For the "Culture" of Matthew Arnold, cultural studies has successfully substituted Raymond Williams' quotidian culture of the populace, a shift that has seemed laudable insofar as it: assists in the exposure of the institutional processes at play in the canonization of works of high art; helps critique the false binarization of "Literature" and popular culture; and reformulates culture as an open, contested, heterogeneous space. (See Grossberg et al) Yet because the practice of cultural criticism has attended primarily to those works occupying the position of "popular" or produced from positions of ethnic, gender, or class marginality, it has inadvertently sustained (or cloaked) values it should wish to critique. In valorizing the contestatory virtues of the "popular" to the exclusion of the literary--which it associates with hegemonic, Arnoldian values--cultural criticism succumbs to the reflexive pairing of oppositional ideology (content) with transparent, unself-conscious language (conventional form). <1> In so doing it replicates the tension between content and form most evident in the relation of radical politics and aesthetics in early part of the twentieth century.

So what place can avant-garde poetry expect now to find in cultural studies? Contrary to the best expectations and dire warnings of various Cassandras, cultural criticism has not effected a major restructuring of the literary canon. Its general impact has been the formation of an "Institutionalized multiculturalism," that, as Charles Bernstein argues, "represents the culmination of Arnoldian principles of distinction . . . " rather than a critiquing of canonicity (39). The most salient effect of the culture wars upon the literature departments of the academy is that the newer Norton anthologies designate their final pages to a handful of authors from a more varied demographic. <2> The basic premises of literariness and the falsely naturalized process of canon formation remain relatively unreconstructed. For instance, while the recently produced the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford) edited by Cary Nelson (who is associated with cultural studies as a co-editor of its most noted anthology) broadens the cultural and political range of selections beyond most previous anthologies, those writers most noted for the opacity of their work receive pro-forma inclusion through the presentation of uncharacteristically accessible work. <3> In this cultural studies project, the exclusions inevitable in any anthologization have fallen heavily on writers associated with the avant garde, those who "present" their "content" in more opaque language. <4>

In the pages that follow, I want to revisit Louis Zukofsky's aesthetically avant-garde, politically left poetry of the 1930s and to identify an implicit corrective that might allow us to think through the apparent incompatibility that prohibits cultural studies from fully engaging with the avant-garde. I want to briefly look at several instances where Zukofsky published formally innovative work in populist or politicized venues in order to articulate how the problems facing the publication and reception of Zukofsky's work in the 1930s find their cousins in the disconnection between cultural criticism and avant-garde literature sixty years later. I argue that the present lack of integration not only diminishes literary studies by maintaining a status quo multiculturalism, as I have suggested above, but also impoverishes cultural studies. In this, my premise is best articulated by Ron Silliman's provocative insistence that a "critical element of oppositionality" exists in the work of such writers as Zukofsky, and that it "lies in the[ir] identification of method with content" (132). To ignore the cultural work of poetry is to neglect a fruitful mode of oppositional practice.

If one might reasonably have expected to find the formally innovative American poet of the 1930s in Ezra Pound's journal Exile, the politically progressive writer appeared in the left-wing, magazine the New Masses. Under the increasingly influential premises of socialist realism, the New Masses came increasingly to prefer the presentation of formally accessible literature that delivered the ideological goods (Scroggins 49-52). So while Louis Zukofsky's then Marxist politics corresponded to some degree with those of the magazine, his literary work would generally have been regarded as suspect (because hermetic, inaccessible, not speaking directly to the struggle). Thus his choice to publish a relatively accessible "worker's chorus" extracted from "A"-8 in a 1938 New Masses can be fruitfully analyzed as an effort to "come to grips with the tension" in the American tradition "between the political and literary spheres" (Scroggins 49). By choosing an excerpt that belies the complexity of the longer movement "A"-8, he thus registered an awareness of this political/aesthetic tension and signaled at least a brief willingness to submit to its strictures.

