Notes

Introduction Notes 1. , "Language, , Realism," In the American Tree (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984), xix. 2. Silliman, "Language, Poetry, Realism," xvii. 3. Silliman, "Language, Poetry, Realism," xvi. 4. , " and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in ," Boundary 2 1 (Fall1972}: 98-133. 5. See Plato, Symposium 184e-206a, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1875), from which Zukofsky has lifted phrases and quotations to compose the bulk of the poem. For notes 5 and 6, I am grateful to Ian Tompkins of the University of Wales, Aberyst• wyth, for his aid with finding these sources and his translation of the Greek. 6. For example, see Plato, Timaeus, trans. and ed. Rev. R G. Bury, Loeb Classical library (1929; London: Heinemann, 1966), 23b, 75e, 89d, or Plato, Laws, trans. and ed. Rev. R G. Bury, Loeb Classical library (London: Heinemann, 1952}, 716d, 870b, where the brightest and the best as a form of good is fre• quently a phrase used by Athenians as a way of distinguishing themselves. 7. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Fragments (I 977; Harmondsworth: Pen• guin, 1990}. 8. Suzanne Clark has explored this sentimental discourse in relation to women's poetic modernism in Sentimental Modernism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991}, in which she points out the way in which a "mascu• line" modernism sought to repress the sentimental as a feminized discourse. She points to Ann Douglas' book, The Feminization ofAmerican Culture, as one example of the case against the sentimental in favor of a tough, Puritan critical reason. Andreas Huyssen has also described the engendering of mass culture as feminine in favor of a "real, authentic culture [which] remains the prerogative of men." See "Mass Culture as Woman," in After the Great Di• vide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988}, 47. 9. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Ethics," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995}, 389. 258 The Poetics ofthe Limit

10. Martin Jay, "Mimesis and Mimetology," The Semblance ofSubjectivity: Essays in Adorno's ksthetic Theory, eds. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1997), 32. 11. , in an interview with L. S. Dembo in Terrell 1979, 272. 12. , Imaginatiom, ed. Webster Schott (: New Directions, 1970), 105, 120-21. 13. Elizabeth Grosz, "Judaism and Exile: The Ethics of Otherness," in Space and Place: Theories ofIdentity and Location, eds. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), 69. 14. , Guide to Kulchur (1938; London: Peter Owen, 1960). 15. See Susan Handelman, "Greek Philosophy and the Overcoming of the Word," WOrks and Days 1 (1980): 45-69; Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991); Lev Shestov, Athem and jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: University of Press, 1966); David Stern, "Moses-cide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism," Prooftexts: A journal of jewish Literary History 4.2 (1984): 193-213; Elisa New, "Pharaoh's Birthstool: Deconstruction and Midrash," SubStance 17.3 (1988): 26-36. 16. Rudiger Bubner, Modem German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni• versity Press, 1981}, 181. 17. "Works of art become domination-free by taking the aesthetic behaviour we display towards nature and transforming it into productive work, which is patterned afrer material labour. As the language of both domination and rec• onciliation, art seeks to revivify the content of what the language of nature was trying to say to man in cryptic, almost unintelligible ways .... art be• comes the model for philosophy rather than vice versa" (A:Z: 114). 18. L. S. Dembo in Terrell1979, 272. 19. Mark Scroggins, Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofiky (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 1. 20. A list of these books would include Peter Quartermain's Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofiky to (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Bob Perelman's The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, joyce, Stein, and Zukofiky (Berkeley: University of Press, 1994), Sandra Kumamoto Stanley's Louis Zukofiky and the Transfor• mation of a Modem American Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Bruce Comens' Apocalypse and After: Modem Strategy and Post• modem Tactics in Pound, Williams and Zukofiky (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), Luke Carson's Depression and Consumption in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofiky and Ezra Pound (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objec• tivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 21. Mark Scroggins' Louis Zukofiky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998} usefully develops a range of ideas, such Notes 259

as the Jewish and political contexts of "Poem Beginning 'The'," the musical structures of ~."the philosophical underpinnings of Zukofsky's epistemol• ogy, and his influence on the "Language" , which dovetail with exami• nations my own Ph.D. sought to broach in 1992, examinations that formed the initial research basis for this present book. See Tim Woods, "Po• etics and Politics in the Writings of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and the 'Language' Poets," Ph.D., University of Southampton, , 1992.

