80 Flowers notebooks

The following transcriptions draw from two notebooks that Zukofsky used in preparing and writing 80 Flowers: a working notebook, in which Zukofsky gathered notes relevant to the project and developing its scheme; and a draft notebook, in which Zukofsky carried over relevant notes for a specific poem in the series and then drafted the poem. For a more detailed discussion of the correspondence between the notebooks and the poems, see Michele Leggott, Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (1989). For a sense of how Zukofsky used the notebooks for 80 Flowers in comparison to how he used them for other poems, see Jeff Twitchell-Waas, ‘Zukofsky’s Notebooks’ (Z-notes).

The selection of five pages here include one from the working notebook and four from the draft notebook. The selection is intended to give a sense of the variety of the notebooks and their role in the genesis of a poem, for example in p.19 and p.20 for the development of ‘Venus’s Looking-glass’.

Both spiral notebooks are the same size (7.75″ x 5″) with additional loose pages, and Zukofsky often worked right up to the edges of the page. Up to a point, the fixed size of the page served as a productive constraint analogous to the fixed length of the poems. However, as with the poems, Zukofsky did not adhere to the constraints rigorously. In the interests of legibility, I have adjusted the page shape as needed, added margins, and made several other small adjustments. As was his typical practice, Zukofsky used different colored ball-point pens for different stages of his notes, which is reflected in the transcriptions.

Curly braces that do not span multiple lines indicate editorial intervention, as in {?} to indicate uncertainty in reading the preceding word. Where the word is illegible {x} has been inserted, with the number of “x”s corresponding to the likely number of illegible words.

In addition, Zukofsky’s key sources for the notebook page have been listed at the bottom of each page. Entries in the Century Dictionary frequently include literary quotations demonstrating the use of the word being defined. Where Zukofsky has transcribed the quotation, the dictionary entry has been listed in the source references rather than the original text.

Alex Grafen