THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
TO Friday, March 9, 1984
Louis Zukofsky's Poetic Singing Voice
anonymity of a low profile
until "Call It Sleep" was re-
discovered and he could
hide no more. In the mean-
time, he had grown old, and
new public acclaim became
merely burdensome.
The chances of Zukofsky's
poetry experiencing a simi-
lar rediscovery are rea-
sonably nil because there is
so much in his work that is
not only obscure but,
grounded in privacy, im-
penetrable as well. Yet in a
lifetime of active composi-
tion and publication, far
more of his verse than less is
filled with charm, delicacy,
profound observation and a
contagious joy, the latter
emotion originating in the
domestic felicity of a happy
marriage and the pleasures
of husbandhood and
fatherhood set against the
tribulations of the
Holocaust and a materialis-
tic society bent on its own
destruction.
The value of family life
outdistanced his natural
predisposition toward
hypochondria and cyni-
cism, and it came to mean"
more to him than fame
and fortune. It was the
central subject of his
poetry.
Though fortune eluded
him, a modicum of fame did
not. His talents were early
recognized by William Car-
los Williams and Ezra
Pound among others. He
was identified as ,the lead-
17515 W. 9 Mile Rd.
ing force behind the "Objec-
Suite 865
tivist" poetry movement in
Southfield, Mich. 48075-4491
America. Today, he is best
known as a poet's poet, with
two generations of devotees
and followers mining the
treasure-trove of his art and
thought.
Zukofsky died in 1978. He
was born in New York in
1904, the son of devoutly
Orthodox Litvak Jewish
immigrants. Zukofsky's
father provided for his fam-
ily, which included three
considerably older siblings,
living in a tenement at the
I
corners of Crystie and Hes-
ter Streets, by working days
as a pants presser and
nights as the watchman in
the same sweatshop. Only
Yiddish was spoken in the
home, and Zukofsky did not
learn English until he
entered school.
Paste in old label
From the age of four he
went regularly with an
older brother to the Yiddish
theater, principally the
Thalia in the Bowery,
where by the age of nine he
had seen the plays of
Shakespeare, Ibsen,
Strindberg and Tolstoy per-
formed entirely in Yiddish.
He read Longfellow's
NAME
"Hiawatha" and Aes-
chylus' "Prometheus
Bound" in Yiddish before
Effective Date
I
liommrnmasimmuill he encountered them in
By JOSEPH COHEN
NEW ORLEANS — The
recent publication of Barry
Ahearn's "Zukofsky's `A' An
Introduction (Univer-
sity of California Press),
the first full - length
study of Louis Zukofsky's
800-page autobiographical
poem composed over a half-
century, gives us an oppor-
tunity to consider anew the
life and work of one of the
most gifted American
Jewish poets of our time, yet
one who to the larger public,
despite a prolific output,
remains substantially un-
known and unheralded.
The distance between
Zukofsky's poetic achieve-
ment and a large apprecia-
tive audience is likely to be
increased rather than di-
minished by time. As an ex-
perimenter in modern
verse, he wrote little that
could be described as "popu-
lar," choosing, instead, to
follow a brilliant if quirky
approach to his art and
craft, locating the totality. of
meaning in his poems in
sound rather than
metaphor, in tone rather
than in conventional fig-
ures of speech.
That is to say Zukosfky
was a consummate musi-
cian who worked in words
rather than sharps and
flats. He lived his profes-
sional life on that invisible
boundary where the most
minute shift of verbal tone
moves it into the realm of
music. It is not surprising
that a number of his lyrics
have been set to music.
His "Autobiography"
is astonishing: it consists
of 22 musical ar-
rangements for 18 of his
poems among which are
interspersed six inci-
sively-short prose para-
graphs, the whole of
which if read and lis-
tened to properly tells us
as much as the overfilled,
toothsome autobiog-
raphies of the famous to
which we have become
accustomed.
These heard melodies are
sweet; it is the unheard ones
in Zukofsky's life which in-
trigue us and compel us
again and again to return to
the poems for more glimpses
of this remarkable
presence.
The fluctuations in
Zukofsky's reputation are
somewhat comparable to
those of Henry Roth's. Roth
won the early respect and
admiration of critics and
colleagues alike for his
novel "Call It Sleep." Es-
chewing public attention,
he sought for decades the
I To: The Jewish News
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English. By the time he
was 11 he was writing
poetry in what today
would be called Yinglish.
