
The Poem of a Life : A Biography of Louis Zukofsky.
Title:
The Poem of a Life : A Biography of Louis Zukofsky.
Author:
Scroggins, Mark.
ISBN:
9781582439129
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (592 pages)
Contents:
Contents -- Preface xi -- Introduction 3 -- Chapter One A Lower East Side Youth : 1904-1920 11 -- Chapter Two An Ernster Mensch at Columbia : 1920-1924 24 -- Interchapter Adams: Phases of History 37 -- Chapter Three The Lean Twenties : 1924-1928 48 -- Chapter Four "A Thousand fiddles playing Bach" : 1928-1930 68 -- Chapter Five"A"-1 through "A"-7 79 -- Interchapter Duration, "Liveforever": Time 96 -- Chapter Six "Objectivists" : 1930-1931 103 -- Chapter Seven At the Helm of an Avant-Garde : 1932-1933 120 -- Chapter Eight Politics and Poetry : 1934-1935 136 -- Chapter Nine Culture and Design : 1936-1940 156 -- Chapter Ten"A"-8 and First Half of "A"-9 175 -- Interchapter Numbers and Horses 190 -- Chapter ElevenThe Home Front : 1940-1945 199 -- Chapter Twelve A New Life : 1946-1951 217 -- Chapter Thirteen"A"-9 (second half) through "A"-12 238 -- Interchapter Spinoza: Geometry and Freedom 253 -- Chapter FourteenThe Great World : 1952-1957 262 -- Chapter Fifteen Going Westward: 1958-1960 282 -- Interchapter Shakespeare: The Evidence of the Eyes 299 -- Chapter Sixteen The Darker World : 1961-1963 313 -- Chapter Seventeen Short Poems: Contingencies and Sequences 335 -- Chapter Eighteen Becoming a Classic: 1964-1966 352 -- Interchapter Translation: The "Literal" Meaning 368 -- Chapter Nineteen"A"-13 through "A"-20 380 -- Chapter Twenty Retiring : 1966-1969 397 -- Interchapter Quotation 416 -- Chapter Twenty-one At Port: 1970-1978 426 -- Chapter Twenty-two "A"-21 through "A"-24 442 -- Chapter Twenty-three 80 Flowers and "Gamut: 90 Trees" 451 -- Afterword: 1978-1980 460 -- Acknowledgments 469 -- Appendix: Zukofsky, Reisman, Niedecker 473 -- Notes 477 -- Index 557.
Abstract:
The Poem of a Life is the first critical biography of Louis Zukofsky, a fascinating and crucially important American modernist poet. It details the curve of his career, from the early Waste Land-parody Poem beginning 'The'" (1926) to the dense and tantalizing beauties of his last poems, 80 Flowers(1978), paying special attention to the monumental, complex, and formally various epic poem A", on which Zukofsky labored for almost fifty years, and which he called a poem of a life." Zukofsky was a protégé of Ezra Pound's, an artistic collaborator and close friend of William Carlos Williams's, and the leader of a whole school of 1930s avant-garde poets, the Objectivists. Later in life he was close friends with such younger writers as Robert Creeley, Paul Metcalf, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, and Guy Davenport. His work spans the divide from modernism to postmodernism, and his later writings have proved an inspiration to whole new generations of innovative poets. Zukofsky's poetry is oblique, condensed, and as fantastically detailed as the late writings of James Joyce, yet it bears at every point the marks of the poet's life and times.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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