Z-siteA Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky

Mark Scroggins

The notion of the “Objectivists” as posse of four – Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, and Rakosi (with Williams, Niedecker, and Bunting as occasional outriders) – is largely a retrospective construction of literary history, dating from L. S. Dembo’s 1968 series of interviews with Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, and Rakosi, and their 1969 publication in Contemporary Literature as “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet: Four Interviews.” It is clear, as the contents of the February 1931 “Objectivists” 1931 issue of Poetry magazine and the 1932 An “Objectivists” Anthology (both edited by Zukofsky) indicate, that the term “Objectivist” was originally intended as something quite other than a name for a given half-dozen poets.

            The original “Objectivists” issue of Poetry can be viewed at the Poetry Foundation (minus the contributors notes). The contents of both the “Objectivists” issue and the anthology are as follows:

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The goals of the Objectivists’ two publishing programs – To, Publishers and The Objectivist Press¹² – are perhaps best summed up in the statement of purpose Charles Reznikoff composed for the dust wrapper of The Objectivist Press’s first publications:  “The Objectivist Press is an organization of writers who are publishing their own work and that of other writers whose work they think ought to be read.” Zukofsky was salaried editor for To, Publishers, which was largely bankrolled by George and Mary Oppen; books published by The Objectivist Press, whose editorship was collective, were underwritten directly by their authors (except for Williams’s Collected Poems, which was funded by subscription). 

Books published by To, Publishers

William Carlos Williams, A Novelette and Other Prose (1932).

Ezra Pound, Prolegomena 1: How to Read, Followed by The Spirit of Romance, Part 1 (1932).

Louis Zukofsky, ed., An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932).

Books published by The Objectivist Press

William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems 1921-1931, with an introduction by Wallace Stevens (1934).¹³

George Oppen, Discrete Series (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, Jerusalem the Golden (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (prose), with a preface by Kenneth Burke (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, In Memoriam: 1933 (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, Separate Way (1936).

Louis and Celia Zukofsky revived The Objectivist Press imprint in 1948 to publish Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry, and for a while the Zukofskys corresponded on Objectivist Press letterhead which advertised their 30 Willow Street, Brooklyn address as the Press’s location.

Notes (added by JTW)

¹ Pseudonym for LZ and/or Irving Kaplan; in the contributors notes, LZ states that Joyce Hopkins is from Berkeley, CA where his good friend Kaplan lived. Aside from the title, this poem consists, of a single found line—“Dis in napa now trailing the sterilized.”— apparently taken from a sentence written by Kaplan. As LZ explained in a letter to Edmund Wilson (22 March 1963), “Dis” was the name of a female social worker in Napa, California, while de-capitalized napa was a trade name for a naphthalene or naptha product. See 14 Dec. 1931 letter to EP for an explanation and possible interpretations of this poem (EP/LZ 120-121).

² This selection of Reznikoff poems, as well as “The English in Virginia” included in An “Objectivists” Anthology, would all be subsequently published in Jerusalem the Golden (1934) by The Objectivist Press.

³ This poem is the last section of the long, Prolegomena to a Theodicy, which would be included complete in An “Objectivists” Anthology.

⁴ “1930’s” was apparently Oppen’s earlier or working title for what would become Discrete Series, whose first three poems are those that appeared in the “Objectivists” Poetry issue and An “Objectivists” Anthology. The bibliographical notes for these poems in Oppen’s New Collected Poems (2002) are mixed up.

⁵ In Bunting’s Complete Poems (111-112), this poem is Ode I.15: “Nothing / substance utters or time,” plus “Appendix: Iron,” which was subsequently separated out as an individual poem, Ode I.16: “Molten pool, incandescent spilth of.”

