ZwO

I: Introduction

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In her monograph of Louis Zukofsky, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley writes that the poet recognized “that no unified, transcendent, unmediated ‘I’ exists; when we seek to recover ‘LZ,’ we recover bits and pieces of Zukofsky’s life and writings, all filtered through and reconstructed in our minds” (1). Her claim, with regards to Zukofsky’s ontological stance, stems from a letter the poet wrote to his friend John Seed, which states: “I may show some interest in ‘LZ,’ whoever someone else thought he was” (1). By acknowledging multiple versions of his past Self (both as “LZ” and “someone else”) as distinct from his present Self, Zukofsky disassembles the notion of a holistic, unified Zukofsky and instead forwards a fractured and contingent multiplicity of himself. Such a diffusion of the “I” prefigures a Deleuzian metaphysics, in that the philosopher, when conceptualizing Nietzsche’s eternal return, claims that we “must lose…the resemblance of the Self and the identity of the I must perish…For ‘one’ repeats eternally, but ‘one’ now refers to the world of impersonal individualities and pre-individual singularities” (Deleuze, Difference 299). Or, as Deleuze and Guattari write in the incipient chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, the Self needs to be re-conceptualized so that we may not come to “reach the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer our selves…We have been…multiplied” (3).

But the connection between Zukofsky and Deleuze does not terminate with the manner in which both men re-envision the Self and fundamental propositions of Western ontology; in fact, throughout their respective oeuvres, an inter-textuality based linguistic repetition creates an echoing of language that resonates across both spatial and temporal dimensions. During his seminal essay on poetics entitled “An Objective,” Zukofsky lists several “components of the poetic object,” one of which is “the core that covers the work of poets who see with their ears, hear with their eyes, move with their noses and speak and breathe with their feet” (Prepositions 17). Through a re-distribution of perception that assigns active agency of the senses to new and different organs, Zukofsky seeks to demonstrate how “lunatics,” or poets, “are sometimes profitably observed” in that they can produce an “intense vision of a fact” (17). While no doubt the poet derives the aforementioned quote from Bottom’s dream in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream[1], the words, nonetheless, reverberate just as, if not more, clearly within Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breath with your belly” (150-1). If one re-distributes sensory perceptions as such, the closer one comes to attaining a Body without Organs (BwO); although, one can never “reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 150).

But what exactly is a BwO? According to Deleuze and Guattari, to have a BwO, one must “be done with the judgment of God” (150), but “God,” in this sense, refers to any mythos reinforced through a hierarchical structure. While Deleuze and Guattari primarily create a BwO by dismantling psychoanalysis, they make clear that the “BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole” (151); the BwO, then, is asignifying and asubjective, a body which is “nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, or communicating vessels…populated by intensities” that are “defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations” (153). It must be noted, though, that a BwO “is not opposed to the organs but to the organization of the organs called the organism,” which is, as previously mentioned, the “judgment of God, the system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism” (158). Connecting the BwO to the previously mentioned disassembly of the Self, Deleuze and Guattari write: “it is a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, self…can no longer be said to be personal…it is like an absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally apart of the immanence in which they have fused” (156). Zukofsky writes about the fusion of “interior and exterior” as well when he states: “In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations…the detail, not mirage, of seeing” (Prepositions 12). “Word combinations,” or that which derives from an interior space, concomitantly appear with the “shapes,” or objects in an exterior space, that the “seeing” subject apprehends. With both authors, then, the interior and the exterior, the subject and the object, can no longer be divided into separate, hermetic categories; strict Cartesian dualism, or the traditional Western conception of Self, collapses into “historic and contemporary particulars” (12), an “immanence” in which subject and object are fused.

But how does one make a BwO? Or, more precisely, how does one make a Zukofsky without organs (ZwO)? Although Deleuze and Guattari do not provide an explicit template for how this is done, they do present a series of strategies that aid in the production of a BwO; such strategies are as follows:

Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. (Thousand 161)