Chapter 1 Notes

1. The annotated manuscripts of~" 1-6 and ~"-7 held in the Louis Zukof• sky Manuscript Collection in the Harry Ransom Research Cen• ter make clear that the original seven Movements were completed between July 19, 1928, and August 7, 1930. The manuscripts in this collection are recorded in Marcella Booth, A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofiky Manuscript Collection (Austin, TX: The Humanities Research Center, 1975) (hereafter cited in the text as Booth Catalogue followed by the catalogue numbers) (see Booth Catalogue Nos. B.S. c, B.8 and C.1-7). 2. Louis Zukofsky was quite understandably anxious to clear up this misper• ception ofliterary history and the mistaken critical inferences that his poetry was merely a Poundian imitation. In a letter to Cid Corman, dated January 15, 1959 (Booth Catalogue No. J.8), held in the Louis Zukofsky Manu• script Collection in the HRHRC, Zukofsky attempts to set the record straight, pointing out the correct sequence of dates and the fact that Pater• son also did not appear until1946. 3. Louis Zukofsky, "A Draft ofXXX Cantos by Ezra Pound," Front4 (Ams• terdam, Holland), June 1931. A letter from T. S. Eliot to Louis Zukofsky, unclearly dated in the early 1930s, held in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC, declines to publish Zukofsky's poetry in The Criterion, but it does hold out some hope for a review of Pound's XXX Cantos. 4. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 1-22, for a discussion of the general rehabilitation and revitalization of interest in Objectivist poetic practices since the 1970s. 5. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 143-57. 6. Solomon Liptzin, The jew in American (New York: Bloch Pub. Co., 1966), 135. 7. Mike Gold in "Notes of the Month," quoted in David Peck, "'The Tradition of American Revolutionary Literature': The Monthly New Masses, 1926--1933," Science and Society 42 (1978): 385-409. 8. Until quite recently, there has been a relative dearth of critical writing on Zukofsky, but those articles and books that were frequently cited as impor• tant show distinct Poundian influence. For example, L. S. Dembo's "Louis 260 The Poetics ofthe Limit

Zukofsky: Objectivist Poetics and the Quest for Form," printed in Terrell 1979, 283-303; , Conviction's Net of Branches (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); Hugh Kenner's books, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972) and A Homemade World (London: Faber, 1977); Serge Fauchereau, "Poetry in America: ," Ironwood 6 (1975): 43-56; and Warren Paul Lang, "Zukofsky's Conception of Poetry and a Reading of His Poem of a Life .:4,"' Ph.D., University oflndiana, 1974. See also Charles Altieri, "The Objectivist Tradition," The Chicago Review 30.3 (Winter 1979): 5-22, discussed below. 9. Pound published this poem in The Exile 3 (Spring 1928) and followed this with the publication of several other small poems. 10. Paul Smith, "Z-Sited: Zukofsky's Poetry," Pound Revised (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 133-54. I owe much to this short critical appraisal ofZukof• sky, although I have not followed Smith's Lacanian approach. 11. Paul Smith remarks in his book on the manner in which Pound's theoretical dogma have permeated the fabrics of academic institutions, aided by the in• fluence of the journal Paideuma and its critics in their perpetuation of Pound's critical ideas. 12. Barry Ahearn, Zukofiky's '.:4": An Introduction (Berkeley: University of Cali• fornia Press, 1983). 13. For example, see Alison Rieke, The Senses ofNomense (Iowa City: University oflowa Press, 1992), 200. See also Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, joyce, Stein, and Zukofiky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Bruce Comens, Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Post• modern Tactics in Pound, Williams, and Zukofiky (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995); Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofiky and the Transformation ofa Modern American Poetics (Berkeley: University of Califor• nia Press, 1994); Mark Scroggins, ed., Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofiky (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1997); Mark Scrog• gins, Louis Zukofiky and the Poetry ofKnowledge (Tuscaloosa: University ofAl• abama Press, 1998); Luke Carson, Comumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofiky and Ezra Pound (London: Macmillan, 1999); and Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus: Es• says in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 14. Louis Zukofsky, "Sincerity and Objectification," Poetry 37 (February 1931): 272-88. In a later interview with L. S. Dembo, Zukofsky explained that he offered the name "Objectivist" in response to Harriet Monroe's insistence that his poetry must "have a movement." He refused this, but offered "ob• jectiv-ist'' in an attempt to prevent another "ism" occurring and to escape the connotations of the philosophical terminology; hence also the quotation marks. See this interview in Contemporary Literature 10.2 (Spring 1969), reprinted in Terrell1979, 155-219. 15. Charles Altieri, "The Objectivist Tradition," The Chicago Review 30.3 (Win• ter 1979): 5-22. Reprinted in DuPlessis and Quartermain, eds., The Objec• tivist Nexus, 25-36. Notes 261