Entering Columbia be-
fore his 16th birthday, he
completed a master's degree
by the time he was 20. From
his graduation forward to
his death he held a succes-
sion of low-paying writing
and editing jobs, at first for
the WPA, the federal relief
agency Saul Bellow also
once worked for, and, there-
after, he taught in the tech-
nical high schools and at the
Polytechnic Institute of
Brooklyn.
So long as his wife, Celia,
an accomplished musician
who also worked, and his
son, Paul, who was to be-
come a concert violinist,
were provided for, Zukofsky
calculated his day-to-day
existence in terms of mov-
ing forward his ambitious
and sophisticated poetry
projects.
Though several critics,
principally M.L. Rosenthal
and Harold Schimmel, have
called attention to the
Jewish elements in Zukofs-
ky's poetry, I am unaware of
any extended analyses
which explore completely
the use to which the poet,
non-observant in his pri-
vate life, has drawn upon
his heritage in his profes-
sional life.
Much is obvious; prob-
ably much more is pre-
sent but veiled, hidden in
the nuances of sound and
image that trail off into
Zukofsky's private world
where the commemora-
tion of his parents' lives
and the accolades to his
wife and son constantly
ebb and flow in and out of
the puhlic and private
labyrinths of his writing.
Schimmel tells us that as
many as 60 lines from the
Yiddish poet Yehoash's (S.
Bloomgarden) "In The Web"
are translated and woven
into the fabric of Zukofsky's
most important early poem
entitled "Poem Beginning
`The'." Just thumbing
through "A" or reading
Zukofsky's other volumes of
poetry, one continually
encounters Jewish subjects
and contexts. The following
passages are typical.
In the poem "A Song For
The Year's End," the poet,
apostrophizing his dead
mother, writes:
There are le-ss Jews left in
the world
While they were killed
I did not see you in a dream
to tell you,
And that now I have a wife
and son.
These lines juxtapose new
life against the decimation
of the Holocaust. On an-
other occasion, Zukofsky,
recalling his grandfather,
writes:
On the Eve of Sabbath, at the
end of Sabbath
At home
So good his singing voice
"Sing bridegroom to bride"
"Sabbath has gone"
Neighbors stopped at his
windows
Leaned on the sills.
In yet another poem,
Zukofsky wrote:
Rabbi Leib:
What is the worth of their
Expounding the Torah:
All a man's actions
Should make him a
Torah—.
Reading these lines, I
cannot but wonder whether
Zukofsky, in the embrace of
assimilation, like so many
other American-Jewish in-
tellectuals of his genera-
tion, ever realized just how
comfortable he was with the
heritage that enriched his
poetry.
I would like to believe
that he was fully conscious
of it, since it was only in his
more mundane existence
that Judaism took a back
seat. In the poetry which
was his true life, it was for
him, as he said of his grand-
father, "his singing voice."
Industrializing the Galilee
Topic of Technion Meeting
"Iscar Ltd., Industrializ-
ing Western Galilee" will be
discussed by Shlomo Ger-
tler, vice president of Iscar,
at a public meeting of the
American Technion Society
Detroit Chapter, at 7:45
p.m. Tuesday at the United
Hebrew Schools building.
The program also will in-
clude the film, "The
Mediterranean - Dead Sea
Project." The moderator of
the evening's program will
be Dave Moskowitz.
Iscar Ltd., located in
Nahariya, Israel, close to
the Lebanese border, em-
ploys 1,400 and exports $50
million of high technology
products yearly, including
cutting tools and jet engine
turbine blades. Iscar is now
expanding its manufactur-
ing operations in the West-
ern Galilee.
Gertler ie a Sabra. He
studied at Haifa's Bosmat
Technical High School,
which is affiliated with
the Technion. After
finishing his tour of duty
with the Israel Defense
Forces, he began a pro-
gram at the Technion
evening school in indus-
SHLOMO GERTLER
trial and mechanical
engineering. For his first
two years at the Techn-
ion, during the day he
worked as a metallurgist.
He joined Iscar Ltd. as
manager of carbide prod-
uctions and the tool design
department. In that
capacity, Gertler was Iscar's
first engineer. Presently, he
is vice president for product
development.
The public is invited free
of charge. For information,
call the Technion office,
559-5190.
Cancer Research Hailed
Prof. Joseph Schlessinger of the Weizmann Insti-
tute of Science was hailed in the world press in Feb-
ruary for identifying genetic and molecular events
that account for a defective "switching" mechanism
in one type of cancer.
.
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