⁶ Aside from brief notes on contributors, LZ notes that “A poem by Horace Gregory, arriving too late to be included this month, will appear in a later issue [“A Tombstone with Cherum,” appeared in the following issue of Poetry 37.6 (March 1931): 306-307]. The editor regrets the delay; also the limitations of page-space which prevent his presenting contributions by Helen Margaret, Herman Spector, John W. Gassner, William Lubov, B.J. Israel, Chrystie Streeter, Sherry Mangan, Donal McKenzie and Jerry Reisman. The editor also regrets the omission of a blank page representing Ezra Pound’s contribution to this issue—a page reserved for him as an indication of his belief that a country tolerating outrages like article 211 of the U.S. Penal Code, publishers’ ‘overhead,’ and other impediments to literary life, ‘does not deserve to have any literature whatsoever.’ Mr. Pound gave over to younger poets the space offered him.” In his contributor’s note, LZ remarks: “His poem ‘A’—in process—includes two themes: I—desire for the poetically perfect finding its direction inextricably the direction of historical and contemporary particulars; and II—approximate attainment of this perfection in the feeling of the contrapuntal design of the figure transferred to poetry; both themes related to the text of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion” [Scroggins notes that “figure” is almost certainly a mistranscription of “fugue,” an easy mistake given LZ’s handwriting].

⁷ The Dedication reads as follows:
                    “And that was the revolution . . .
                            as soon as they named it.”

To
Ezra Pound
who despite the fact
that his epic discourse
always his own choice of matter
causes him in his Cantos
to write syntactically almost no two lines
the consecutiveness of which
includes less than two phrases
“And doom goes with her in walking,
Let her go back to the ships,
back among Grecian voices.”
himself masterly engaging
an inference of musical self-criticism
in his Fifth Canto
(readers can afford to look for the lines)
is still for the poets of our time
the
most important.

The opening quotation is from EP’s Canto XVI, from a passage describing Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution that LZ quotes at length in his essay on EP’s Cantos (Prep+ 70-71). The second quotation is from Canto II.

⁸ The epigraph reads: “to give to the epic its rightful qualities, to find again the essential distinction of the epic, which is neither love nor hate but the restitution of these sentiments to a chain of facts which exist, and the existence of which confers upon them the marvelous.” This is taken from Taupin’s article “Three Poems by André Salmon,” translated by LZ and included in the “Objectivists” Poetry issue (337). LZ also uses this quotation in “‘Recencies’ in Poetry” prefacing the Anthology (see Prep+ 213-214).

⁹ Reznikoff’s contributions in the first section of An “Objectivists” Anthology are a short play, Rashi, that appeared in Nine Plays (1927) and an excerpt from “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” an early version of the prose Testimony published by The Objectivists Press in 1934, which would in turn be reworked and considerably expanded as verse (or what Reznikoff called “recitative”) and eventually published in four books beginning with Testimony: The United States 1885-1890: Recitative (New Directions, 1965). Further sections of “My Country, ’Tis of Three” also appeared in 1932 in Contact edited by WCW and Robert McAlmon: 1.1 (Feb 1932): 14-34, 1.2 (May 1932): 99-108. However, somewhat oddly, in LZ’s selection for the Anthology, he quotes Reznikoff’s note on using law reports as his primary materials, but then only gives excepts from the lyrical catalogs and none of the actual cases. These lyrical catalogs would disappear from the later, recitative version of Testimony. 

¹⁰ These “collaborations” consist of poems that LZ has abridged through deletions, often quite radically. Rexroth insisted a note of protest be appended: “I have read this over once more. I cannot allow it to be printed with my signature. You can append a note that it has been abridged by L. Z., if you wish, or print it entire or don’t print it at all. It simply makes no sense to me at all.” “After Les Collines” refers to the long poem by Guillaume Apollinaire in Calligrammes—Reisman and LZ produce a four-line, 22-word, highly fragmentary poem that appears to have little to do with “Les Collines” and whose last line translates a line from another poem, Apollinaire’s “La Victoire.”

¹¹ This is a severely truncated version of the two statements that appeared in the Poetry “Objectivists” issue, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931” and “Sincerity and Objectification,” including the crucial statements on poetics. From the former is included the opening paragraphs through the list of recommended reading and from the latter the two definitional paragraphs on “sincerity” and “objectification.”

¹² The publishing history of these two presses is examined in detail by Tom Sharp, “The ‘Objectivists’ Publications,” Sagetrieb 3.3 (Winter 1984): 41-47.

¹³ This volume is actually a selection, that according to WCW himself was largely chosen and edited by LZ (I Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Edith Heal, New Directions, 1977: 52). Despite the title, the collection includes a section of earlier poems.