Zukofsky, Louis

Bottom: On Shakespeare (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)

Average customer rating:

Thought as Music

Bottom: On Shakespeare (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)
Louis Zukofsky , and Celia Thaew Zukofsky
Manufacturer: Wesleyan University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Quotations | Reference | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Reference Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays (Zukofsky, Louis, Selections. V. 2.)
A Test of Poetry (Zukovsky, Louis. V. 1.)
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky
The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky
The Maximus Poems

ASIN: 0819565482

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

Thought as Music.......2003-11-25

Of all the (countless) responses to the Bard by writers over the last four hundred years or so, this one may be the most idiosyncratic; it may also be the most intelligent, insightful and inspired. BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE reminds me a little bit of Burton's THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, first, in its encyclopedic bulk, and, second, in the preponderance of quotes in its pages. Louis Zukofsky was a world-class quoter (he's spiritual kin to Walter Benjamin, I think, who dreamed of writing-if that's the right word-a book composed entirely of quotations), and in BOTTOM, he cites everyone from Homer to Wittgenstein, and whole pages of Shakespeare, for the central purpose of elucidating what may be thought of as the book's thesis, which Zukofsky puts thus:

"Love is to reason as the eyes are to mind."

I don't pretend to understand entirely what that means. But the idea that to perceive something as it truly is requires love, or is the beginning of love, or both, is beautiful.

It's important to keep in mind that although he was a professor of English, widely read, and had an acute literary-critical gift, Zukofsky was, above all, an artist. A staggering amount of scholarship went into BOTTOM, but it is, in the end, a poetic response to Shakespeare, a poet's reply to a poet. By academic standards, therefore, BOTTOM is downright eccentric. An example. Elsewhere, Zukofsky writes, "And it is possible in imagination to divorce speech of all graphic elements, to let it become a movement of sounds." Thought as music. A writer as deeply ethical as Zukofsky would never say something like that if he didn't mean it, and so we find that the second part of BOTTOM, the culmination of his thought on Shakespeare, isn't critical prose, but a musical setting for PERICLES, composed by Celia Zukofsky, Louis's wife.

Obviously, this book isn't an introduction to Shakespeare. The student coming to grips with the Bard won't get much help here. Like Zukofsky's poetry, of which it's very much an extension, BOTTOM can be obscure and taxing. On the other hand, it's as beautiful as it is difficult. At every turn, some idea or turn of phrase will make the patient reader gasp (or sigh, I suppose, depending on one's temperament). For anyone really, vitally engaged with Shakespeare, for any fan of Zukofsky, and for anyone who really cares about poetry, five stars is too few to recommend BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE.

Average customer rating:

excellent, reflective, broad in scope

Zukofsky Opens Ears and Minds

Not for everybody, it's true, but...

No Wonder No One Reads It

A
Louis Zukofsky
Manufacturer: Univ of California Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | 18th Century | 19th Century | 20th Century | African American | Asian American | Classics | Collections & Readers | Drama | General | Hispanic | History & Criticism | Humor | Jewish American | Letters & Correspondence | Native American | Poetry | Short Stories | Women Writers
20th Century | Poetry | British | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Maximus Poems

Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works

Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays (Zukofsky, Louis, Selections. V. 2.)

The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975

New Collected Poems

ASIN: 0520032233

Customer Reviews:

excellent, reflective, broad in scope.......2001-02-23

This poem is incredible.

"A" is a must read for any reader serious about poetry, literary aesthetics, or modern thought. Zukofsky incorporates immense ideas into his work, and keeps the reader challenged. But though the poem is highly cerebral, it's not just a poem for scholars and academicians. It's emotional and beautiful as well as stimulating. Even if you don't have the time or energy to read all of "A", read bits and pieces of it. You will be caught up in the language. You will be amazed. Read it at leisure, study it, or keep it on your bookshelf for years at a time. You will most definitely get something out of it. Readers who like "The Cantos" will most likely enjoy this as well. It is fantastic.

Zukofsky Opens Ears and Minds.......2000-08-31

Not only is this justifiably regarded as one of the most important long poems of the 20th Century, it is one of the most enjoyable of them. People say Zukofsky is difficult, but he's not so difficult if one listens: "The ears have it." Zukofsky says a poem offers pleasure by means of "sight, sound, and intellection." That's one key in to this work. Another is to notice that this is perhaps the first American long poem, at least in its first half or more, that offers a leftist/Marxist perspective. Another is that it lets us see an important Jewish poet finding his place as American and modernist/postmodernist. These are real dramas that can be found in *A.* Another key to reading *A* is to enjoy Zukofsky's intense pleasure in everyday, family life. There are ways in which this great poem is accessible to all readers. Finding one's way in can require patience, but more than anything, it simply requires an act of listening with open ears and mind.