About this same time, however, Zukofsky indicates he had completed a Workers Anthology, which he describes as having the purpose of providing workers with poetry that speaks to their condition and could serve as models for their own writing of poetry (Panel Discussion). The uncompromising stance toward that political/aesthetic tension stands in contrast to the publication above. If we judge from the subsequent A Test of Poetry, the anthology into which some of the material for the unpublished Workers Anthology was incorporated, it was remarkably free from any obvious intent to 'talk down' to the workers and without any adjustment of the aesthetic to suit the political. Passages about folk art from the editorial notes interspersed throughout A Test of Poetry convey Zukofsky's seemingly unconflicted allegiance to both the populist and aesthetic: "Folk art occurs with inevitable order as part of the growing history of a people. . . . the essential technique of folk art . . . --its simplicity, its wholeness of emotional presentation--can serve as a guide to any detail of technique growing out of the living processes of any age" (70). And again, "Poetry does not arise and exist in a vacuum. It is one of the arts--sometimes individual, sometimes collective in origin--and reflects economic and social status of peoples . . . "(99). Characterized at its best by "sincere convictions . . . [and] the art of simplicity," folk poetry "is not the property of the few 'arty,' but of everybody" (103).

Should we understand the gesture toward folk sources in A Test and the Workers Anthology itself as symptomatic of an absolute, blind universalizing (the purveyor of elite culture not even acknowledging the position of his audience: workers) or a noble refusal to abide by the division between high and low art, high and low audiences? How do these projects reframe the publication of the atypical extract from "A"-8 in New Masses? Or, to reframe the question in terms of the contemporary, disciplinary tension--in theoretically leveling the distinction between high and low art, does cultural studies usefully resolve the conflict or merely achieve a "collapsing of the low and the high against the middle" (Bernstein 40)?

Two minor public incidents in Zukofsky's career present a window through which to think about these questions in terms of cultural poetics. On June 7, 1937 and October 24, 1938, Zukofsky read sections of "A"-8 on New York radio stations WOR and WQXR. These moments of "Nationwide Hookup" are significant in being two of Zukofsky's few opportunities for some years to reach a large audience through a modern, mass medium. What's more, they represent the presence of a normally peripheral, avant garde in the space of popular culture. As we examine these performed poems, consider the implications of airing such poems for a general audience. How might they have been received? How does their recontextualization as relatively brief radio works shift their meaning? Do they accede to the dictates of an imagined "popular" (as in the New Masses aesthetic), resist it, reconfigure it, or attempt to straddle the divide between popular and avant-garde? In the 1937 WOR reading, part of a dialogue sponsored by the League of American Writers, Zukofsky reads a section from "A"-8 that begins an exposition on the theme of production which is overt in its politics, but covert in its literariness:

But the labor process —

Consider the labor process apart

From its particular form under particular

social conditions

What distinguishes any worker from the best

of the bees

Is that the worker builds a cell in his head

before he constructs it in wax.

The labor process ends in the creation of a thing,

Which when the process began

Already lived as the worker's image. ("A" 61)

"A"-8 violates the expectations held by the dominant poetic tradition of the time; it is non-metrical, bereft of obvious symbolism or figurative language, etc. and integrates stanzas on a collage principle. But its language is not inaccessibly opaque. If anything, the poem is likely to have been deemed a bit prosaic by unsympathetic listeners. The selection concludes with a line that felicitously references the corporate dominance of Standard Oil Company of New York, which extended even to the medium of radio itself: "SOCONY will not always sign off on this air" (63). With this odd anticipation of Gill Scott Heron's famous "the revolution will not be televised," Zukofsky's "A"-8 too implies a revolution of a sort. He suggests that workers and products--be they woodworkers and their chairs, or writers and their poems--might have a common relationship to and in their work. As products of labor, they are equally distinguished commodities enlivened by the imagining of the worker. In reading this passage of "A"-8 on the air, Zukofsky's reaches emphatically towards the possibility of poesis as a veritable craft, a form of labor.

As the narrative of American poetry during the 1930s has it, writers of otherwise incommensurable camps came to see the relation between art and society as a central issue (Nelson 17). Recent critics of Objectivist writing tend to agree on at least one characteristic: that it is "aware of its own historical contingency and situatedness" (DuPlessis and Quartermain 6). While for many the choice between aestheticism and realism dichotemized the possible responses, the above performance from "A"-8 emphasizes how Louis Zukofsky's poetry of this decade reflects the intersection between a high modernist aesthetics and a left-wing politics with a deep concern for history (Scroggins 49, 54). In this light, when his "Program 'Objectivists' 1931"--the foundational essay for what has subsequently seemed a heterogenous group of writers--defines the Objectivist poem as enmeshed in "the direction of historic and contemporary particulars" (268), it makes a double-voiced claim on behalf of politics and poetics.

