“A” is Zukofsky’s lifelong long poem in 24 parts, one for each hour of the day, written from 1928 to 1974 (though not in chronological order). The complete poem runs about 800 pages in the Johns Hopkins University Press edition. Most of the movements begin with an A or an an. “A” is a serial collage, an explicit turning away from Pound’s desire, in the Cantos, for montage, for the parts to cohere. As such, “A” opens a “z-sited path” (“A”-23) for the long serial poems of Zukofsky’s most immediate heirs in the following generation – Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Hannah Weiner, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Jerome Rothenberg. Ideas in “A” are not proclaimed but threaded into successions of voicings. The sources, themes, and forms in “A” are plural and overlaid; there is much taken from daily life, much from family life, many literary and philosophical threads, alongside explicitly addressed political and aesthetic commitments. These are Zukofsky’s “historic and contemporary particulars,” which together make up a tissue of allusion and articulation that is everywhere localized and embodied in and as the poem.
“A”-1 – first word “A” – opens on the night of April 5, 1928 – both the first night of Passover and Good Friday – at a performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall. Bach weaves through “A,” whose intricate pattern of recurrences, recapitulations, and extensions can be compared, at least metaphorically, to the form of a fugue – from the chordal arrangement of syllables to the recurrences both between and within the movements of the work.
“There’s naw-thing / lak po—ee try,” Zukofsky writes in “It’s a gay li – ife,” “it’s a delicacy / for a horse.” Is this the horse Zukofsky evokes in “Poem Beginning ‘The,’” the one he told his mother he wished could sing Bach? “A”-7 returns to horses – there are many plays on horse in Zukofsky – here it’s police saw-horses closing a street, sawhorses that look like a capital letter “A” in this poem of seven sonnets.
“A” -9 is the crux of “A” – a supreme realization of what Zukofsky called “rested totality”; that is, “desire for what is objectively perfect.” The poem takes its form, and rhyme scheme, directly from Calvalcanti’s “Donna Mi Prega,” which had also been the subject of an influential translation by Pound. “A”-9 has two halves, written, respectively, before and after Word War II. The second half of the poem is a mirror image of the first. Its sources include Marx and Spinoza (the two liminal figures for secular American Jewish thought), as well as a scientific treatise on quantum physics (related scientific material is also found in “It’s hard to see but think of a sea,” #12 of Anew, included in this volume). “A”-9’s intricate system of patterning goes from its eleven-syllable lines, mostly in sonnet-length stanzas, to what Zukfosky called the “conical” distribution of n’s and r’s, to the syntactic rotation of the same words shifting to different parts of speech (as in the “Songs of Degrees” and “Julia’s Wild”). “A”-9 presents the shimmering figure of a crystal turning on its axis to an imagined beat, leaning leftward, arriving at song. The poem’s recurrent motif is for a rescaling of values toward that which is created by “hands” and “hearts” – that is, by the production of good and goods made by human hands; rather than by commodity value, that is, by how much a thing is sold for. “Labor as creator,” as Zukofsky puts it in”A”-8, from the 1930s.
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One outtake from”A”-9 is the hilarious and charming “A Foin Lass Bodders,” a translation of “Donna Mi Prega” into Brooklynese. “A”-15 begins its second stanza with a homophonic translation of The Book of Job: if you listen closely you can almost hear the Hebrew percolating through the English: “He neigh ha lie low”; but this is also a horse’s song (its neigh), or “An hinny,” which is not only a backside but a cross between a “she-ass” and a stallion.
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