80 Flowers (1978)

L.Z.’s notes to 80 flowers (1978/2018), edited by Celia Zukofsky. Online Z-site; see also introductory notes.
80 Flowers Bibliography of Sources (pdf). Annotated list of all sources used in 80 Flowers as indicated by LZ’s notebooks.
80 Flowers notebooks. Transcriptions of sample pages by Alex Grafen
LZ’s Comments on “Bayberry.” Online Z-site.

Commentary

LZ comments at some length on #22 Bayberry in his Dec. 1975 reading of the first 22 Flowers (see PennSound); Leggott includes a transcript of these remarks in an appendix (369-372).

Álvarez, Faustino Álvarez & Emiliano Fernández Prado. “Presentación.” 80 Flowers / 80 Flores, trans. Álvarez & Prado. Gijón. Spain: Impronta, 2024. 9-26 [this edition includes an introduction and extensive notes in Spanish on all the poems].

Corman, Cid. “In the Event of Words.” Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet. Ed. Carroll F. Terrell (1979): 307-309 [on “Privet”].

___. “GAMUT/LZ.” Origin 4, fifth series (Fall 1984): 51-54.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. A Long Essay on the Long Poem: Modern and Contemporary Poetics and Practices. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. 98-102.

Florit, Rita R., trans. 80 Fiori/80 Flowers. Colorno, Italy: Benway Series, 2024 [this edition includes notes in Italian on all the poems and an afterword by Paul Vangelisti in both English and Italian].

Irby, Kenneth. “Some Notes on Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers and Michele J. Leggott’s Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers.” Sulfur 34 (1994): 234-249.

Johnson, Kent. “A Fractal Music: Some Notes on Zukofsky’s Flowers.” In Scroggins (1997): 257-275.

Kasemets, Udo. Z for Zuk for Zukofsky: A Celebration of 80 Flowers (1995).

Lang, Abigail. Le Monde, compte rendu. Lectures de Louis Zukofsky. ENS Editions, 2011.

___. “‘Reading slipperwort’: des articulations syntaxiques dans 80 Flowers de Louis Zukofsky.” Revue française d’études américaines 103 (Feb. 2005): 93-103.

___. “Comment finir?” in Louis Zukofsky, 80 fleurs, trans. Abigail Lang. Caen: Éditions NOUS, 2018. 91-99.

Leggott, Michele J. Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

___. “‘See How the Roses Burn!’ The Epigraph of Zukofsky’s80 Flowers.” Sagetrieb 4.1 (1985): 115-136.

Levi Strauss, David. “Approaching 80 Flowers.” Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. Ed. Michael Palmer (1983): 79-102. Online.

Lewis, Leon. “Aural Invention as Floral Splendor: Louis Zukofsky’s Vision of Natural Beauty in 80 Flowers.” The Writer’s Chronicle 40.4 (2008): 24-29. Online.

Perloff, Marjorie. “The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed: From Free Verse to Procedural Play.” Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. U of Chicago Press, 1994. 145-150 [on “Starglow”].

Parsons, Marnie. Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry (1993): 150-152.

Zukofsky, Paul. “Starglow” (part 1 of “Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas”). Musical Observations website.

 

80 Flowers was composed from 27 Dec. 1974 – 21 Jan. 1978 and published in a limited fine press boxed edition of 80 copies by the Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont in June 1978, a month after LZ’s death on 12 May 1978. In the last months of his life, LZ was working on another related volume to be called GAMUT: 90 Trees, of which only a single poem or epigraph was completed. This poem was published unauthorized as a broadside in 1984 (B. Brecht, Mahogonny City [sic]). 80 Flowers and the one composed poem for GAMUT only became widely available with their inclusion in CSP in 1991.

LZ was already anticipating 80 Flowers while composing “A”-22 & -23. The last hundred lines of “A”-22, which work with materials related to two trips in 1972 to Bermuda and Lake Como in Italy, are full of the the sort of botanical detail that would dominate the later book (LZ would use the notes taken during these trips in 80 Flowers as well). Similarly “A”-23 contains an interlude (554.6-37) describing the Zukofskys’ new house in Port Jefferson on Long Island, full of specifics about the flora on the property. Plus there are a couple of references to the anticipated project at “A”-23.538.31 and 562.9. Promptly on completing “A”-23 (the last written movement of “A”), LZ began on the 80 Flowers project with the stated intention of working on it for a decade to be completed by his 80th birthday, but fortunately he worked well ahead of schedule. Leggott includes an Appendix that gives a chart listing the specific dates of composition for each of the poems of 80 Flowers. LZ outlined the parameters of the 80 Flowers project in a few brief notes replicated in CZ’s L.Z.’s notes to 80 flowers (see above).


Note on the text: The publication of CSP in 1991 made an almost entirely inaccessible text finally available to interested readers, but in the process a number of textual errors crept in. Michele Leggott identified one error in the original Stinehour edition (and another in her dissertation), but at least seven further instances have been identified in the CSP text by the Spanish translators Faustino Álvarez Álvarez and Emiliano Fernández Prado, whose scrupulousness I wish to thank. A further few, probably unintentional, variants are revealed by comparison with LZ’s fair copy notebook (what Leggott refers to as the “spiral” notebook), which I take to be the most authoritative text. See the Textual Notes. The elongated spaces before a hyphen in “Spider or Ribbon Plant” (line 4) and after a hyphen in “Coleus” (line 4) are ambiguous cases: no such extra space appears in LZ’s fair copy, but they do in the typescript, which Álvarez and Fernández Prado plausibly argue was intended to signal to the printer that the hyphen was not to be run into the preceding or following word, as is often the case elsewhere in 80 Flowers. Furthermore, the Stinehour edition does not number the poems, although both LZ’s fair copy and the typescript do include numbers, excluding the epigraph poem. LZ may have made a last minute decision to leave out the numbers, as there is a note in his fair copy notebooks that page numbers should be put at the bottom so as not to be confused with the poem numbers, but then this note was crossed out and marked “discard.” In the Stinehour edition the titles are given in all caps, as was LZ’s typical practice, which has been replaced by a conventional use of initial capitals only in the CSP text.