Along with his reading from "A"-8, Zukofsky contributed to the dialogue on station WOR by responding to a the host's question about how the contemporary poet reconciled social responsibility with aesthetics. Preserved on a little-noted sheet of paper held among Zukofsky's archives at the University of Texas, Zukofsky's response conceives of the relation of art and society in a scenario perhaps only articulable at the precise moment in the course of American poetry and history:

It's obvious a poet lives in his time and can't escape it, and he writes because he lives in his time. Today obviously he can't escape even to the so-called ivory tower, for he's likely to find it's in the Chrysler Bldg. A poet's technique keeps up with the working materials of his time, just as other craftsmen and workers keep up with theirs. . . . It is unfortunate that the poet to-day has [not] carried over into his job the business of the division of labor as other workers, because good poetry is a product (sic) more of dealing with specific tasks, than of poetic sentiment. . . .Yes, it would be nice if poets could forget themselves get together and one do this about a poem, and one suggest this and the other cadence, etc. and produce a cooperative poem which would be a product of their combined labor and not of individual sentiment. <5>

Zukofsky's statement emphasizes that the poet must be responsive to the contemporary world, in his case urban New York, and match it as material for poetry through formal engagement, perhaps even through collective labor. Such a response argues for the impossibility of practicing an autonomous, formalist poetry. The statement indicates Zukofsky was thinking about the poem in social terms circa 1937, as an object produced by and reflecting on historical and social conditions. Interesting for its content and context as a public intervention, it advances an image of the poet working alongside other laborers, rather than as a bard speaking for nation or tribe.

It is in this respect that Objectivist poetry can be situated in the loosely defined tradition of the American epic that begins with the democratic vistas of Walt Whitman, moves through the "poem including history" of Ezra Pound, and arrives at a labor theory of poetics in the first half of Zukofsky's "A."which works towards the constitution of a "social voice" for poetry (di Manno 297). According to Yves di Manno, the development of a "social voice" for poetry (297), or what might with equal aptness be called the social epic, reflects the Objectivist interest in "reclaiming the possibility of a collective song, a social voice, putting the emphasis on the bonding of a poet to a community" and exists "in contradistinction to a strictly individual trajectory of development" (297). Objectivist poetics is social to the extent that "the poem weaves, knots, and unravels the fibers connecting the artist to a particular place and time" (298). As it combines the characteristic Objectivist interest in a poetry of historical particulars with an artisanal dynamic of production worthy of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century craftsman, Zukofsky's social vision might be contextualized in terms of his reading of Marx. The commonly identified source for Zukofsky's thinking about labor, production, and all things economic, Marx, along with Thorsten Veblen, invites the analogy with mechanical production that leads to the idea that poetry is ideally an impersonal art that might be practiced communally. Zukofsky adopts the Marxist labor theory of value to the extent that poesis becomes a "subcategory of production" and poetry "a commodity" in his poetry and correspondence of the 1930s (Marsh 105). But another source at work here in fomenting this equation between craftsmen and poets is Zukofsky's extensive, first-hand research into the tradition of American handicrafts.

An important influence in fomenting this equation between workers and poets was Zukofsky's extensive, first-hand research into the tradition of American handicrafts as a research writer for the WPA Index of American Design, which contributes to Zukofsky's "concern with the labor process, and to beauty, for he was studying objects that combined elements of both" (Ahearn 83). One of five divisions of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) established on May 6, 1935, the Federal Arts Project (FAP) engaged Zukofsky and some 6,000 other individuals in its employ. The Index of American Design, a program of the FAP, aimed to recover and diffuse information about U.S. culture, at a time when interest in handicrafts had just begun to emerge; like all Federal One programs, it aimed at once to create jobs and provide a public service. Envisioned as an eventual publication of encyclopedic scope, the Index of American Design now exists as an archive at the National Gallery of Art, including "approximately 18,000 watercolor renderings of American decorative arts objects from the colonial period through the nineteenth century." While visual artists worked to illustrate characteristic craft objects, "researchists" like Zukofsky compiled information from primary sources as well as publications geared toward collectors.

