969, an extraordinary set of translations of Catullus that attempted to replicate the sound rather than the sense of the originals in English. His A Test of Poetry was a teaching anthology with critical commentary. // Charles Causley, Underneath the Water Rod McKuen - Lonesome Cities Black Fire, edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, an anthology of African American poetry See 1968 Governor Generals Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards. ... // Babette Deutsch, Collected Poems, 1919-1962 T.S. Eliot - Collected Poems 1909-1962 Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith, editors, A Group Anthology Silvia Plath, The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, her third volume of poetry... See also: 1967 in literature, other events of 1968, 1969 in literature, list of years in literature. ... See also: 1969 in literature, other events of 1970, 1971 in literature, list of years in literature. ... See also: 1961 in literature, other events of 1962, 1963 in literature, list of years in literature. ... See also: 1972 in literature, other events of 1973, 1974 in literature, list of years in literature. ... For the Stargate SG-1 episode, see 1969 (Stargate SG-1). ...

Late revival

Having suffered critical neglect for most of his career, Zukofsky, along with the other Objectivists, was rediscovered by the Black Mountain and Beat poets in the 1960s and 1970s. The poet and editor Cid Corman was largely responsible, publishing Zukofsky's work and critical comments on it in his magazine Origin and through Origin Press from the late 1950s onward. In the 1970s, Zukofsky was a major influence on many of the Language poets, particularly in their formalism. The complete "A" was at the printers when the poet died in 1978. His Complete Short Poetry appeared in 1991. The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called the Projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered around Black Mountain College. ... The term beat generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in approximately 1948 to describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: This is... Cid Corman (1924 - March 12, 2004) was an American poet, translator and editor who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century. ... Origin magazine was an American poetry magazine founded in 1951 by Cid Corman, its longstanding editor, and Charles Olson, provided an early platform for the work of Olson, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder and Theodore Enslin, among other poets. ... The Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine that bears that name) are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s; its central figures are all actively writing, teaching, and performing... // L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, first published Stevie, a film based on a play about the poet Stevie Smith is released Maya Angelou, And Still I Rise Paul Blackburn, translator (posthumous), Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry Odysseus Elytis... // Forward Poetry Prize created John Ashbery, Flow Chart W.H. Auden, Collected Poems Gwendolyn Brooks, Children Coming Home Billy Collins, Questions About Angels (ISBN 0-8229-4211-9), the winner of the National Poetry Series competition in 1993 Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns Odysseus Elytis, The Elegies of Oxopetras (Τα Ελεγεία της Οξώπετρας) Howard Nemerov...

Currently the Zukofsky revival continues unabated. In 2000 Wesleyan University Press, honoring Zukofsky's birth in 1904, began publishing The Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky. Editions of "A" continue to be published and sell quickly; Chicago Review (Winter 2004/5) devoted an issue to Zukofsky; his correspondence with William Carlos Williams was published in 2003. If we add to this the hundreds of critical studies and dissertations appearing world-wide along with the perennial conferences devoted to his work, including the recent centennial remembrance at Columbia University, we have only hinted at the interest and trajectory Zukofsky's revival now generates on into the 21st-Century. // Griffin Poetry Prize is established, with one award given each year for the best work by a Canadian poet and one award given for best work in the English language internationally. ... // Rita Dove, American Smooth: Poems (Norton); named a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review Donald Justice, Collected Poems (Knopf); published posthumously; named a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review Michael Ryan, New And Selected Poems Derek Walcott, The... // Chuck Palahniuk reads his short story Guts to audiences while on tour to promote his novel Diary. ...

Bibliography

Poetry, prose, plays

• Le Style Apollinaire (With Rene Taupin (1934))
• First Half of "A" 9 (privately printed, 1940)
• 55 Poems (1941)
• Anew (1946)
• Some Time: Short Poems (1956)
• Statements for Poetry (1958)
• Barely & Widely (1958)
• It Was (1959)
• "A" 1-12 (1959, 2nd edition 1966 (UK), 1967 (US))
• Louis Zukofsky: 16 Once Published (1962)
• Arise, Arise (1962/1973)
• Bottom: On Shakespeare two volumes (Volume 2 is C. Zukofsky's musical setting of Shakespeare's Pericles) (1963)
• I's (Pronounced Eyes) (1963)
• Found Objects: 1962-1926 (1964)
• After I's (1964)
• Finally a Valentine: A Poem (1965)
• I Sent Thee Late (1965)
• Iyyob (1965)
• Little: An Unearthing (1965)
• All: The Collected Short Poems,1923-1958 (1965)
• All: The Collected Short Poems, 1956-1964 (1966)
• "A" 14 (1967)
• Fragment for Careenagers (1967)
• Ferdinand, Including "It Was" (1968)
• "A" 13-21 (1969)
• Catullus Fragmenta (with music by Paul Zukofsky) (1968)
• Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (1968)
• Catullus (1969)
• The Gas Age (1969)
• Autobiography (poems set to music by C. Zukofsky) (1970)
• Little: For Careenagers (1970)
• Initial (1970)
• All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964 (1971)
• "A" 24 (1972)
• "A" 22 & 23 (1975)
• 80 Flowers (1978)
• "A" (1978)
• Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky (edited by Barry Ahearn) (1987)
• Collected Fiction (1990)
• Complete Short Poetry (1991)
• Selected Poems (edited by Charles Bernstein) (2006)

Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings

• A Test of Poetry (Foreword by Robert Creeley) Complete Critical Writings-Vol.I (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)
• Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays (Foreword by Charles Bernstein; Additional Prose edited & introduced by Mark Scroggins) Complete Critical Writings-Vol.II (Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
• Bottom: On Shakespeare (with Celia Thaew Zukofsky) Complete Critical Writings-Vol.III & IV (Wesleyan University Press, 2003)
• A Useful Art: Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design (Edited with an introduction by Kenneth Sherwood; afterword by John Taggart Complete Critical Writings-Vol.VI (Wesleyan University Press, 2003)
• Le Style Apollinaire:The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire(Edited with introduction by Serge Gavronsky; foreword by Jean Daive) Complete Critical Writings-Vol.V, bilingual edition (Wesleyan University Press, 2004)

Robert Creeley (May 21, 1926 - March 30, 2005) was an American poet, author of more than sixty books, and usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that schools. ... Charles Bernstein (born April 4, 1950) is an American poet, critic, editor and teacher. ...

Letters and Correspondence

• Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky (edited by Barry Ahearn) (Faber & Faber, 1987)
• Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970 (edited by Jenny Penberthy) (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams & Louis Zukofsky (edited by Barry Ahearn) (Wesleyan University Press, 2003)

// Charles Bukowski, fictionalised as alter ego Henry Chinaski, becomes the subject of the film Barfly starring Mickey Rourke. ... // January 20 — Maya Angelou reads On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton T. S. Eliot Prize created. ... // Chuck Palahniuk reads his short story Guts to audiences while on tour to promote his novel Diary. ...

As editor

• An 'Objectivists' Anthology (1932)
• Test of Poetry (1948/1964)

Further reading

• Perelman, Bob. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1994.

Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor and teacher. ...

References

• Zukofsky at Modern American Poetry
• Zukofsky at the EPC
• Z-site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky
• American Poets Project page referencing Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems (2006) edited by Charles Bernstein
• Feature: Zukofsky Webmag "Jacket Magazine" (#30: July 2006), devotes a prominent section to Zukofsky