Post on Zukofsky

***I'm sure there are tons of mistakes in this, but I think I'm going to expand this into my final paper for the class--cuz I think I'm on to something, and it's a topic I've been thinking about for a very long time--so for those in the know, any input would be great!

Katie Price
Major and Minor
Bernstein and DuPlessis
Nov. 6: Louis Zukofsky

During the late 1920s and 1930s, Louis Zukofsky’s most explicitly political years, he outlined the poetics of what came to be known as the Objectivist poets. In “An Objective,” Zukofsky asks what it would mean for poetry to bring “the rays from an object to a focus,” to conceive of “a poem as object.” This formulation assumes that things never speak the truth so much as when they are silent, when they are seen, when they are treated as object. What are the politics behind holding this belief and then writing about, or more precisely with, these things? If things, as objects, can never be spoken for, why write at all?

In contrast to Auden’s proclamation in 1939 that “poetry makes nothing happen,” Zukofsky held that labor was a “distinct human act which we collectively use to transform and make the world” and that through the labor of writing one could create the “objectively perfect:”
The lines of this new song are nothing
But a tune making the nothing full
Stonelike become more hard than silent
The tune’s image holding in the line. (25, Selected Poems)
We see in these lines Zukofsky wrestling with his desire for the “objectively perfect,” –stonelike lines—as well as the musicality held within them—“more hard than silent.” Zukofsky’s famous definition of his poetics in A-12, “An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music,” also speaks to this formulation. Certainly Zukofsky’s struggle with how to reconcile the objectively perfect, mathematics, optics, music and poetry is not a new topic. But what precisely does Zukofsky’s conflation of these things do?

Zukofsky’s belief in labor as a transformative activity cited above, coupled with his understanding of writing as “thinking with the things as they exist” reveals why, even though the Truth of objects can never be spoken, Zukofsky continued to write until his death. The labor of writing for Zukofsky, literally birthed new objects (poems) which themselves became part of the truth of the world as well as revealed a truth of the objects (material words themselves included) in the poems. I insist upon this because Zukofsky seemed to recognize and move beyond “concrete poetry” (I am speaking here of its post-war manifestations) before its inception. Yes, he says, the first thing to note is that a poem has a material reality. Without having to stretch too far we can see that it is an object. However, in order for it to be an object(ive), to bring things to a focus, to have the signified and the signifier meet at the apex of the “A”, one must think the thing: how it is used, how it functions, etc. since a word is more than just its material reality.

Recalling the frequent reduction of Wittgenstein’s theory of language to the slogan “meaning is use,” Zukofsky can be seen as a poet who not only uses words, but utilizes them: pushes them to their extremes until they reach a point of “an object—Perfect rest.” He does not attempt to speak objects as much as labor (think and write) about them until they are exhausted and come to a point of rest or silence. In other words, he strives for the moment when a poem is indeed an integral, insofar as it is the entire realm of possibilities between two definite limits, the complete marriage of signifier and signified, the Marxist moment.