If one employs these general instructions, a BwO may manifest itself; in other words: “You [will] have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines” (161). The BwO as a “little machine,” again, resonates with Zukofsky’s language in “A Statement for Poetry” when he quotes William Carlos Williams: “consider a poem as a design or construction. A contemporary American poet [Williams] says: ‘A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words’” (Prepositions 19). So, to create a ZwO, or a “little machine” made of Zukofsky, one must not solidify into an interpretative mode, mired in the realm of signification with the intent of extracting “meaning” from its content; instead, readers must lodge themselves on a “stratum,” experimenting “with the opportunities [they] offer,” then flow into another “stratum” with the intent of discovering, “through meticulous relation,” a multiplicity of conjugations, intensities, and lines of flight. The poems of Zukofsky, these “little machines” that are ZwOs, should be read in a manner that emphasizes affective elements, such as “sound, pitch, rhythm, and tone” (Bernstein ix) just as much, if not more, than a circumspect search for the “meaning” of a poem’s content. Experimenting with the auditory aspects of Zukofsky’s poems becomes all the more important in lieu of Charles Bernstein’s claim that sonic elements:

Do not accompany meaning, neither are they arbitrary nor conventionally associated with meaning: they make meaning. When words are heard as sound, the poetic mode of expression has taken hold. The result is…an acoustically charge poetry…derived from the newly invented. (ix-x)

Zukofsky himself wrote that poetry should not only “embrace…such action that informs skills and the intellect…in the head,” but also that which is “outside…the head or whatever impinges upon it anatomically” (Prepositions 8): a visceral, affective poetic, no less than a poetic of intellection. Yet, with anatomical impingement, as well as with the BwO, Zukofsky’s poetic displaces perception, in that “what is sounded by words has to do with what is seen by them—and how much what is at once sounded and seen by them cross-cuts an interplay among themselves” (8). The eye of the I becomes the ear of the I, and vice versa; to be a ZwO is to be a seeing ear, “An Objective…lens brining the rays from an object to a focus” (12) that is “associated with ‘musical’ shape…of words more variable than variables” (16).

II: "Crickets'/ thickets"

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Zukofsky once wrote: “The best way to find out about poetry is to read the poems…because [the reader] finds himself subject of its energy” (23). As such, to more fully understand a ZwO and the intensities it produces, or to be a “subject of its energy,” one can best achieve this goal by looking directly at Zukofsky’s verse. An oft analyzed poem by critics, section sixteen of “29 Songs” provides an interesting “stratum” in which to lodge oneself on:

Crickets’
thickets

light,
delight:

sleeper’s eyes,
keeper’s;

Plies!
lightning

frightening
whom…?

doom
nowhere…

where eyes…
air,

are crickets’
air (Zukofsky, Short Poetry 48-9)

The poem immediately draws the reader into a brisk musicality that develops through a series of short, one to three syllable lines divided into stanzas made up of couplets, with each line terminating in an end rhyme. By privileging the auditory, section sixteen of “29 Songs” highlights what Robert Creeley called Zukofsky’s “unique hearing of phonetic patterns” that produces a particular “pace and sounding” (x). While critics tend to mention the musicality of Zukofsky’s poem, analysis most readily addresses the “elliptically broken” and “fragmented language” (Vanderborg 205), or the manner in which “meaning” becomes “problematic: as sound moves to the foreground” (Hatlen 51); little, if any, discussion involves the (e/a)ffects of such musicality other than the creation of word combinations that are “opaque, impenetrable, mysterious, and resistant” (52). So, then, the question becomes: how does the music of this “little machine,” this cricket-machine, function? More precisely, what are its (e/a)ffects?

It would appear that in conceptualizing the poem through a lens of the BwO, one is more equipped to answer these questions. To explicate upon the concept, Deleuze and Guattari present their readers with several examples of BwOs within A Thousand Plateaus; one such example is the masochist body. They write: “it is poorly understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of BwO” (150). Integral to the masochist body as a BwO is the process of becoming: “a becoming-animal essential to masochism. It is a question of forces…[wherein] an exchange and circulation” occur: the masochist, who dons a bridle, harness, bit and chain, and whose “master will never approach without the crop, and without using it” (155), becomes equine through “an inversion of signs: the horse transmits its…forces to him” (155). And just as a masochist becomes-equine, Zukofsky becomes-cricket within section sixteen of “29 Songs.” Becoming-cricket, though, does not mean sounding like a cricket. In fact, “becoming is never imitating” (305). While resemblances between Zukofsky’s rhythm and a cricket’s chirp may occur, such correspondences are merely incidental and do “not add up to becoming” (237). Becoming-cricket means developing music as “a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing” (300) language and the voice, so that “the voice itself is instrumentalized” (308). Insects, with their “molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping…are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and cymbals” (308)[2].

