If there's one thing that can be said of a grotesquely collated (perhaps of any primarily Objectivist) work like Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare it is that it was written in order merely to be written.Zukofsky would only give his papers to Harry Ransom Research Collection (University of Texas) provided the university agree to publish a work that comprises almost entirely of quoted materials. It seems to violate every law of historico-literary logic and yet it does bewitch the eye hungry for empty diversion. The largest of his prose work patches venerable personages from antiquity to his present for the sake of some intellectually dizzying collage effect. And the "eye" is its primary focus: or what he calls the "'compounding' eye-thought of its culture" (p.85) and cultures do intersect clumsily in Zukofsky. In fact, Shakespeare (the work's putative center) finds himself in a kind of continual discourse with Wittgenstein, Spinoza and Aristotle, all unmercifully threaded through quotations into a single preoccupation ("graph of culture", as the author says) with the nature of "seeing". And yet they do anything but that. They all seem to think the "same" or have similar ideas because Zukofsky says so. It's pleasing to the childish eye, perhaps, in the way the eye delights in cartoons. In Zukofsky, however, the cartoon bubbles are full of adult erudition. But in what sense do smart cartoon characters "see" anyways?
There's also something keenly fanatical in Zukofsky's Bottom. He's always struck me as the reformer holding the whip. Here's the writer of manifestos sweating over something new to say to a world stuck to outworn paradigms (like Paul to Ephesians). And treating Shakespeare as an "object"-- or solidified into so many elementary philosophico-lyrical particles--is decidedly new. I've laboured to read it only because Frank Samperi had read it (in the days when he'd struggled equally hard to learn his poetry from Zukofsky and even be a friend) and because I'm presently finishing a work on Samperi. The impressionable young Brooklyn poet, just back from Korea, had shaken author and work off as a kind of gross materialism that never reverences life and certainly doesn't know its "music" from a hole in the ground. Samperi looked to a single author and his De Vulgari Eloquentia for that. The character Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream is the book's putative exemplum: he's one of those 'mechanical' characters in Shakespeare (like those in the opening scene of Julius Caesar who always appear without their apron and rule and aggravate the authorities) that experimental poets like to tinker with. Perhaps Samperi had resented how churlishly Zukofsky had treated him, as if he were another Bottom. The man and his wife could be cruel to young impressionable poets.
Bottom, like every self-indulgently daring exposition, at first tries to be hieratical but can't: in the end it is inherently unreadable and like each of Zukofsky's works from "A" to Prepositions to A Test of Poetry is a case of just plain cruel theorizing. It seems to offend wherever it goes. The Zukofskys' sound translation of Catallus must have been a private joke. His saying in Bottom that "eyes are understood to be so often there in the Works [of Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, Boole, Charles Sander Peirce, etc.]it appears they wish to unite others to them in friendship" is rhetorical gibberish. He was no more a friend to classical authors than he was to Samperi. Zukofsky's penchant for an "alphabet of subjects" certainly would set all his imitators astir with language activity in the years after his death. But in Silliman's abcediary, to his credit, there's not this tampering with subjects he hasn't really mastered and certainly none of undergraduate's love of quotation-gathering. He's a "jigging fool" and he knows it. Zukofsky chose the "eye" or "seeing" as the work's central idea because it is necessarily vague enough to appear to convince without actually doing so. In Zukofsky you can appear to see and yet remain essentially "witless", and those are his own words.
Of course, I've offered only a few general comments, mainly "off the cuff", because I can't be bothered to look at individual examples for very long. I do dare anyone, however, to read Bottom: On Shakespeare (as Samperi and I have had to) and tell me what's really worth seeing there. I'm open to suggestions.
24 comments:
Boy, when you dont like something you *really* don't like it!
Life is too short, brother...
Go here for a more sympathetic treatment of Zukofsky's poetics.
Write a little more about Z's treatment of Samperi. I'm ignorant on that subject. Thanks!
Joseph,
I have Samperi's correspondences with both Zukofsky and Corman on which to base my claim that Zukofsky had treated his young charge with some disdain. There are two views of the mentor Zukofsky presented in Samperi's letters, that of the elder poet whom the young impressionable poet from Brooklyn had held in great esteem, writing often in the 50s to ask for feedback and outline his own developing spiritual poetics, sometimes even visiting the Zukofskys who'd treated Samperi cordially at first (he'd given him a typescript copy of "A"-12 as gift), and then that of the man who'd quite suddenly ignored him, openly snubbing him in public, discouraging all contact, as if he'd had no more time or energy for him. Samperi refers to that incident in his November 11, 1986 letter to Corman where "[Zukofsky] couldn't wait to be far away from the young odd dying one -- and he did remove himself, far away, to the back of the audience, where he was known...". Samperi also mentions in another letter that Zukofsky wouldn't give Samperi a free copy of "Bottom" but had scolded him for not being industrious enough to earn the money to purchase a copy. Celia Zukofsky had even made disparaging comments, within Samperi's hearing, of the poet coming again to their door with his "gift of chocolates".
