Louis Zukofsky and the poetry of knowledge / Mark Scroggins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scroggins, Mark, 1964-

Series:

Modern and contemporary poetics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Zukofsky, Louis, 1904-1978--Criticism and interpretation.

Zukofsky, Louis.

Zukofsky, Louis, 1904-1978.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xvi, 397 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, [1998]

Summary:

Scroggins provides a provocative and advanced introduction to the thought and writing of Louis Zukofsky, aptly described as one of the "first postmodernists." -- Poet, translator, and editor, Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City in 1904. Raised to speak first Yiddish and then English, he was fascinated by language from an early age. This deep preoccupation with language--its musicality, complex constructions, and fluid meaning--later became a key component in the development of his poetry. Friend to William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, mentor to Robert Creeley and influence on many of the Language Movement poets, Zukofsky and his work stand squarely at the center of American poetry's transition from modernism to postmodernism. Mark Scroggins advances thoughtful readings of Zukofsky's key critical essays, a wide variety of his shorter poems, and his "poem of a life," "A". He carefully situates Zukofsky within his literary and historical contexts, examining his relationship to Pound, his 1930s Marxist politics, and his sense of himself as a Jewish modernist poet. Scroggins also places Zukofsky within an ongoing tradition of American poetry, including the work of Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer, and John Taggart.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

List of abbreviations

Introduction

"More than the words say": Louis Zukofsky's writing life

Zukofsky and skepticism: the evidence of the eyes (pronounced I's)

Doing away with epistemology: Zukofsky and the problem of knowledge

Bottom: on Shakespeare: "a philosophy of suspecting philosophy"

"I's (pronounced eyes)": objectivist epistemology; or, seeing things

The poet in history

Bleistein among the nightingales: Zukofsky, the Jew as high modernist

"The revolutionary word": Zukofsky, the political radical

"A": musical form and musical knowledge

Music and poetic form in Pound/Zukofsky era

Zukofsky as formalist: fugue and form in "A"

Obscurity, solipsism, and community in "A"-23 : Zukofsky among the poets

"A sense of duration": Zukofsky, Stevens, and "Language"

Zukofsky and after: post-objectivist poetics in John Taggart and Ronald Johnson

Polemical conclusion: (toward) a poetry of knowledge

Note on texts

Notes

Works cited

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-381) and index.

ISBN:

0817309071

0817309578

OCLC:

38207795