Editorial Director of the Index, Constance Rourke, wrote in 1937 that the work then being done "under the Federal Art Project by the Index of American Design, in recording sequences of examples in the useful and decorative arts, suggests both the richness of this phase of our inheritance and the slenderness of our knowledge." She depicts the Index as responding to a particularly American need for a cultural vocabulary that might be absorbed through the "strong and natural association with evidences of the past" more typical of European experience; the assembly and eventual publication of the Index, she argued, would allow for citizens and prospective artists to "saturate themselves with a knowledge of forms which have been essential to us in the past, getting a sense of these into their minds and eyes and at the ends of their fingers, without any immediate purpose." Zukofsky's own summation of the Index in the "Henry Clay Figurehead" radio script represents the ideals of the project in terms congruent with those of Rourke:

The artists, research workers, and writers of the Index, a division of the New York City Art Project, are preparing for publication a monumental history of American handicrafts. The whole field of manual and decorative crafts in America will be summed up in colored and black and white plates together with written descriptions of the objects rendered. The Index of American Design promises to be a new history of our country from the earliest days down to the present revival of handicrafts. (166)

We do not know precisely how Zukofsky came to undertake the job of Index researchist, but it is consistent in some ways with his known interests.<6> In a 1937 letter to fellow poet Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky wrote, "I am now outlining the economic, political background of American Design (useful arts)--and with a chance to read and study history" (Pound 193). His appreciation of this research job--"a responsible position while it lasts"--is at first begrudging. The drain on his poetic energy must have been compounded by what he perceived as the political inequity of the fact that so many of his contemporaries had been invited to take part in the Federal Writers Project, employed to do their own writing (Ahearn 81). Zukofsky was presumably comfortable with the Index's mission to represent a national, cultural heritage, but it is also clear that he found a personal use for the job. As evidenced by specific poetic borrowing from his research, he gradually came to appreciate the fact that the work might contribute to his poetry, both as information and in giving a model of artistic laboring; it "could contribute to his concern with the labor process, and to beauty, for he was studying objects that combined elements of both" (Ahearn 83).

In one of two studies indispensable to those interested in Zukofsky's Index work, "Zukofsky, Marxism, and American Handicraft," Barry Ahearn argues that Zukofsky's Index research documents a tradition in which productive labor of craftsmen was not dissociated from issues of form and aesthetics--a tradition, that is, which essentially confirms Zukofsky's own poesis. (Ahearn 84) Zukofsky's preoccupation with complex form, rather than the transparent social messages of poetry popular in venues such as the left-wing periodical New Masses, troubled his own relation with American Marxism. While the popular and institutional interest in American craft tradition proceeded largely out of a desire for "totems of a pure-blooded American past" (Ahearn 88-89), Zukofsky finds that "these artifacts illuminate the social and economic life of the common people" (89)--and can, should be recovered so as to speak of and for the same. Thus, Ahearn observes, "the attraction Zukofsky finds in American handicrafts and design that predate industrial manufacture is the attraction of an artist who sees his own work as comparable to theirs. The same values he finds in their craft exist in his. . . . "A" itself . . . is an American handcraft" (90). Research into American Design bears on Zukofsky's poetics because he found the handicraft tradition applicable by analogy to poetic method, and historical information about labor, fit subject.

Rather than seeing these Index essays as an isolated example of an American poet doing cultural research, Ira Nadel argues they should be placed in the context of kindred work by William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, and Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur. (114). In his critical study, "'Precision of Appeal': Louis Zukofsky and the Index of American Design," Nadel observes that a central lesson Zukofsky derived from the Index was the discovery, or, arguably, the confirmation "that materiality and its preoccupation with making is the very heart of a craft" (117). Nadel summarizes the importance of Zukofsky's work on the Index as follows:

it immersed him in American history; it confirmed the method initiated by the Objectivist 'movement'; it underlined the value of citation and keen observation; it united a poetics of detail with the plot of history; it clarified Zukofsky's emerging social and political thought; and finally, it reflected an aesthetic that required the proximity of lost or forgotten objects . . . (115)

As Nadel concludes, the methodology Index writing entailed led to those which Zukofsky would "elaborate in sections of "A": research, documentation, definition, history, and fact, vying with each other in poetic statement" (121).

