Tribute to Zukofsky
Read at "Poetries of the 1940s:
American and International"
University of Maine, 23 June 2004
About six months after Louis Zukofsky’s death in 1978, six San Francisco poets (three of them here tonight) staged a production of “A”–24 in the Grand Piano Reading Series. The occasion was memorable not only as a realization of an impossibly difficult work, but as the definition of a community in and among writers—a utopian community founded on textual displacement, in fact—that would confirm the group’s identity and politics.
I’ll
never forget the triumphant assertion of my line “Voice, a voice blown,”
scored for haut voix, thundering through our carefully staged cacophony.
It truly echoed through the ruins of a cathedral constructed of fragments of
language—one built from the perspective of a nonbeliever as well. One tried to
listen deeply in to its opacities and overtones, to the heart of the
masterpiece’s simultaneous grandeur and incoherence. One found the text to be,
as Zukofsky anticipated throughout his career, both an instruction in
epistemology and a demonstration of its failure.
Zukofsky provided us with an example of critical negativity—a deferral or withholding of closure, totality, and even comprehension—and a vehicle for realizing it in real time, with others. Louis Zukofsky as author—interpreted through Celia Zukofsky in “A”–24, who fused the horizons not only of Zukofsky’s work in several genres but Händel’s music—was reenacted by others, defined around an empty center of prospective authorship. This was our production as a critical act—a politics of deferred language in the here and now.
I
remember talking with Marilyn Schwartz, the editor at UC Press who helped bring
out “A” . . . about our production—particularly its opacity. She
said, yes, it’s like my Jewish relatives—everyone trying to talk at the
table at the same time. At the same time, “A”–24 is the apotheosis
of the Christian tradition, possibly one of the most redemptive moments in
American literature. “See Him? Whom? The Son of Man.” Was all that
redemptiveness being written, as it were, with tongue in cheek? . . . Was he
putting us on? . . . Were we participating in a grand joke at the expense of our
entry into tradition, or were we signing our names in blood to a higher order of
retrospectively confirmed literariness that would, in a reassuring way, contain
us (and all the cacophonous eruptions of this moment of filial piety to our
modernist master)? For all our careful scoring of textual emphasis, were we of
the avant-garde the original misreaders? [Perhaps] we had in part misrecognized
Zukofsky’s endorsement of our own, arguably more radical, poetic project. At
the same time, we wanted his endorsement; we wanted to claim him as our own.
Retrospectively confirmed literariness is what is meant by the
“author”—not the agency of the work, looking forward, but its destination
in a negotiated tradition of meaning and value. Zukofsky seemed in our reading
to argue, with us, for agency rather than authorship in that sense, yet he is
surely one of the most author-centered of authors (in a canon that has not yet
entirely accepted him). All that aside—we wanted to proceed according to the
lights of our reading, and the potential for the possibility of writing it
demanded.
We
were married by Zukofsky, in the State of Modernist Apotheosis, County of
Temporal Crisis. Later, in temporal fact and legal fiction, as it happened, we
were married in the State of California, County of Alameda—in the same Alameda
County Courthouse where Edwin W. Meese, later Attorney General, ruled the roost
for many years as one of the last representatives of the old guard Republican
oligarchy that made the City of Oakland mean what it did to everyone at the
time: repression. There is a famous photograph of Black Panther Party members
raising their fists at the art deco monument of the Alameda County Courthouse. I
was in the crowd of supporters that witnessed that salute. Later, Meese would
return as facilitator of the Meese Commission Report, another document of
repression. Let us pause to remember Edwin W. Meese. As I wrote in Conduit:
“Our marriage domesticated the courthouse.” This writing is his tombstone;
we survived.
Here, I am reading Zukofsky with the politics of the 1960s—and through later moments as well. There is no doubt that the politics of the 1930s—not merely as an apprenticeship to modern authorship but as record of a desire for social transformation, as utopian vision and revolutionary agency—persist in the totality of Zukofsky’s work, the turn to Spinoza and family values notwithstanding. It is to an open, deferred, counter-authorial reading of his work that I would aspire; if in politics (totality) and religion (millennium) we are not there yet, neither are we in terms of the author. Zukofsky is a site for construction.
I
read him, over and over again, in the late 1960s. I read him at the beach, on
the bus, on the top of Mt. Tamalpais. The poems in All were as good as
nature: they were a kind of second nature, better than the first. And of course,
quite fitting for someone as belated as myself, these poems were, as second
nature, an order of art predicated on belatedness. There is not an original
Zukofsky; there is the Zukofsky who wrote and pared down what he wrote until all
that was left is what survived. In many ways, his position vis à vis the
modernist masters—who will make one feel belated if anyone will—is an apt
analogy to our own. Or my own—I was twenty years old at the time of first
reading Zukofsky, but wondered what had kept me away so long.
In the spirit of that reading, then, I argue for a continuation of Zukofsky’s work in a reading that is not the textual encryption that will keep scholars busy for the next one hundred years; not the overarching horizon of love that immanently aligns with value and tradition; not the material text of fascination and horror as the site of sublime investment in the absent author; not the dehistoricized cult object, finally, that is used to confer on a poetics of language its authority and tradition—but for a poet of deferred comprehension, of textual difference and historical unfolding, of encryption and reconstitution, read as a poetic example of negative dialectics that aligns the best of modernist authorship with the most vital of modern critical theory; a poet who renders impossible an authorized reading and thus puts forward an obdurate textuality to keep open both a horizon of new meaning and the record of the historical struggle that had given rise to such a totalizing desire.
Zukofsky
proposed a risk that we accepted, to be a part of his perverse redemption, his
ironic send-up of Christian, high humanist literary tradition as a joke for the
ages, even as we knew the better of it. The heaven we would get, in any case,
would be in the act of reading, a deferred particularity. It turned out, I
thought, that Zukofsky had better be read as a Marxist. That would put his sense
of particulars right back down on the ground, back in the world where they
came from and we are, if belatedly. Our reading was not originary, and not in
homage to any original. It was, however, always at the beginning of a series of
acts, from that one until now, as we are only just finding out. Hence, it would
not be possible to have done with epistemology [even as Zukofsky attempted it].
Equally so, it would not be possible to write transparently in the name of love.
Obdurate love.
[Material in sans serif excerpted from Barrett Watten, The Grand Piano, an ongoing collaborative mémoire of the literary politics of the 1970s. © 2004 Barrett Watten; all rights reserved.]