Zukofsky A tribute Encountering the thing that most poets believe about Zukofsky, that his work is difficult

to pierce, that it inhabits a kind of flesh that no reading needle is going to make bleed. I disagree. What A illustrates about the philosophical concept of the individual is to connect it to the surrounding, encompassing historical movements all around it. Zukofsky, in A-6 writes: And to rise in the morning,/Like nothing on earth,. There it is. An individual, separate but connected. An individual, whole in its body within another whole body. The pregnancy, the planet spinning. A is a long work, epic-mocking but epic and filled with denselycrammed research granules from times and places lost, forgotten, overlooked, and repressedan 806 page red mammoth, written chronologically (with one exceptionA-24), accompanied by a nineteen page index of name and object. Its musicality does not overwhelm or encompass but meditates on the many miniature environments within and around it. This is a lifes work, research-based, a collage deeper than a canyon and bigger than New York. The perpetual processes of research that Zukofsky engaged came out of deep need and out of rotation and/or movement. Not only does a human being possess a bottomless need to make but a human being is vibrating, moving and sounding. Is it possible to put this all into one poem? Zukofsky certainly believed so and so did. The determination and the scale does not say more about A or make A any better; it simply acts as component. If a poem can be a field, or an open grid and can be plotted, then the poet must ask the obvious question: how do I plot this? When to ask that question is even more important. Zukofsky was an intricate professional at this type of crusade, plucking ideations from innumerable sources (Karl Marx, Alexander Hamilton, Jonathan Swift, Vico, Henry Adams, thousands of newspaper articles, Spinoza, Appalachian subculture, Baudleaire, Wagner, The Buddhist Fire Sermon, etc.). A research-based poem does something that other poems do not seem to do as wellto connect the individual and society but to assert both equally, in chorus. Why is this important? Because the one is part of the many and the many is emptied of false meaning and practiced without a single one. Barry Ahearn points out that Zukofsky preferred to read American handicrafts as relics of labor processes best understood according to Marxist economic analysis, but, also believed that such vestiges reflect the lives and loving care of the individuals who made them. One less ambiguous example of this happens when Zukofsky, in A-10, writes: Credo I believe//Shame//Ashamed of all people put to shame/And all planets emit light/and indeed all bodies do. Zukofsky long claimed that A is of a life, one trying to revive the century with a panoply of collected objects. Its clearly a misnomer that readers feel they cannot penetrate A; all one is obligated to do with this poem is spend time with it, to enter into the same simple dialectical process that one enters into upon birththe process of one letter becoming the use of language which is the same process of one object becoming the ability to use and be used.

Zukofsky A tribute

CASTE & PUT who works of wets her he sought at sums to dapple its dew as very when flects the night you sput it but you seize it as its bill is due oft hat it tips or re ember ring falls the emer all wells down to my gray in

Zukofsky A tribute vested ravens nest & so

TAKEMITSU after sharpening & lifting up he played thru the interval it takes to the circuitous recalling how in turn is revealed as a stones atonement for a tree looking back there would be no space between like finally ephemera kyoto spring L.S. Asekoff

Zukofsky A tribute

PULP A polluting we have fantasies and trees process in print under. Once, cells seemed enshrined those split subjects Then came real words this text of human nature. The rich and everyone else are more than faith. Composed mostly of the imagined and inescapable. How it hurts to have a body

Zukofsky A tribute Erika Moya

UPPITY YOUNG WOMEN EXIT YOUR ZENANA A comfortable establishment, attentive staff, occasional whiffs of inoffensive R&B, sign over stage: Dancing Not Permitted. Crystallography, a telescope manned by Jesuits vibrates osmium air, suspends animal, rides ungenerous reply girl not quite little: they dont even look at you when you speak to them! Calm, lashed gaze beyond kicking distance respects mutual fence: an As a neigh, but also a sawhorse, eh? bipedal trellis, a maze play called zoo, horsebladder strafing abyssal current, swimming ears shot by sound, nervous laughter, individual. Floorboards creak, four horses with T-shirt bodies, featherduster manes, vinyl guitars, I Sharpie Tattoos: Study what you most affect. All meanings in the dictionary dogmas without threat, 1000 monks debating in a field, finding a word, clapping, reaching out, dancing: boys tussle

Zukofsky A tribute to color yak cheese, grass, sky: glass rose broken, an audience given the space we are suddenly in. Mike McDonough

THIS BOY

IS A

DEAD MAN

Boy: birthed in the dream of sheep reared among wrath, mountain abandon, fallen to a traditional horrormen and women chanted dirges, linoi, Linus Dear ghosts. Dear Delphics. And now I just cant remember Bastille Day in Bed-Stuy, some pirate clothing me hats sweet revenge while I started wildly for profit of those who live ill. A sleep to make mankind so drowsy, to dream of when day was day, night was night. She asks, how many should I ask

dihydrocodeinone hydroquinone hydroponic

And rude tonics. Regarding this underlying feeling my wallet will be good as bone in two weeks. The man who wrote this myth summary shares my surname, and middle. Aulis shares something like the worst case scenario head: chopped like an iceberg

Zukofsky A tribute wedge in hopscotch days, tetherball memory, or invasive cells bagging forebrain. The Nymphean heracleon which has a club-like root, was named after a certain nymph deserted by Heracles, who died of jealousy; it makes men impotent for the space of twelve days. Ive already been down so many greens I cant utter well. The purgatory between fact and romance is germane to the issue, see: How many days is a day of your love? Whats the snuff of conversation, rouser? Fact: romance is germane to sight, see: divinity; divinity see: mythology, masculinity, salinity. I dont care if you take something from me, lips cajoling apples. The operative question is do you want to dance (Hymn of Hamartia). Just give seconds. Seth Graves

ILL BITE 2011 is going to be a pretty good year for reading poetry. Robert Duncans Collected Writings start appearing, beginning with The HD Book. Rae Armantrouts Money Shot is out now. But the book thats making it really interesting for me is the reissue of Zukofskys A. Its copyright tale is pretty infamous at this point. How his son, the copyright holder, has absolutely, militantly refused any reprint in any form without explicitly written permission. So when my copy came in the mail, I was struck by how heavy it is. This is, of course, for good reason: its a long damn poem. But mostly because its been too long for this to be out of print. Glad to have this around. 2011 has been a pretty good year for reading poetry. David Miller

Zukofsky A tribute

DANGLING MODIFIER But when we push up the daisies, The melody! the rest is accessory: My one voice. My other: is An objective rays of the object brought to a focus, An objective nature as creator desire for what is objectively perfect Inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars. from 6 Reminded of scansion, a great shudder starts at the tailbone and, in the fullness of time, intersectsthe memory of looking out a window onto a snowed soccer field and putting off parsing those iambs in Sonnet 30 that stack slant on one another, of bethinking the sadness of not recalling the great sadness of sadness greatest sadness. Back then, it was no joke, and Zukofsky would have sounded like imported ham. In the city now, aesthetics are sensitized in architecture, metropolis is diagrammatic, scansionwonderingis structural

Zukofsky A tribute but underneath like unheard bass? Or, is it the opposite? Which came first, Handel or the egg? No matter: Music is invisible as 3D, and to be made otherwise is to see the underpinnings, the scansion, of the significance of things, which are invisible. L.Z. does his best; that is to say, He does what is regularly impossible and remains paralyzed in the imagination of most. And with him always, Celia, his wife her voice as inseparable from his as the vibrant deep-architecture from his work still glancing off the angles between rhetoric and sky, that leaves us wondering: How do you catch such a bird?

from Autobiography (Grossman Publishers, 1970)

Ted Dodson