Just begun to learn (PoemTalk #22)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

One of the signal steps forward in the PennSound project — the gathering of recordings of modern and contemporary poets reading their own poems — was the release of the recordings of Louis Zukofsky, thanks to the generosity and cooperation of Paul Zukofsky. The recordings on PennSound’s Zukofsky author page are being made available for non-commerical and educational use only (in line with PennSound’s mission), and any other use can only be done by permission of Paul. (If you need to contact him, just write us and we’ll put you in touch: poemtalk [AT] writing [DOT] upenn [DOT] edu.)

The Zukofsky recordings are remarkable! One of them was made in 1960 by Zukofsky at home, on a reel-to-reel tape machine. It was meant for the Library of Congress. It includes readings of some sections of the long poem Anew. PoemTalk 22 is a discussion of the gorgeous twelfth poem in the Anew series, which is untitled and gets mentioned by its first line, “It’s hard to see but think of a sea.” One gets a sense of its worked-at density from this first-line sentence alone.

The Anew poems were written between 1935 and 1944 and published in March 1946 at James Decker’s press in the small-format “Pocket Poetry” series. Marcella Booth has dated the writing of our poem precisely: January 16-17, 1944, a week before the poet’s 40th birthday. Several critics have contended that Anew was Zukofsky’s attempt at a fresh start. William Carlos Williams, a great supporter of Z and an admirer of these poems, called the writing in this work “adult poetry.” Perhaps he meant that Zukofsky was growing up, taking on seasoned topics. Certainly, at least, the end of our poem is quite personal, words coming from the poet’s contemplation of his 40th birthday, of mortality’s challenge to and provocation of open-ness. As Bob Perelman puts it (asked to compare this poem to others), “The poem is almost conversational. ‘Gee, I’m 40. I’m thinking about my entire life.’” Much of our conversation — with PoemTalkers Perelman, Wystan Curnow (visiting us from New Zealand), and Charles Bernstein — is devoted to integrating the first part (full of the language of science) with the second (the personal retrospective).

Wystan, facing a vocabulary of science he didn’t understand, wanted to look up the term “condenser” (what, after all, is a condenser really?), but then worried about his impulse to look it up. Is that a productive way of coming to understand Zukofsky’s use in verse of electro-magnetism and wireless sound? “Condensed,” after all, is an ordinary word — and a term of modernist poetry. (Bob points out Lorine Niedecker’s contemporaneous use ofcondenser to refer to poetry itself, the act of writing in the modern way, in a famous poem that technically imagines the site of the poet-maker as a “condensery”: “no layoff / from this / condensery.”) “The poem,” Charles says in praising its use of the referential language of science, “is not incomprehensible in that it will restore you to the knowledge you already had of what the word means.”

Al asks, “What is the connection between the vocabulary of physics here and Zukofsky’s wonderful stuff at the end about seeing many things at once?” “By the end,” observes Bob, “I’m reminded more and more of the Romantics. It’s Wordsworthian, from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. ‘Wherever science goes the poet will go.’* Which leads us to a discussion again of the personal elements in the poem: the specific romanticism of the child, causing double (and really: multiple) seeings.” 

“The poetics quote from this,” adds Charles, “would be: ‘I see many things at one time.’” Which is to say: it is an apt way of conceiving Zukofsky’s poetics generally. 

PoemTalk 22 ends with a discussion of why Zukofsky is not better known. No conspiracy theories here, but a perhaps useful conversation about why writing not easily (quickly) read gives such pleasure. Wystan makes this point most clearly — movingly. There is, alas, little Zukofsky in print, but Charles himself has done something to correct that sorry state of affairs: the new condensed (as it were) Selected Poems, which he edited for Library of America. In that volume you will find this poem, the twelfth of Anew, which Charles was happy to include (as somewhat representative) and which Bob, summing up, simply calls a “great" poem,” one of the “greatest hits.”

PoemTalk’s engineer and director is James LaMarre and our editor, as always, is Steve McLaughlin. PoemTalk is conceived, produced and hosted by Al Filreis. Administrative support is provided by the amazing Mingo Reynolds. The series is co-sponsored by the Kelly Writers House, the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing — both at the University of Pennsylvania — and by the Poetry Foundation, where Anne Halsey is a great supporter. Wystan Curnow’s extended visit to Penn was made possible by a generous grant from the office of the provost at Penn. His readings and talks at the Writers House were sponsored by the Writers without Borders series, funded by a gift from Seth Ginns. For links to audio and video recordings of these events, click here. Permission to use the recordings of Louis Zukofsky has been granted to PennSound by Paul Zukofsky. Photo credit, above: (c) Elsa Dorfman.

* Wordsworth: "The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science."