Samperi, of course, had been devastated. In the course of his own developing poetics and personal maturity he had come to see Objectivist poetics in general as a sort of sordid "materialism" that turned poetry into technique only. Samperi had been particularly keen to show that the celebrated "upper limit music" dictum was a sham, the kind of theorizing typical of the "technical poet [who] has become the academic poet the professional poet". It was Samperi's contention that "technique in poetry" (thinking of Zukofsky certainly)could be learned in 2 weeks; the "Art of Poetry", on the other hand, is a life's work. To Samperi's "unitive" poetics (based on Tradition) was the "disjunctive" technique of Objectivists who glory in language dismemberment. In short, the poetics was the man. In his 1/23/80 letter to Corman he refers to Zukofsky's "hot shot heart": "..somehow somewhere along the line he was necessitated into just such a heart: his position against the young was defensive, i.e.,his kind kindness turned out to be the surface that is repressive: feeding off the young by right of sound". Here's a view of the author of the Objectivist Manifesto as someone who shouted down his opponents with the sordid shrillness of his own verses.
That's just the view of Zukofsky I also happen to hold.
Conrad:
I have no doubt it would always have been difficult to "know" the Zukofskys.
Even son Paul has apparently morphed into a bitter old man living in Asia, crouching in the weeds looking for LZ copyright violators to pounce on with threats of legal action.
Zukofsky was an intellectual, in the best sense of that word--a man of almost incalculable mental gifts, focused on several spheres of inquiry simultaneously: Literature, philosophy, art, history, Jewish culture and thought, music, etc. To read anything he wrote is to feel the pressure of that normous erudition, lightly handled, and always earnestly employed.
His life went through important transformations, the most significant of which were the political upheavals of the 1930's and 1940's and 1950's. Like many people during the Thirties, he was a Communist, and then did an about-face after the war. His commitment to "family" and the "chamber music" of his later years is an ambiguous turn. "A" is an attempt to collate his earlier radicalism with his later attitudes about politics and art.
I've never been a big fan of "A" but All: The Collected Poems is one of my touchstones.
I've never been able to appreciate Samperi. Does that explain Zukofsky's dismissal of him (or of his work)? I have no idea. As you know, I'm not at all impressed by Corman or Samperi or Tagliabue, or--for that matter--of Snyder's or Whalen's "orientalism"--though I love the poetry of both those other two men.
Maybe your work on Samperi will allow his work to be seen in a more favorable light.
Curtis,
your portrayal of the man is both generous and respectful. My problem is that I tend, rightly or wrongly, to filter impressions through my own likes and dislikes. I like Samperi; I dislike Zukofsky (tho I have read almost most of his substantial writings); and I therefore sympathize with Samperi's own views on the person whom he'd once revered. I think "Bottom" is a pretty good gauge of the man himself, wildly eclectic, wildly experimental and always cruelly disposed to silence his opponents with a display of "enormous erudition".
Have you read "Bottom"? If you have, what do you make of it? Like Olson I simply cannot read the man.
I hear you, Ed
but poetry's so saturated with "feeling" for me that I sometimes can't fairly represent a poet's working without throwing in my own dislikes or likes. Wasn't it Cicero who said a bad person can only be a bad writer??
Conrad:
I don't think Bottom is meant to be read straight through.
A Test is also--to my way of thinking--a mosaic or piecemeal fricassee. Like a textbook of examples.
I.e., you can start anywhere and jump around.
My habit of mind is to sample, not get in a tunnel and keep going to the other end.
Ed reminds us that formal preoccupations are the chief insight of post-Modernism, that to know the meaning of a thing is first to apprehend its underlying assumptions about how it can or should be understood and structured, before drawing any conclusions about its meaning or ultimate significance. The Poem beginning "The" is first of all an inquiry: Where do I (Zukofsky) fit into the historical moment in which The Waste Land is the standard of quality and meaning? How do we get from Browning and Tennyson and Whitman and Dickinson to Eliot and Pound (and Zukofsky), thence to the heroes of our own epoch?
Men of all times "feel" and speculate, but what separates them is their sense of how to go about presenting their feelings and ideas. Form itself is an idea, like any other, but it holds the key. What breakthroughs in form do you see in Samperi? I see him as just another quotidian poetaster, wanting to experience the thrall of submission.
Eigner makes the top of my head rise.
Olson and Zukofsky are worth the work it takes to understand them. Samperi?--not much effort, and not much pay-off.
You seem preoccupied with Samperi's "feelings" of personal rejection, as if that had anything to do with the significance of LZ's work.
Ultimately, we don't care who LZ liked or didn't like--just as we don't care about Pound the man. In 500 years, the biographies of these writers won't matter, just as the lives of Homer or Catullus or Ovid don't matter. I don't want to know anything about Dante's life. Or Browning's for that matter. It doesn't really count. The work is the thing.
Curtis,
"What breakthroughs in form do you see in Samperi?"
It is precisely the purpose of my book to answer that question. It's curious, however, that the choice of Eigner as favourite poet seems to have been based on pretty much the same visceral liking for a particular style and sensibility of work. I maintain that work and worker are the same. To tear the poet from his work is to destroy the heart of both.