What does Zukofsky’s poem do, then, but transform the voice into an instrument. Signification, or the “problem of meaning,” is no longer a problem at all. The poem, to this extent, is asignifying in that the word combinations act as a conduit for sound, each line a staff or ledger on which to designate a certain rhythm, pitch, or tone working independently from a signifying regime, each word combination a musical note. What is important is the becoming-cricket, or the becoming-music, wherein the “refrain is…deterritorialized” (308). The refrain, in section sixteen’s case, can be heard in the repetition produced by the end rhymes[3].

One might rightfully ask: how does becoming-cricket deterritorialize the refrain? While rhyme (or the refrain) can “question, or on occasion deny the literal meaning of words” (Ferguson et al 2037), more often than not one employs the technique so as to “confirm” meaning through the union of content and expression (2037); or, stated in other words, rhyming in poetry attempts to consider both “meaning and sound [as] basic to the choice of words in a poem” (deFord and Lott 13). To that extent, the writer who conceptualizes poetry in a traditional manner fails when (s)he: “consistently mistakes the appropriate meaning and/or appropriate sound for his [or her] writing…since words are the medium and their values and limitations must be respected” (13). Does Zukofsky’s work function within the limits of “appropriate” meaning and sound? Does his poem, if it functions outside those limits, demonstrate a lack of craft or attention to sonic and semiotic details? Examining the first two stanzas, the poem reads: “Crickets’/ thickets// light/ delight:” (Zukofsky, Short Poems 48). While the first stanza offers an image of a dense underbrush inhabited, or “owned by,” crickets, the proceeding stanza lacks an explicit semiotic connection, in that the elided syntax and diction of the poem omits, or leaves ambiguous, the relation between “light” and the previous lines. Is “light” a noun or a verb? Should one understand the second stanza to be a syntactical extension of the first stanza, or a distinct element unto itself? Furthermore, what is the relation between “light” and “delight”? Does one expect, within the specific “values and limitations” of the word “light,” for the subsequent word to be “delight”? With regard to the last of these questions, one may well concede that, in an auditory capacity, the word “light” prefigures the word “delight” in that they both terminate in a common sound or utterance; but, with regard to “meaning,” the poem is too fragmented for the reader to presuppose the word “delight.” In fact, once a reader vocalizes the entire word combination, the “meaning” remains elusive. It would seem, according to a traditionalist, the poem is an utter failure.

But Zukofsky did not conceptualize his writing within a traditionalist’s mode[4]. His abiding purchase was that of sound, which is: “sometimes 95% of poetic presentation. One can often appreciate the connotations of the sound of words merely by listening, even if the language is foreign…What is foreign to poetry is the word which means little or nothing” (Test 58). Not only does Zukofsky privilege sound as “95% of presentation,” but he in many ways acknowledges, and thus pre-dates, Derrida’s claim[5] that the signifier is arbitrary, that it “means little or nothing” in-and-of-itself. In such a manner, the poet cleaves meaning from sound and disrupts the linguistic equilibrium sought by more traditional writers.

This linguistic disruption, as previously mentioned, can be conceptualized through the deterritorialization of the refrain. Deterritorialization, which is inextricably entwined with the minorization process, “is the movement by which ‘one’ leaves the territory,” in other words, the “operation of the line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 508) that flees from, and works in contradistinction to, a “homogenized, centralized, [and] standardized” (101) system of language, thought, etc. Deterritorializing, and thus minorizing the refrain, Zukofsky’s poem enters into a complex “zone of transition” that constructs “a continuum of variation, negotiating all of the variables both to constrict the constants and to expand the variables” (101-2). The “constraint” that is “constrained” is “meaning,” whereas the “expanded variable” is sound. No longer constrain to a rhyme that must make sense with a traditional manner, Zukofsky is free to select the word that most adequately expresses the sonic possibilities of the poem and most fully embodies his admonition that: “If, in any line of poetry, one word can be replaced by another and ‘it makes no difference,’ that line is bad” (Test 58).