Not for everybody, it's true, but..........2000-06-21

Zukofsky's "A" isn't for the timid--it's long, after all--and it's not for those who don't want to give their minds and ears a workout--in other words, it's difficult, and doesn't sound like...well, like Robert Pinsky, or Robert Frost. But for readers who are patient enough to let the peerless music of the verse sink in, and who don't demand that poetry give them a prepackaged "message," "A" offers a wonderful range of pleasures. It's a long poem in as many forms as you can imagine, from Shakespearean sonnets, to letter-perfect canzoni, to phonetic translations from the Hebrew. It's a poem that tracks 50 years in the life of its writer and 50 years of American history, from the Depression through the space race. It makes the most wonderful sound of any book in English since Joyce's *Ulysses*.

No Wonder No One Reads It.......2000-05-23

It's entirely clear from reading "A", the pathetic book over which Louis Zukofsky labored for his entire life, that the man was quite demented. This book is an awful disease, which I've cured after reading all tedious 800+ pages of it with heavy doses of the great masters of postmodern American verse: David Lehman, Robert Lowell, and Galway Kinnell. No one should ever be forced to read "A" unless he's comitted an awful crime.

Average customer rating:

"a" 1-12
Louis Zukofsky
Manufacturer: Doubleday
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

Average customer rating:

The Worm Turns

Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)
Louis Zukofsky
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)
Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics (American Poets Project)
Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works
Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems (American Poets Project)
Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

ASIN: 1931082952

Book Description

With an ear tuned to the most delicate musical effects, an eye for exact and heterogeneous details, and a mind bent on experiment, Louis Zukofsky was preeminent among the radical Objectivist poets of the 1930s. This is the first collection to draw on the full range of Zukofsky's poetry-containing short lyrics, versions of Catullus, and generous selections from "A", his 24-part"poem of a life"-and provides a superb introduction to a modern master of whom the critic Guy Davenport has written: "Every living American poet worth a hoot has stood aghast before the steel of his integrity."

The most formally radical poet to emerge among the second wave of American modernists, Louis Zukofsky continues to influence younger poets attracted to the rigor, inventiveness, and formal clarity of his work. Born on New York's Lower East Side in 1904 to emigrant parents, Zukofsky achieved early recognition when he edited an issue of Poetry devoted to the Objectivist poets, including George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. In addition to an abundance of short lyrics and a sound-based version of the complete poems of Catullus, he worked for most of his adult life on the long poem "A" of which he said: "In a sense the poem is an autobiography: the words are my life."

Zukofsky's work has been described as difficult although he himself said: "I try to be as simple as possible." In the words of editor Charles Bernstein, "This poetry leads with sound and you can never go wrong following the sound sense... Zukofsky loved to create patterns, some of which are apparent and some of which operate subliminally... Each word, like a stone dropped in a pond, creates a ripple around it. The intersecting ripples on the surface of the pond are the pattern of the poem." Here for the first time is a selection designed to introduce the full range of Zukofsky's extraordinary poetry.

Customer Reviews:

The Worm Turns.......2006-04-11

This book came out the EXACT MONTH I happened to be reading Zukofsky: Man and Poet, a collection of appreciations and essays assembled just after his death in 1979. What's sad is that the essays all start from the assumption that Zukofsky is almost totally unknown except among poets, a fact that caused him some bitterness in his final years. He died just before his masterpiece, "A," came out in a single edition from UC Press.

Flash forward a generation to this handsome Library of America edition. The pros will quibble over the sense of excerpting Zukofsky, which Z. himself tried to prevent in his lifetime. But it's hard to see this book as anything less than a vindication of the quiet, steady devotion Zukofsky showed to poetry over his productive life. Charles Bernstein, who's about the best ambassador the avant-garde's got to the publishing mainstream, is a great choice for the project: his selections are sympathetic and smart, aware of the larger work while giving you enough tantalizing bits to satisfy a healthy curiosity. I doubt Zukofsky's work has ever reached as broad an audience as it will here: it may be just the end run around the growing Zukofsky industry his work needs to find fresh readers. The poems deserve it, and somehow I think he'd be tickled pink to know this is out there.

Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays (Zukofsky, Louis, Selections. V. 2.)

Average customer rating:

Clarity, Economy, Beauty

Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays (Zukofsky, Louis, Selections. V. 2.)
Louis. Zukofsky , and Charles Bernstein
Manufacturer: Wesleyan University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Qualifying Textbooks - Spring 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

A Test of Poetry (Zukovsky, Louis. V. 1.)
The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky
Bottom: On Shakespeare (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky

ASIN: 0819564281

Book Description

Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, published first in 1967 and then in an expanded edition in 1981, was a definitive set of critical statements by Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings of Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others.

Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the "Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics.