16. , "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" New Literary History 13 (1982): 485-514. Perloff explores the terms of the debate between these two styles of poetry, showing first how critics of modern poetry tend to fall into two opposing camps. She then reviews the appropriation of Pound's and Stevens' critical terminology by these groups and, finally, contrasts the two "traditions" on the epistemological grounds of their appropriated terminol• ogy, setting the Poundian "respect for the given, for the form of the object" against the "symbolist transformation of objects." 17. Altieri, "The Objectivist Tradition," 6. 18. Alben Gelpi, : The Politics ofModernism (Cambridge: Cam• bridge University Press, 1985), 12. 19. Altieri, "The Objectivist Tradition," 6. 20. Laszlo Gefin, Ideogram: Modern American Poetry (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982), 52. 21. See chapter 3 for an extended comparison between Adorno's ideas and Zukofsky's poetics. 22. Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect," The Literary Essays ofEzra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), 3. 23. Ezra Pound, "Votticism," Fortnightly Review (September 1914): 573. 24. In my critique of these Imagist principles, I am indebted to the observations made in chapter 2 of Alan Durant's book, Ezra Pound: Identity in Crisis (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 16--39. 25. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; New York: New Directions, 1970), 113-14. 26. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1981), 59. Peter Brooker notes that these lines reiterate the key principles of Confucius' "Four Books," and that Pound's application of the first is evident in his view of Mussolini as standing "not with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of I ORDER I to kal6n." See Peter Brooker, A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems ofEzra Pound (London: Faber, 1979), 258. 27. Since the 1970s, the works published under the name ofV. N. Volosinov have often been ascribed to M. M. Bakhtin, who neither consented nor ob• jected. A voluminous, ideologically motivated, often fractious and fre• quently futile debate has emerged to contest the issue one way or another, but in lieu of concrete evidence to suggest that the published authors were not responsible for the texts that bear their names, there seems no real case to answer. It seems much more likely that the materials were written as a re• sult of lively group discussions among the Bakhtin Circle around these is• sues, which group members wrote up according to their own perspectives afterward. Despite many philosophical, ideological, and stylistic discrepan• cies that suggest these different works were largely the work of different au• thors, in accordance with Bakhtin's own philosophy of dialogism, I am inclined to treat them as part of an ongoing intersubjective discourse be• tween group members on one hand and between the group and other con• temporary thinkers on the other. 262 The Poetics ofthe Limit

28. See, for example, Scroggins, Louis Zukofiky and the Poetry of Knowledge, 121-39. 29. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 38. 30. Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 39. 31. Eliot originally published The Waste Land in The Criterion and The Dial in 1922 without explanatory notes. He appended these to the poem in the book edition published in December 1922 in the and in Sep• tember 1923 in Britain. 32. Peter Middleton, "The Academic Development of The Waste Land," Glyph Textual Studies, ns 1: Demarcating the Disciplines: Philosophy, Literature, Art, ed. Samuel Weber (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 172. 33. Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 101. 34. See Allen Guttmann, The jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Cri• sis ofIdentity (New York: , 1971). On the marginal• ity of the Jew and the interesting skeptical and critical position that this opened up, see Robert E. Park, "Human Migration and the Marginal Man," American journal of Sociology 33 (May 1928): 891-92; Thorstein Veblen, "The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe," Political Science QJulrterly 34 (March 1919): 41; and Irving Howe, "The Lost Young Intel• lectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated," Commentary 2 (October 1946): 361-67. 35. David Edelstadt, '~ti-Religion," poem in the Freie Arbeiter Shtimme, quoted in Guttmann, The jewish Writer in America, 138-39. 36. On Louis Zukofsky's equivocation toward his Jewish heritage, see Norman Finkelstein, "Jewish-American Modernism and the Problem ofldentity," in Scroggins, ed., Upper Limit Music: The Writing ofLouis Zukofiky, 65-79. 37. See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (1961; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 284-86, for further information on Waldo Frank's address. Among the manuscripts in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC is Zukofsky's address to the League of American Writers' Pacific Coast Conference in 1936, intended for delivery by proxy on behalf of the New York membership, calling for the establishment of a national publica• tion through which the league might promote and organize its writers and attract new and as yet unrecognized writing talents (Booth Catalogue No. 1.36, new). 38. Quoted in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 83. 39. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day (London: Verso, 1987), 156-158. See also James E. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), and his discussion of the debate in the mid-1930s, which hinged on whether proletarian writers had anything to gain from the tech• nical experiments of bourgeois writers such as Joyce and Eliot, or whether they ought to restrict their writing to realist narrative, unequivocal political Notes 263