Further deterritorializing the refrain, Zukofsky introduces both an internal rhyme and a disruptive, half-line break in the section that reads: “sleeper’s eyes,/ keeper’s;// Plies!” (Short Poems 48). While the internal rhyme magnifies the previous end rhymes, the half-line’s jarring effect echoes throughout the remainder of the poem, in that the end rhymes separate from the structural-interiority of the stanza and risk being “swallowed by the white space of the page” (Vanderborg 205). To rectify a possible dissonance within the musicality of the piece, one must re-distribute sensory perception and see the piece with one’s ears. If one continues seeing (reading) with the eyes, the rhyme and rhythm of the piece careen into an off-kilter composition that struggles to maintain its sonic properties. But if one sees (reads) with their ear, the half-line and stanza breaks give way to the poem’s tonal qualities. The pertinence of seeing with the ear only increases as the poem progress. Stanza six ends with the line “nowhere…” and stanza seven reads “where eyes…/air”; as such, reading with the ear extends the rhyme through the entirety of the penultimate stanza, sonically coupling “nowhere” with “air.” But to maintain the rhythm, “where eyes…/ air” must be spoken in the same breath, as opposed to vocalizing the ellipsis and line break. The identical claim can be made for the final “are crickets’/ air” stanza: one must read through the line break to maintain the poem’s sonic cohesion. As such, it would appear that the reader speaks with their ear, in addition to seeing with it.

III: "The Problem of Meaning"

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Yet, one should not completely negate signification; in fact, even Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that such a regime exists and operates, at times, in quite powerful ways[6]. What needs to be stressed, though, is that there is no “problem of meaning”; meaning, instead, becomes an effect of sound and the poetic techniques employed to enhance those sonic aspects of the poem. To enter into Zukofsky’s poetry, then, one must engage the work on its own terms and not foist incongruent, interpretative models upon it. If we are to treat the poem-object properly, it would be wise to appropriate a reading strategy that echoes Zukofsky’s approach to writing with an object: “Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness” (Prepositions 12). How, then, can we as readers think with the poems “as they exist” so as to “sense and receive awareness” of their shape? What reading strategy will enable us to see the “detail,” not the mirage, of Zukofsky’s work?

First and foremost, one must take Zukofsky at his word when he writes that the poet must give “some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve” (Prepositions 10). Such attention to article usage, between the definite and indefinite, signals a highly attuned relationship with language: word combinations are not chosen in a slapdash manner, but “weighed” with the most exacting precision. Mobilizing the theoretical framework of Deleuze will aid in a more thorough understanding of Zukofsky’s poetry. In fact, Deleuze shares Zukofsky’s belief in the profound difference between “the” and “a”:

the indefinite article a covers the entire zone of variation included in the movement of particularization, and the definite article the covers the entire zone generated by the movement of generalization. It is stuttering, with every position of a or the constituting a zone of vibration. (Essays 109)

The “stuttering, with every position of a or the” and the subsequent zone of vibration constructed between their difference, in Deleuze’s opinion, is what makes for great writing because it minorizes language and forces it down a line of flight, creating “a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation” (109). By “exceeding the possibilities of speech,” a great writer becomes “a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent [sic] foreign language within his own language. He makes language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur” (110).

As a matter of example, Deleuze provides some brief examples of stuttering within literature: Artaud’s abandonment of “grammatical appearance in order to [develop] breath-words” coupled with “deviant syntax,” Celine’s “exclamatory sentences and suspensions that do away with all syntax in favor of pure dance words,” and Melville’s ability to have “words create silence” (Essays 112-3); likewise, the stutter is no less active in the poetry of Zukofsky through paratactic elisions. The poet’s use of elision is primarily employed to create, develop, and enhance the sound of the poem, but it also effects signification, in that elision: “opens [the poems] to active thinking, to enable them to move into new…contexts all the while constantly transforming themselves” (Bernstein viii). Lines five and six of section sixteen read: “sleeper’s eyes,/ keeper’s;” (Zukofsky, Short Poetry 48), which are preceded by a colon in line four; ostensibly, then, line five and six should be an enumeration of line four’s “delight.” But what is the relationship between the “sleeper’s eyes” and “keeper’s”? Indeed, there is no way to tell due to the absence of relation syntax. In this sense, Zukofsky creates word combinations and a poetics that traverse the space between the “tensor and the limit, the tension in language and the limit of language” (Deleuze, Essays 112). To further explicate, the limit of language, in Zukofsky’s case, is a word’s sonic possibilities; as he writes in section twelve of “A”: “I’ll tell you./ About my poetics…An integral/ Lower limit speech/ Upper limit music” (138). The tensor, or “lower limit,” is “speech” or “traditional” usage of language. In Deleuzian terms, language’s basic function is a “centralization of information…an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words. Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience,” wherein an order-word is the “elementary unit of language” (Thousand 76). As such, every “rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical unit” (76). By eliding relational syntax, Zukofsky’s poems enable the reader, in that they decentralize information and attempt, not to “compel obedience,” but to expand the range of possibilities within a piece[7]. Moreover, given the two extremes of tensor (speech) and limit (music), Zukofsky’s poetry oscillates between these two boundaries and creates a “tension” that forces language into a “pure dance of words” (Essays 112): the words dance to the music they create, a self-sustaining music-machine moving in time with its own rhythms.

