Z-siteA Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky

Editorial Notes to the Annotations for 80 Flowers

These annotations to 80 Flowers are presented in three parts for each poem:
          1) a transcription of the notes and drafts from LZ’s draft notebook;
          2) a complete list of sources LZ consulted;
          3) a line by line replication of the original sources used.
The list of sources attempts to exhaustively identify those LZ consulted for any given poem as evidenced in his draft notes or other notebooks, regardless of whether or not they were used in the final poem. The sources replicated in part 3, on the other hand, only reproduce those which have plausibly contributed, directly or indirectly, to to the poems themselves. As can be seen, the sources for the large majority of the words and phrases out of which LZ constructed these poems can be quite precisely identified, while other sources contribute resonance or suggestive connections.

LZ used two pocket-size loose-leaf notebooks in the composition of 80 Flowers. The first (simply referred to as the 80 Flowers notebook or NBk) essentially consists of various lists of plants for potential use, primarily taken from Taylor’s Encyclopedia of Gardening, to which were added miscellaneous unused notes left over from “A”-22 & -23 plus dated notes from whatever LZ was reading during the course of working on 80 Flowers. In the second or draft notebook, LZ copied out the various notes he thought relevant for a given poem, out of which he composed the poem, usually in two, sometimes three drafts. The notes he copied into the draft notebook serve as a word hoard out of which he directly constructs the poems. Finally, he recopied the poems into a third fair copy notebook, which includes instructions to the typist, as well as some dedications and personal notes (there are actually two such notebooks, which for all practical purposes are identical, one held at the HRC and the other remained among PZ’s effects).

LZ’s general practice in the draft notebooks was to copy out all those notes he thought might be usable for a given poem with a standard blue ballpoint pen, leaving space for the draft, designating the eight lines by numbering them in red ink. Subsequent additions and markings were usually made with a red pen. Very occasionally he added further notes in black or in pencil. Most often he would draft the poem in pencil, involving a greater or lesser amount of erasing, and then would copy out a second, usually final, draft in blue ink. The completion of each poem is marked by three colored lines (blue, red, yellow) and the notes for the next poem would immediately follow – LZ was always adverse to wasting space.

For these transcriptions, the default color is black, with LZ’s black ink additions, which are not very frequent, appearing in blue and pencil in gray. These transcriptions ignore a good deal of secondary underlining and check marks added as LZ composed the poems, maintaining only his initial underlinings, which usually indicate titles and italics in his sources or are used as dividing lines to differentiate notes which were being squeezed onto the notebook page. However, it has to be admitted there are many instances where such distinctions are ambiguous, and therefore involve subjective editorial interpretation. (See the transcriptions of sample pages by Alex Grafen for an idea of how the pages look fully marked up.) With the drafts of the poems themselves, I have transcribed the entire draft only when a majority of the lines vary from their final printed version. In most cases, however, I have only presented those lines with variants or revisions, and it can be assumed the blank lines are identical to the final printed text. Since LZ usually worked on the initial draft in pencil, the “first draft” we end up with is usually quite advanced, and we cannot recover anything like the full drafting process. However, in the earlier poems, before LZ’s general practice became fairly settled, he drafted in ink, and there are examples of heavily worked drafts, with details often difficult to decipher.

Only basic bibliographical information is given in the list of sources and in the quoting of source materials. For full bibliographical information, including the precise editions LZ used, consult the 80 Flowers bibliography. The list of sources in part 2 follows the organization of the detailed bibliography into three groups: plant reference works, word reference works, and literary and other works (the first two groups ordered according to relative degree of frequency used in 80 Flowers and the latter chronologically). Although we can feel confident that the complete bibliography is close to exhaustive, there are a couple other “sources” that are beyond recovery: the notebooks indicate LZ took information from the various seed and bulb catalogs the Zukofskys used to mail order plants and also on occasion include his observations of the actual plants on their property at Port Jefferson on Long Island.

Textual notes, where relevant, have been added following the list of sources to register two types of information. First, errata with an indication at what point in the preparation and publication process the error was introduced. The authoritative text is assumed to be LZ’s holograph fair copy notebook(s), checked against the typescript. Michele Leggott identified one key errata in the Stinehour text (and another lesser error in her dissertation), but another half dozen or so errors were introduced with the CSP printing, including three instances of misspelled words. Second, “irregular” lines are noted (as recorded by Leggott), which have either a word less or more than the expected five (or in one case seven words). In 80 Flowers, hyphenated words are counted as one, and separated possessives (‘s, or in one case ‘d, preceded by a space) also count as one word. Such “irregularities,” quite typical of LZ programmatic poems, occur in 28 lines across 22 of the 81 poems (although at least one of these (#6 Spider or Ribbon Plant) is probably due to an inadvertent missing hyphen). See Textual Notes for full list of errata.

The dates of composition and dedications or personal notes that appear at the head of the sources and annotations in part 3 are taken from LZ’s fair copy notebooks. These dates are not always exactly the same as those in the draft notebook; the latter indicate when LZ began collecting notes for a given poem from his other notebooks, whereas the fair copy dates are restricted to the actual composition dates. Leggott conveniently includes a table of all these dates and dedications-notes as an appendix, but a few mis-transcriptions have been corrected here.

The sources in part 3, which are predominately reference works, have been reproduced as exactly as possible, with all their peculiarities and abbreviations, and they have often been replicated at some length in order to give an adequate idea of the types of textual materials with which LZ was working. To aid the reader, the specific words and phrases that appear to contribute directly to the poems have been underlined in red. The sources have been quoted without quotation marks, and everything that is not quotation is placed in braces or should be obvious (e.g. See . . .). An exception is quotations from LZ’s notebooks, which always appear within editorial braces and for the sake of clarity appear within quotation marks. For more extensive commentary on LZ’s use of his notebooks, his sources and compositional practice, see the Z-Notes commentary on LZ’s Notebooks and the section specifically on 80 Flowers.

Throughout the annotations, there are notations on the appearance of source materials in notebooks prior to those of the 80 Flowers draft notebook, which supply some of the non-botanical materials seemingly randomly interpolated into the poems. These include: (1) materials that LZ used but for whatever reason did not copy into the draft notebook and instead apparently took directly from the 80 Flowers notebook (NBk), and (2) materials carried over from earlier notebooks, that is, the so-called Black notebook used in preparation for “A”-22 & -23 and the working (as opposed to draft) notebook for “A”-22 & -23, much of which was copied from the Black notebook. For a detailed description of these various notebooks for “A”-22 & -23, as well as 80 Flowers, see Leggott 3-25.

Abbreviations and editorial marks

Transcriptions

Otherwise the transcriptions adhere as closely as practicable to the irregularities of the original, except that spelling has sometimes been silently corrected when Zukofsky is clearly copying out from his source, as is usually the case. Whenever a misspelling might be deliberate or reflect a Zukofsky mannerism, the “correct” spelling based on the source is given in braces. However, Zukofsky is fairly scrupulous about indicating with his initials whenever he deliberately alters his source, is simply paraphrasing, or adds something of his own.

As one would expect, Zukofsky uses a fair number of abbreviations, which for the most part can be figured out by context, but perhaps a list of the following might be helpful:

Sources