I've had this argument with Kirby Olson over on his blog Lutheran Surrealism.
Kirby, of course, is a Puritan, who believes that a poet's life experience and behavior can be used as a measure to the value of the work.
That's heresy as far as I'm concerned. Nothing Pound the man did during his life detracts in any way from the poems in Cathay. They're great poems, and they stand well beyond any biographical fallacy.
Don't be seduced into the religious notion of evil is as evil does. It's just a loop.
I've always been a little fascinated with Kirby (haven't been reading him much lately) and probably no small part of that derives from the "Puritanism". As if that's a bad thing.
I'd say the secularist lives in a loop and god help you if (like me) your secularism comes limping after a nagging sense of "transcendence" at the same time. Believe me I've tried to shake it off but just can't. And besides, why should I? I believe Newman was on to something with his "grammar of assent", as if the brain's been hard-wired for both heaven and earth. Nothing's more abhorrent to me than a poetry that's narrowed its field to a prescribed set of "knowables" excluding the possibility of "assent" to the unknowables. There's a sort of Kierkegaardian "ethical demand" (in the sense of that expression provided by moral philosopher Knud Ejler Logstrup) to sacrifice the "self"in every significant discourse as a primary requisite for significant creative work. Poetic discourse, in particular, is one that holds to an infinite incommensurability between the eternal and temporal. This is not at our disposal: we cannot (as Objectivists in Samperi's day did and conceptual poetries do today)cavalierly rule it out without doing great harm. It almost seems silly to do so.
I propose that poets like Pound and Zukofsky rather than shrouding their work in 'exclusivity' and being held captive to their own "abstractions"--leaving the reader with the feeling that there's always necessarily more than appears--should have left room for the rich manifold of experience that is poetry's essence. One always feels the bludgeoning of sense in them and that heavy-handed will-to-dominate that cannot be separated from personality. Poetry is perhaps, Curtis, more person-driven than you'd care to admit.
Ed,
I'm afraid your right. But why should I feel it in poetry. Is that why we write poetry? Of course, I'm as guilty at times of that bludgeoning as the next guy.
WhenI'm reading poetry with great comprehension and pleasure, my moral compass is not operating.
I can read Wieners and Schuyler and O'Hara and Ashbery and not feel any moral discomfort whatever. For me, art is outside of morality and conduct. If you begin by applying ethical standards of behavior or conduct to art and artists and literature and writers, you end up in a dead end.
Is Milton a great poet? Unquestionably, but not because of anything in his personality or his "faith" or his life. Shakespeare is "beyond" ethical questions. Can a Nazi be a great anything? Without question. Does that create a great moral problem for us? Not at all.
Which is why I can appreciate great "Gay" art while not accepting the idea of Gay-ness as a guide to conduct. They're separate.
Samperi wouldn't be good or bad for me "because" of his ethics. Because ethics changes over time, and our knowledge of what is, is constantly being augmented (not necessarily "expanded" or "improved").
My problem is in crediting serious art which exists in outworn forms. I love Robert Bly's work, while acknowledging that he never had an interesting formal idea in his life. An entirely prosaic mind, but one which finds interesting things to say over and over again.
Curtis,
I can't for the life of me see how you can say "When I'm reading poetry with great comprehension and pleasure, my moral compass is not operating". It's ironic, however--and I notice this in detractors of 'transcendental' poetries in general-- that you employ the very privileging of will and intellect over the emotions that marks a decidedly medievalist way of thinking. What else could you possibly mean by "Form itself is an idea'"? And your preoccupation with form seems also to hanker after (again, in a Thomistic sense) a work's value-laden ("formal") properties like truth, goodness, beauty, etc., the very objects of "comprehension and pleasure" you posit as a work's final goal. Of course, the Thomistic universe is a God-saturated one; nothing like qualities inherent in whatever can give you objects of "comprehension and pleasure' can exist without God as foundation and source. But you talk in the same way and without presumably acceding to divine causality. It is presumably by a sort of "lumen propheticum" (think Eliot)peculiar to literary criticism that you can find, unsullied by personality or "feelings", resorting only to "form", the path to a work's personally satisfying properties. You've injected "form" into the discussion (and talk of "definition" also brings in "essence")when all you wanted to do is discredit anything that goes beyond a feeling of personal satisfaction.
In Samperi the "lumen propheticum" is supplied by divine illumination (which is primarily conveyed in light & angel imagery) and by a poetics that's entirely Dante-driven. At least we know where Samperi's loyalties lie. To say, as you do, that it's the author's mandate to furnish a "sense of how to go about presenting their feelings and ideas" appears to be bringing in a work's "transcendental" properties through the back door. The language is interestingly circular.
Conrad,
I seem to have offended you.
I think we all need to believe in the possibility of mutual amicable disagreement, and not fall into the trap of insulating ourselves out of private moral codes.
If you want me to avoid your blog, I will.
Curtis,
you have not offended me at all. I'm just replying (in as direct a way as possible) to your previous post. It's hard to gauge tone.
No offense, my friend. Have at me! I enjoy the verbal sparring.
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