Zukofsky began his work for the Index in January of 1936, although the earliest surviving work is from the middle of 1938. Without proposing a constant or unidirectional influence of the Index on the poetry, we can discern a number of familiar themes and issues, such as working conditions, the division of labor, and the effects of industrialization on craft tradition, all of which receive heightened attention in both the Index and the poetry. A passage in the "Ironwork" essay and another from the radio script, "Two New York Water Pitchers" bear comparison with a selection from "A"-8:

And skilled, like unskilled labor, was not always free. Extant copies of early colonial indentures are the same word for word as those of England. Colonial apprenticeship, except for differences of training compelled by different conditions, bears the stamp of a system taken over from abroad. (12)

History has minimized the evils of this brand of slavery by giving it another name - indenture. . . . Indenture was really a means by which the growing mercantilism of the 17th and 18th centuries employed government sanction to transfer labor to undeveloped colonies. (187)

By what name you call your people

Whether by that of freemen or of slaves . . .

That in some countries

The laboring poor were called freemen,

In others slaves . . . ("A"-8; 89-90)

In another Index passage, Zukofsky gives an idealized description of the organic nascence of American craft. It dramatizes Ahearn's observation that "the items Zukofsky writes about in his notes for the Index of American Design and in his radio broadcast scripts are not products of alienated labor." (88). Passages from "A"-8 and "A"-9 evoke a similarly approving attitude toward the products and activities of a pre-industrial laborer:

Given an unsettled landscape, they would try to order it, work the land and build on it. Having built houses, they would fashion iron to supply their daily demands. Once these were satisfied, increasing comforts would permit them the luxuries of decoration and playthings for their children, tho it is true that sensitive craftsmen would find even these luxuries a need from the beginning. (28)

How entirely different the relation between theoretical learning

And practice was in the handicraft,

From what it is in large-scale industry" ("A"-8, 74).

Hands, heart, not value made us, . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lives worked us slowly to delight the sense ("A"-9, 107)

In another instance, the poet and future translator offers a cleverly rhyming version of a stove-maker's signature couplet. "Baron Stiegel ist der Mann / Der die ofen Machen Kann" becomes: "Bard Stiegel is the cove / Who can make an iron stove" (44, 175). The acknowledged "Briticism" Zukofsky supplies to preserve the rhyme means fellow or man. This use of illustrative period verse carries out the convictions expressed in Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry that poetry "is one of the arts--sometimes individual, sometimes collective in origin--and reflects economic and social status of peoples . . . " (99) and that ". . . Good poetry is definite information on the subject dealt with . . . " (89).

In several instances, Zukofsky observes the simple fact that "the majority of craftsmen and their masters left no personal record." Of itself unremarkable, the observations anticipate Zukofsky's own courting of a kind of anonymity in his Autobiography and his use of his own initials and those of family members throughout "A":

The ironwork and the industry they established tell the story of most of them. Occasionally their names were engraved or stamped on an object, most often only their initials. (43)

Like most of the American designers of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, the majority of craftsmen who worked in tin remain anonymous. There exist only the wares they made and some few traditions connected with these . . . . (77)

As a poet I have always felt that the work says all there needs to be said of one's life. (Autobiography 5)

The craft object or poem should apparently speak for itself, saying all that need be said, and the artist contents himself with a simple "L.Z." This reflects not only an effacement of the artist as person but also relates to Zukofsky's well-known positions on the sincerity of good craft. In a remarkable passage from the radio script, "Remmey and Crolius Stoneware," Zukofsky suggests that the high-quality craftsmanship of the object itself confirms the good character of its maker:

. . . Mr. Z. do we have so much faith in the accuracy of Clarkson Crolius' statement on the origin of his pottery?

Mr. Z.: - For one thing, no authorities have denied it. And, if for no other reason, we will see when we presently look at his work, that he must have been sincerely interested in the tradition of the craftsmen he followed.(226)

Finally, the first half of "A"-9 has long been celebrated as a masterfully Objectivist exercise in reanimation. Its speaking objects are introduced with the lines: "So that were the things words they could say: . . . ." (106), in a section Zukofsky likely completed in November 1939. A corresponding passage from the "Remmey and Crolius" script, completed in February 1940, provides an interesting context and points to a possible source for "A"-9's masterful conceit:

If the stoneware shown on our Index plates could speak, like Omar Khayyám's pots, they would say: "'Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?' It doesn't matter really which Crolius or Remmey made us. The tradition is unbroken. (228)

The Persian poet, whose Rubáiyat was famously translated by Edward FitzGerald and included in Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry, also wrote of handicrafts that speak for themselves. Did the Index research lead to "A"-9? Did the decision to include Omar Khayyám quatrains in A Test of Poetry predate the Index? Perhaps it does not matter in Zukofsky's view of labor, since in any case he participates in a tradition that is unbroken.