Punning further amplifies the dance of words within Zukofsky’s poetry. In line seven, where the aforementioned half-line occurs, the reader encounters the one word sentence “Plies!” (Zukofsky, Short Poetry 48). While the word can be read as the present-tense of ply, and as such provides an exclamatory enumeration of “sleeper’s eyes” that are joined together to “keep” the “light.” Yet, the half-line can also be read as the plural of “plié.” The plié, or a choreographed ballet movement where the knees are bent but the back remains straight, resembles to some extent the physical characteristics of a “singing” cricket: while the cricket’s legs remain perpetually bent, it’s wings, when chirping, are raised “above [it’s] body and then rubbed…together” (Laufer 3). In fact, crickets “belong, in the entomological system, to the order, Orthoptera (from the Greek orthos, ‘straight,’ and pteron, ‘a wing’; referring to the longitudinal folding of the hind wings)” (2). The ballerina and the cricket both bend their legs, while keeping their back and wings respectively straight. The “Pliés!” of the poem can be thus read as the cricket chirping, or an insect-created “lightning”: in other words, the “crickets’ air” (Zukofsky, Short Poetry 48). Just as the signifiers dance about the poem through the elision of syntactical markers, so do the signifieds dance through the technique of punning. This fluidity concomitantly highlights the arbitrariness, and relative unimportance, of the signifying regime as a system of judgment, as well as providing the reader with a series of word combinations that allow one to pass through a variety of strata. At very least, such fluidity demonstrates how sound “makes meaning,” not the oppisite way around. Such a passage allows the poem to sing, to stutter, to become a ZwO. And so to, then, does the reader.

IV: Conclusion

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Reading through the poetry of Louis Zukofsky can, at times, be a daunting task, especially if one is not familiar with his writing. Such preconceptions are only exacerbated by the tendency of traditionalists, “at least since [Modernism,] to complain that contemporary poetry has become difficult, and that this difficulty has alienated readers who used to flock to poetry” (Shepherd 8). But, it would seem the only “problem of meaning” is that there isn’t a problem at all, and difficulty arises within certain works of poetry when the reader chooses to enter the work on their own terms and not on the terms of the poem itself. The “problem of meaning,” with regard to “difficult” poetry, is actually the reader’s “problem of critical rigidity”; or, to phrase the problem less judiciously, the reader’s lack of critical engagement.

Yet, the “difficulty” one encounters when reading Zukofsky’s poetry no doubt aides in the mainstream neglect of his corpus; but, such richness of language and density of thought can also account for the reverence and attention several generations-worth of notable poets have accorded his work[8]. If Zukofsky’s poetry is to enter into a broader conversation, it will only be if/when those that approach his writing move away from the signifying regime that seeks to interpret and toward a mode of reading that brings “forth continuous intensities” and allows for the reader to be “subject to [the poem’s] energy”: to understand each poem as a ZwO, wherein we experiment with the possibilities they offer. By releasing the Self and the quest for “meaning,” one can submit to the object (in this case the poem), reveling in the affective experience. Of course, there is no one way to create a ZwO, or a BwO in general. The construction necessitates experimenting with different strata and discovering relational links between them. While section sixteen of “29 Songs” operates in interesting and exciting ways, both sonically and linguistically, by conceptualizing it through the lens of becoming-cricket, deterritorialization of the refrain, and the affective and intensive possibilities of the stutter, different ZwOs will necessitate a different network of relations to produce flow conjunctions and continuums. Take, for instance, Zukofsky’s final collection 80 Flowers. How can one enter a poem such as “X”:

Of thousand grown climb head-on-head
A “X” unknown stand indued
no glue kiss’d peon knee
freesia’s iris grass-tropical true scourge
bees earthflight magnetic north 4-native
dial-canter excellence scent one-thousandth-in
one-night lady’s-eardrops-fuchsia seaborne northeast unnailed
papyrus-bath-nut trailing arbutus fringed-gentian hydrangea (Zukofsky, Short Poems 351)