Customer Reviews:

Clarity, Economy, Beauty.......2001-07-06

Louis Zukofsky imbued criticism with the grace of his poetry. He believed that poetry was not a gesture to be revered, but a crystalization of experience, individual and general. Thus his criticism of poetry judges it against vital standards, with reference to philosophy and history, but without reference to critical fashion. The academic formulae which remove poetry from experience to convention are absent from this book: a great writer who takes pains to be an acute reader tells us what sustains him, and can sustain us.

The language of invention, of discovery must always seem strange at first, but time has brought us closer to these original explorations of sincerity in poetry. Zukofsky wrote about his contemporaries as they appeared, and helped many of them to appear. He was there. If you want to know what poetry can do, unfettered by prejudice, you can find it here. I urge you to. Prepositions, in conjuction with his poetry, can change and illuminate how you see, feel, hear, think.

Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)
Average customer rating:
Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)
Louis Zukofsky , and Jean Daive
Manufacturer: Wesleyan University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

20th Century | Poetry | British | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | Classics | Comic | Contemporary | Literary
General | Criticism & Theory | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
French | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
All French Books | French | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 0819566209

Book Description

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."

A Test of Poetry (Zukovsky, Louis. V. 1.)

Average customer rating:

Give It All The Stars In The Sky

A Test of Poetry (Zukovsky, Louis. V. 1.)
Louis Zukofsky , and Robert Creeley
Manufacturer: Wesleyan University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays (Zukofsky, Louis, Selections. V. 2.)
The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975
Bottom: On Shakespeare (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

ASIN: 0819564028

Book Description

By juxtaposing several translations of the same passage from Homer; an elegy from Ovid and lines from Herrick that read like an adaptation of Ovid; or a 15th-century poem about a rooster and a contemporary poem about white chickens, Louis Zukofsky has established a means for judging the values of poetic writing.

A wonderful education for the fledgling poet, this handbook, first published in 1948, is the best elucidation of Zukofsky's "objectivist" premises for recognizing value in specific instances of poetry.

Customer Reviews:

Give It All The Stars In The Sky.......2000-12-22

Poor poetry. Either it smothers under tons of academic pretension, or it is retailed as pop entertainment in poetry slams. It seems sometimes that Robert Pinsky is the only one with a good handle on the popular appeal of this emotional/intellectual art. But I bet you Pinsky has this book and refers to it regularly. This is the most hard-headed, economical poetry criticism, completely free of cant and pretension; equally free of stylishness. Zukovsky gives us, as Donald Barthelme once wrote, "the red meat on the rug." The form of the book is disarmingly simple: Selected quotes, side by side, with the occasional footnote. Zukovsky lets you figure things out yourself, and when you refer to his notes, you are nearly always rewarded with the notion that you and he are at least on the same planet when it comes to deciding what is good and what is not so good about poetry. Some of the selections in Middle English or Scots dialect are tough going, but you soon discover that it is as much sound as meaning that is important. In any event, there are plentiful and helpful footnotes. If you're lucky, you've never read any poetry criticism and can leap into this book unbiased and unafraid. If (like your reviewer) you had to read a lot of it in college, you'll feel positively liberated.

A Test of Poetry (Jargon Society edition, Number 11)

Average customer rating:

A Test of Poetry (Jargon Society edition, Number 11)
Louis Zukofsky
Manufacturer: Jargon/Corinth Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000M9A0SG

Average customer rating:

Complete Short Poetry
Louis Zukofsky
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays (Zukofsky, Louis, Selections. V. 2.)
A Test of Poetry (Zukovsky, Louis. V. 1.)
Bottom: On Shakespeare (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky)
Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works
The Maximus Poems

ASIN: 0801856566

Amazon.com

Louis Zukofsky was a writer's writer. Largely ignored by the general reading public, he counted Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams among his admirers, and the Beloit Literary Journal insists that his poems are "essential for anyone hoping to understand the whole modern movement, especially the Objectivist branch." This complete collection of Zukofsky's short poems gives readers a good sense of what all the fuss was about. Zukofsky's great gift was in finding the words to let the moment tell itself, as in "A Song for the Year's End": "Daughter of music / and her sweet son / so that none rule / the dew to his own hurt / with the year's last sigh / awake / the starry sky and bird." The visuals create a collage effect, so that the poem's rhythms move the same way one's eyes move in viewing a collage: from details to the overall impression and back, in a continuous cycle. The collection of pieces based on various flowers is especially beautiful and melodic.

Book Description

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 Mallarmé," 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. Mallarmé had a long poetic tradition from which to deviate into philology. Zukofsky received a philological tradition, which he raised to a higher power."

Average customer rating:

Barely and Widely
Louis Zukofsky
Manufacturer: Celia Zukofsky
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000LEEV8C

Authors:

Authors

Authors