The framing of poesis as a kind of labor allows the conception of modernist aesthetics as kindred to other practices of fine workmanship, true to the demands of the activity and the historical moment--if also resistant in trying to maintain a pre-industrial quality. It proposes the reconciliation of the aesthetic and the popular on the model of Duncan Phyfe, the furniture maker Zukofsky researched and of whom he wrote approbatively in the Index of American Design. Phyfe is characterized as having balanced the dictates of his particular craft with popular taste:

And the symbol of his career is almost summed up in the horizontal curves of his table tops, chairs, seats and sofas. . . . His best art, like his time, was given over to order and freedom, simultaneously as it were. Phyfe's furniture reflects the virtues of his life and age. (211)

The terms of this praise for Phyfe suggest analogous application to Zukofsky's "A"-8, a poem that reflects the virtues of Zukofsky's life and age, in part through its carefully achieved curves and form.

The second broadcast of "A"-8, over station WQXR, was part of a regular Federal Theater Radio Division series "Exploring the Arts and Sciences," for which Zukofsky had fifteen minutes to give "A reading of Original Poetry." Where the comments recorded as part of the first, WOR broadcast invite an understanding that the conflict between the popular medium and complex form can be resolved by the commonality of labor; the second broadcast receives a different frame. In the case of this broadcast, we do know something about the reception--or, at least, how Zukofsky wished to frame it. Zukofsky scripted the brief commentary below for himself and the interviewer, Miller; it followed immediately after the reading from "A"-8:

MILLER - I think that the excerpt from the poem "A"--which you just read says a number of things about poetry,--such as language, imagery and music -- all of which is found in the verse itself. Isn't it so?

ZUKOFSKY - Why, yes, Mr. Miller that's what I intended. ("A Reading of Original Poetry" 6)

A striking contextualization on several levels, it renders more tractable the hyper-complex prosody, dense and highly-political referentiality, and superimposition of a polyphony of themes by suggesting that a reader might need only appreciate its insight on "language, imagery, and music." However paradoxical given the political dimensions of the content, it might at first also seem to be a claim for the formal autonomy and hermeticism of the poem. Read as a precise statement, however, it tells us that what the poem "says" might be "found in the verse itself"--i.e. claiming an "identification of method with content" that constitutes the oppositionality of some modernist works. (Silliman 132) Zukofsky chose to begin the reading of the poem--entitled "Poem 'A'" in the broadcast script--with lines that also imply an identification of form and content:

bringing together facts

which appearances separate:

all that is created in a fact

is the language that numbers it,

The facts clear,

breath lives

with the image each lights. ("A" 102).

he then moves into the much discussed, ballade section with which "A"-8 concludes: "A pretty May note, / Singing Bach as they dug" (103). These two lines unite manual labor and the highest art of song, leading into the modified ballade, the form of which Peter Quartermain notes is determined via a repeating rhyme scheme and the measuring of "r" and "n" sounds according to a mathematical formula.(75) In terms of this essay's aims,the exact calculus providing the substructure to the ballade is unimportant. The variation of consonant sounds was identified through close-reading analysis and with the assistance of composition notes. What are the implications of writing and performing a piece with an almost unfathomable depth and complexity?

n/r rhyme

(Times): that dug under the set hymns, tonus a

Contrarius -- . . Lags a new May discards: 4/4 b

Old chant, flaked arch, for live contrapunctus; a

Plays till four notes give out their names: Old Bach's 5/5 (b)

Here: blind .. hands (birds wing fall digging). Son ..shard b

Where orchards were . . has two boys.. the May view 3/7 c

Tunneled heap of ruin. Shirt rags imbue c

A red, free blood, Men, Men of Madrid, girth 4/7 d

Of the attacker dogs will not stop you. c

Labor, light lights in air, on earth, in earth. 4/5 d

Coda, see to it the burden renew, c

Sound out thick gardens dug up in purlieu 5/4 c

The shrapnel haunts; May is red blossom, berth d

Of what times' mill; blood reads the wounds, the cue -- 3/4 c

Luteclavicembalo -- bullets pursue: c

Labor light lights in earth, in air, on earth. ("A" 104-5) 2*/5 d

The patterning gives the poem a unified aural structure that permits the compressed syntax and gracing of a range of themes from Bach, music, renewal, and hope to labor, history and revolution. On the page, the visual high-lighting of sound patterns makes obvious why the "aural" density might have allowed Zukofsky to imagine that the poem said all that it needed about the poetry through the poetry--labor itself lighting the value of his craft. The "A"-8 ballade becomes significant as 'heard labor', as if the nature of its craft, if not all the craftsman's secrets, could be aurally apparent.