“X,” like the other eighty poems of the collection (the untitled, introductory poem pushes the collection’s total from eighty to eighty-one pieces), contains eight lines, each consisting of five words. But throughout the manuscript, Zukofsky implements liberal use of the n-dash to create a root system that extends each line, overloads the concept, and creates a veritable rhizomatic structure. Is this an instance of becoming-flower, a line of flight fleeing into a new zone of deterritorialization, a linguistic stutter that minorizes language? Likewise, what can one make of the collaborative efforts between Louis and his wife, Celia? Take, for instance, the poem “Motet” (Click image for bigness):

Can this be seen as a moment of a ZwO through becoming-music, becoming-violin? What of the fact that this piece is a collaborative effort? How does this alter our reading of the work? Can this piece even be properly read without musical accompaniment? Is it another instance of seeing with the ear and singing with the eye, redistributing sensory perception in an effort to produce a unique affective response? The answers, it would seem, are to be found in the detail of the object itself and can only be unlocked when we, as readers, are subject to its energy. Or, as Zukofsky writes in section twenty-seven of “29 Songs”:

“there
       develops
           a
                   multiplicity

“of
     social
             relations

“that are
             spontaneous in
                    their
                            growth

“and are
          quite
                 outside

“the
     control of
                 the
                       actors” (Zukofsky, Short Poems 60)

To acknowledge that “actors” do not control the “a multiplicity of social relations” is for the reader to submit to the poem-object and recognize that the subject does not transcend or dictate its material conditions; instead, the subject and object function concomitantly within those conditions and are “spontaneous in their growth,” in that their development is tied to a unique social, linguistic, and historical context. Perhaps, then, to read Zukofsky properly, one must understand that we are no longer “ourselves”: we are multiplicities operating on a stratum “outside” the subject, wherein the mind and the poem-object flow together in meticulous relation to one another to produce a continuum of thought in detail.

Notes

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[1] Upon waking from his retransformation into human form from that of an ass-man, Nick Bottom says: “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—But man is a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was” (Shakespeare 4.1.204-11). Zukofsky would go on to write the book-length essay, entitled Bottom: On Shakespeare, that simultaneously attempts to prove “Shakespeare’s text throughout favors the clear physical eye to the erring brain,” while “tak[ing] expection to all philosophies” (Prepositions 167). While it may seem odd to filter Zukofsky through Deleuzian (i.e. philosophical) thought, given the poet’s desire to “do away with all philosophy (Prepositions 229), Deleuze’s focus on affect (i.e. physical response) as opposed to epistemology, seems rather Zukofskian in nature. Furthermore, although Zukofsky sought to “do away with all philosophy,” Mark Scroggins points out that: “While Zukofsky…often dismisses epistemological issues in quite peremptory terms, they receive extended exploration in Bottom: On Shakespeare” (17).

[2] Of course, there is a striking resemblance between crickets and Zukofsky, in that they are both becoming-cricket. As Deleuze notes: “Even when it is a woman who is becoming, she has to become-woman, and this becoming has nothing to do with a state she could claim as her own” (Essays 1), so one should not confuse crickets with becoming-cricket. But crickets do become-cricket in that their “endless repetition of…sounds…develop into a purely mechanical practice in which the insect indulges as a pastime for its own diversion” (Laufer 5); or, they become a “little machine” made of sound that produces music “like the figures in a kaleidoscope, definite and doubtless due to some internal mechanism, but not to serve any special purpose” (3). Simply, music for the sake of music: asignifying and asubjective. Interestingly enough, the Chinese, as early as the T’ang dynasty (A.D. 618-906), harnessed the instrumentalization of crickets by keeping them “as interned prisoners in cages to be able to enjoy their concert at any time”; furthermore the Shi king was a collection of odes sung in praise of the cricket’s musical capabilities (7). It would appear that the connection between musicality and crickets can be traced back thousands of years.

[3] If one considers the refrain to be a phrase or verse that recurs within a song or poem at regular intervals, rhyme, by extension, can be thought of as a phonetic refrain with the recurrence of a particular vocalized sound-pattern.

