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 I WEI JUST from TO: • 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. . "Serving the Jewish community with traditional dignity and understanding" 543- 1622 1 HEBREW MEMORIAL CHAPEL 26640 GREENFIELD ROAD OAK PARK, MICHIGAN 48237 SERVING ALL CEMETERIES Alan H. Dorfman Funeral Director & Mgr.