The substructural labor involved in achieving "A"-8 anticipates the composition of "First Half of 'A'-9." A fuller treatment of Zukofsky's work from this period would address the original 1940 publication, which included copious supporting materials that indicated important sources for the poem, a prose restatement of the poem, and Cavilcanti's "Donna mi prega," as well as a sequence of translations by Pound, Jerry Reisman, and Zukofsky. The broad framing context of these notes invites the reader of the privately mimeographed edition to appreciate the labor and workmanship involved in the poem's composition--its complex origins and the writer's skillful making reinforced beyond question by the weave of materials.

I began this essay by proposing that Zukofsky's practice could provide a corrective for cultural studies overweening attention to the oppositional qualities of cultural forms from the popular sphere, with the implicit devaluing of the experimental and disruptive language processes characteristic of avant-garde poetics. In Repression and Recovery, Cary Nelson demonstrates the flawed idealism in the belief that literary history and criticism can be disinterested. For those critics and readers who come without a special interest in the work of Louis Zukofsky (or such otherstream poets as Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Melvin Tolson, Laura Riding Jackson, Charles Olson, David Antin, Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Cecilia Vicuna, etc.) to the questions this essay has raised, the need to place avant-garde language practice in relation to cultural studies will seem more compelling from the perspective of Cary Nelson's argument that "poetry throughout the twentieth century is the site of a much broader cultural struggle" (245). The dilemma Zukofsky faced in the seemingly unbridgeable divide between left political values and modernist aesthetics is but one aspect of the larger struggle:

a struggle over whether poetry can be an effective and distinctive site for cultural critique, over whether poetry will offer readers subject positions that are reflective and self-critical, over what discourses poetry can plausibly integrate or juxtapose, . . . over what role poetry and the interpretation of poetry can play in stabilizing or destabalizing the dominant values and existing power relations in the culture as a whole. (245).

Zukofsky brought avant-garde poetics into a popular sphere, reframing his poetry in broadcasting it as: the product of labor; comparable to the unalienated products of craftsmen; accessible to the ear. Zukofsky suggests poetry may play a role in destabalizing power relations--"SOCONY will not always sign off on this air"--but in Zukofsky's case, it does so by presenting oppositional thinking through a discursively sophisticated, at times opaque poetic form. Should cultural studies begin to more seriously engage the proposition of such a poetics, it could better attend to the ways form too is a site of opposition (and recognize instances of its complicity) to hegemonic forces. Zukofsky's labors words--"Labor light lights in earth, in air, on earth"-- may even lead to our seeing the heterogeneity of poetic forms themselves as paradigmatic forms of cultural criticism. Any such a criticism would have the certain merit of always illuminating the virtues of its time and place.

________________________________________

Note: Any and all unpublished documents are from the Zukofsky collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. All published and unpublished works by Louis Zukofsky are copyright Paul Zukofsky and quoted by his permission. They may not be quoted by third parties without the express permission of the copyright holder.

Amended Footnotes

1 Of the thirty-nine essays in the paradigmatic Cultural Studies anthology (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler eds.) from Routledge, exactly one focuses on the production of literary texts: "Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text," by Peter Stallybrass.

2 See for example Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Lawall, 7th Ed. or Norton Anthology of American Literature, Baym, 5th Shorter Ed.

3 The according of space to various Objectivist poets clarifies the situation. Charles Reznikoff, arguably the most accessible of the four, is accorded some fifteen pages for excerpts from to major poems: Testimony and Holocaust. His less prosaic comrades Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker together receive a total of fifteen pages. The formally challenging, major works, Zukofsky's "A" and Oppen's Discrete Series are omitted in favor of much more accessible lyrics. Among the contemporary poets claiming a challenging political/poetic position, such as Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Anne Waldman, or Rosemarie Waldrop, only Ron Silliman and Susan Howe are unrepresented.

