Louis Zukofsky

Zukofsky's poem, completed in sections, was written over the course of his life with the first section complete in 1928 at the age of 24 and the last in 1974, four years before he died.

The American poet Louis Zukofsky received little public attention during his lifetime, though he was regarded by his literary contemporaries as one of the finest writers in the United States. Now in paperback, "Complete Short Poetry" gathers all of Zukofsky's poetry outside his 800-page magnum opus entitled" "A""--including work that appeared in "All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964," the experimental transliteration (with Celia Zukofsky) of Catullus, the limited edition "80 Flowers," as well as several fugitive pieces never before collected. "Zukofsky is the American Mallarm," writes Hugh Kenner, "and given the peculiar intentness of the American preoccupation with language--obsessive, despite what you may read in the newspapers--his work is more disorienting by far than his exemplar's ever was. Mallarm had a long poetic tradition from which to deviate into philology. Zukofsky received a philological tradition, which he raised to a higher power."

Complete Short Poetry

Including [the Prefatory Piece] It was

Ferdinand

Celia Thaew Zukofsky

Written between 1947 and 1960 and first published in 1963, the prose work in the first of these two volumes reflects Louis Zukofsky's ongoing obsession with Shakespeare—whose plays he had first seen performed in Yiddish—and is central to understanding Zukofsky's work. Tracing the themes of knowledge, love and physical vision (“the eyes have it”) through both Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry, Bottom: On Shakespeare is more than a compendious act of homage by one poet to another. In effect, it lays out Zukofsky's poetics and theory of knowledge on a grand scale, tracing his themes through the whole of Western culture, from the Classical Greeks through William Carlos Williams. The second volume of Bottom: On Shakespeare consists of Celia Thaew Zukofsky's spare operatic setting of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play in which Zukofsky saw Shakespeare rewriting the classic plots and tropes of the Odyssey. The Wesleyan edition features a new foreword by Bob Perelman.

On Shakespeare

Bottom

Little for Careenagers

“A”

The work of Louis Zukofsky has been gaining exposure as a new generation of poets and scholars "rediscover" the American avant-garde tradition. Concurrently, interest in Guillaume Apollinaire’s work has grown in recent years as English departments re-explore international modernism. In this extended essay, one of the American literary giants of the 20th Century provides deep readings of the French modernist’s entire oeuvre and provides insight into his own formative aesthetic. Two sections of the essay were published in Westminster Magazine in 1932; the complete book is available here for the first time in English. The book builds its arguments with extensive quotations from Apollinaire’s poems in their orignal French; this bilingual edition is the latest offering in what Publisher's Weekly has hailed as "an essential series."

The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire

Le Style Apollinaire

William Carlos Williams

Barry Ahearn

Chronicles the professional and personal relationship between renowned poet William Carlos Williams and literary innovator Louis Zukofsky.

The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky

A gathering of all of Zukofsky's poems outside of "A" -- poems that are "absolute clarification, crystal cabinets full of air and angels" (Kenneth Rexroth).

Complete Shorter Poetry

Anew

Lorine Niedecker

Jenny Penberthy

The forty-year correspondence between Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky is one of the closest and most productive in recent literary history. Beginning in 1931, the correspondence was tutelary but it quickly grew into a collaborative enterprise of emotional and artistic significance for both poets. This volume presents Niedecker's side of the correspondence. It opens with a substantial introduction tracing the life and work of Niedecker and how her relationship with Zukofsky influenced her poetry. At the same time Jenny Penberthy attempts to disengage Niedecker from her own myth of Zukofsky. She examines the emergence of Niedecker's quiet but rigorously experimental poetry: her rejection of hierarchies of genre, structure, and syntax, and her questioning of relationships among author, world, and text. Penberthy also reconstructs the early years of Niedecker's career, looking particularly at her surrealism and its impact on her poems. The book is not only about the impact Zukofsky had on Niedecker's work, it is also about a woman poet's struggle for recognition both within and without.

Louis Zukofsky

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