[4] Barbara Guest, in her collection of essays entitled Forces of Imagination, opens with an apropos discussion of the differences between “radical” poetics and “conservative,” or traditional poetry. She claims that traditional poetry “is only a guide from which one can look backward, rather than forward” (Guest 11) and that such verse “is comfortable ensconced in the tried leather of a poem and the voice whether from Odessa or London or Cairo is welcome, because although the sensibility may be tired the words when they arrive are refreshingly old…and can be understood. The poem projects meanings or values; it creates an atmosphere of security” (12). Ultimately, the conservative, or traditional, artist “would like nothing better than to believe in the demise of Modernism” (13). In contradistinction to such a traditionalist posture, radical poetics attempts to “say something new.” Furthermore, radical poetics confront issues that are “infinite” and work within an “endless space” (13). In the end, a poet who writes radically “draws no moral from the assemblage. The moral is in the hands of the reader” (12). With regard to Zukofskian poetics, one can only consider them “radical” within the context of Zukofsky himself. If one attempts to merely parrot the techniques and concepts he employed, such a poetry will in-and-of-itself be a “look backward,” and thus conservative. Therefore, the difference between radical and conservative should not be thought of as emblematic of particular stylistic concerns, movements, or schools, but as work that functions outside of established constraints; as such, radical poetics can seen understood as a poetics that champions difference with regard to an entire continuum of variation in lieu of historical and poetic ancestry. Although Zukofsky drew heavily from Pound and the Imagists, he substantively altered many of the dictums of Imagism so as to develop a new, fresh, and radical poetic unto himself.

[5] Derrida, in Of Grammatology, wrote: “In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin…The origin of the speculation becomes a difference…the forgetting of a simple origin” (36). In this sense, there is no origination point or absolute meaning with regard to language. True, a signified (i.e. “meaning”) can be ascribe to a particular signifier within a particular context, but that signified is contingent and, in many cases, ambiguous.

[6] Deleuze and Guattari certainly qualify the importance of semiotics though. According to them, the “semiotic system [is] not the first, [and] we see no reason to accord it any particular privilege from the standpoint of an abstract evolutionism” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 117).

[7] In many ways, such an expansion prefigures one of the key tenets of the Language poetry movement that would brand Zukofsky one of its forefathers. As Christopher Nealon states in his essay “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism,” one of the three main arguments of the aforementioned movement was active-readership, which “points to a belief that difficult, unconventional texts, rather than being closed to readers, are actually more open than traditional texts because they don’t smother or direct readers with too many genre cues, over determined tropes, clichés, or heavily rehearsed rhetorical movements” (585). Ultimately, such texts “rescue language not only from cliché but also from commodification, from becoming unidirectional, informatics, Power-Point-y medium[s] for social control” (585).

[8] Zukofsky was a mentor to Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, and to a lesser extent, several other Black Mountain writers such as Charles Olson. Furthermore, the Language poets, particularly Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, claim him as a forefather to the movement they helped foster during the late-60s and early-70s. Additionally, Zukofsky serves as a touchstone for many younger poets who write in a more experimental manner.

Works Cited

2008-05-08T07:19:00.000-07:00

Bernstein, Charles. Forward. Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. By Louis Zukofsky. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Creeley, Robert. Foreword. Complete Short Poetry. By Louis Zukofsky. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

deFord, Sara and Clarinda Harriss Lott. Forms of Verse: British and American. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.

---. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Slater, and Jon Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. New York, NY: W.W Norton and Company, 2005.

Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2003.

Hatlen, Burton. “A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The Objectivist Poets in Context.” The Objectivist Nexus. Eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1999. 37-55.

Laufer, Berthold. “Insect-Musicians and Cricket Champions of China.” Field Museum of Natural History: Anthropology Leaflets (22). Chicago, IL: Field Museum of Natural History, 1927.

Nealon, Christopher. “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism.” American Literature 76 (2004): 579-602.

Scroggins, Mark. “Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare: Objectivist Poetics and Critical Prosody.” West Coast Line 27 (1994): 17-36.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1959.

Shepherd, Reginald. “On Difficulty in Poetry.” The Writer’s Chronicle 40.6 (2008): 8-14.

Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

Vanderborg, Susan. “‘Worlds Ranging Forms’: Patterns of Exchange in Zukofsky’s Early Lyrics.” Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky. Ed. Mark Scroggins. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1997.

Zukofsky, Louis. “A". Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

---. A Test of Poetry. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

---. Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

---. Bottom: On Shakespeare. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

---. Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.