4 It might be argued that the avant garde project succeeds only insofar as it resists incorporation, whether by the patrons of taste or the discourse of cultural studies. I see such resistance as a Pyrrhic victory at best, since it relegates formally and culturally challenging work to a neutralized position of neglect. Further, this critique needlessly takes cultural criticism as a discourse that inevitable subordinates its object of analysis, poetry, rather than acknowledging the possibility that poetry might claim similar discursive power.

5 A reconstructed transcript of Zukofsky's response to the question about the relation between social consciousness and poetic technique, it marks his contribution to a League of American Writers panel on New York radio station WOR (with a "nationwide hookup") broadcast on June 7, 1937. From the Zukofsky collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, this unpublished document is copyright Paul Zukofsky and quoted by his permission. It may not be quoted by third parties without the express permission of the copyright holder.

6 Examples include the articulation of a kind of craft aesthetic in "Program: 'Objectivists' 1931" cited at the outset, and the poem "To my wash-stand" (1932), which meditates upon a quotidian household object in anticipation of the Index. So too, through the process of writing "A"-8, he began to incorporate details from his research on craft in the poem as historical information, and on a more subtle level began to investigate the models of artistic production in the labor of the craftsmen he studied. "A"-12 provides corroborating evidence (256-57) that Zukofsky planned both a story, "The Hounds," and critical study, "About Some Americans," derived from his Index research. (Ahearn, "Marxism" 83)

Ahearn, Barry. "The Adams Connection." Terrell 113-127.

_____. "Zukofsky, Marxism, and American Handicraft." Scroggins 80-93.

_____. Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction. Berkeley: U California P, 1983.

Bernstein, Charles. "What's Art Got to Do With It?" My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 36-51.

Booth, Marcella. A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection. Austin: Humanities Research Center, U of Texas, 1975.

di Manno, Yves. "Land's End." DuPlesses and Quartermain 294-300.

DuPlessis, Rachel and Peter Quartermain, eds. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Birmingham: U Alabama P, 1999.

_____. "Introduction." DuPlessis 1-22.

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. NY: Routledge, 1992.

Leggot, Michelle. Reading Zukofsky's 80 Flowers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Marsh, Alec. "Poetry and the Age: Pound, Zukofsky, and the Labor Theory of Value." Scroggins 95-111.

Nadel, Ira. "'A Precision of Appeal': Louis Zukofsky and the Index of American Design." Scroggins112-126.

National Gallery of Art. 1 August 2000 <http://www.nga.gov>.

Nelson, Cary. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. NY: Oxford U P, 2000.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910-1945. Madison, U Wisconsin P, 1989.

Pound, Ezra and Louis Zukofsky. Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Ed. Barry Ahearn. NY: New Directions, 1987.

Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1992.

Rourke, Constance. "American Traditions for Young People." Bulletin of the American Library Association 31.12 (1937): 934. New Deal Network Ed. Thomas Thurston. 1996. Institute for Learning Technologies, Columbia University. 11 August 2000 <http://newdeal.feri.org/index.htm>.

Scroggins, Mark. "The Revolutionary Word: Zukofsky, New Masses, and Political Radicalism in the 1930s." Scroggins 45-64.

_____ed. Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky. Tuscaloosa: U Alabama P, 1997.

Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. NY: Roof Books, 1989.

Terrell, Carol F., ed. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979.

Zukofsky, Celia. American Friends. NY: C.Z. Publications, 1979.

_____. "Year by Year Bibliography of Louis Zukofsky." Terrell 385-392.

Zukofsky, Louis. "A." Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, [1978]1993.

_____. "A Reading of Original Poetry." Exploring the Arts and Sciences. WPA Federal Theater Radio Division. WQXR, New York. 24 October 1938. Lorine Niedecker Papers. University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin. Script. Booth I 21 Addition.

_____. A Test of Poetry. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan U P, [1948] 2000.

_____. Bottom On Shakespeare. Berkeley, U California P, [1963]1987.

_____. Collected Fiction. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1990.

_____. Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

_____. Contributions to the Index of American Design. Ed. Kenneth Sherwood. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan U P, [In Press].

_____. Panel Discussion. League of American Writers. WOR, New York, 7 June 1937. Louis Zukofsky Papers. University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin. Transcript. Booth I 38

_____. Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Expanded Edition). Berkeley, U California P, 1981.

_____. "Program 'Objectivists' 1931." Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 37.5 (February 1931) 268-72.