messages, folksong, mass slogans, and other evocations that would stir the workers into action. 40. Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1966), 3-5, and Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Press, 1988), 1-23, describe this Le&-wing factionalism clearly. 41. The drafts for these poems in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue Nos. C.130, a-c, and No. C.l30, add) con• tain various notes concerning the praying mantis as it has figured in mythi• cal, symbolic, and other representations. 42. The manuscript in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue No. C.l30, add. d) makes it clear which are Williams' words as his initials appear alongside certain lines, although these are erased in the printed version. 43. cogently argues that the poem's principal preoccupation is the danger of an aesthetic form disguising or obscuring "the growing op• pression of the poor." See "Dismantling 'Mantis': Reification and Objec• tivist Poetics," American Literary History 3.3 (Fall1991): 521-41. Reprinted in Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material WOrd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 116-34. 44. Quoted in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 78; taken &om Van Wyck Brooks, The Freeman 7 (8 Aug., 1923): 527. 45. See Morris U. Schappes, "Historic and Contemporary Particulars," Poetry 41.6 (March 1933): 340-43, and Zukofsky's response, "Objectivists Again," Poetry 42 (April-September 1933): 117-18. This hostile reaction to Zukof• sky's aesthetic positions can also be glimpsed in a letter to Pound, where Zukofsky asks about Herman Spector, whose poem "Sadly They Perish (A Dirge for the Objectivist Poets)" was published in The Exile 3 (Spring 1928), and charged that "objectivists stuff cotton into ears, I disclaim the clear em• phatic voices of revolt" (PIZ Letters: 12). Spector went on to state in a review ofReznikoff's work that "The fatal defect of the Objectivist theory is that it identifies life with capitalism, and so assumes that the world is merely a wasteland. The logical consequence is a fruitless negativism." Herman Spec• tor, "How Objective Is Objectivism?" first printed in Dynamo (Summer 1934); reprinted in Bud Johns and Judith S. Clancy, eds., Bastard in the Ragged Suit: Writings of, with drawings by, Herman Spector (: Synergistic Press, 1997), 104-5. 46. Zukofsky wrote to Pound saying that he was regarded as a bourgeois and not sufficiently proletarian in his writing, and that he was too aesthetically in• clined and too closely linked with Williams, Pound, and cummings (PIZ Letters: 96-97). Elsewhere in his letters, Zukofsky mentions that he and his fellow aesthetic travelers are criticized for being blind "on the imminent problems of the day'' (PIZ Letters: 16-17 and 110-111). 47. Many of these writers are also included in Zukofsky's essay "Sincerity and Objectification" as exemplifying Objectivist characteristics in their poetry. 264 The Poetics ofthe Limit

48. Yvor Winters, "The Objectivists," Hound and Horn 6.1 (October-December 1932): 158-60. 49. See Louis Zukofsky and Rene Taupin, Le Style Apollinaire (: Les Presses modernes, 1934), a translation by Rene Taupin of Louis Zukofsky's The Writing ofGuillaume Apollinaire. See Celia Zukofsky, A Bibliography ofLouis Zukofiky (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1969), 9, for details. The book on Apollinaire began as a ghost project for a university academic, which was later not wanted and was therefore published by Zukofsky. See letter held in the HRHRC to Carl Rakosi, dated March 22, 1932 (uncatalogued). 50. See Mark Scroggins, "The Revolutionary Word: Louis Zukofsky, New Masses, and Political Radicalism in the 1930s," in Scroggins, ed., upper Limit Music: The Writing ofLouis Zukofiky, 44-64; 56, n.13. 51. Barry Ahearn, "Two Conversations with Celia Zukofsky," Sagetrieb 2.1 (Spring 1983): 113-31. 52. Letter to Pound dated January 18, 1936 (PIZ Letters: xvii). 53. See Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Modern Library, 1997). This biography makes a reference to the fact that Zukofsky and Chambers worked in Zukofsky's brother's bookshop for a while. Zukof• sky published Chambers in An "Objectivists" Anthology, and in 1922 Cham• bers was associate editor of the Columbia University undergraduate poetry magazine The Morningside, in which Zukofsky regularly published poetry. 54. Letter to Pound dated March 20, 1928: "I once told my communist friend, Whittaker Chambers, (I am not a Parry member by the way) to an• nounce ..." (PIZ Letters: 10). See the anecdote about the Communist Party's refusal of Zukofsky in Mark Scroggins, "The Revolutionary Word," 45. See also a letter to Carl Rakosi held in the HRHRC, dated July 17, 1938 (uncatalogued), in which Zukofsky suggests that during the past decade, he had written work closer to Communist ideas than even Spender and Auden. 55. Celia Zukofsky, A Bibliography ofLouis Zukofiky, 25-28, shows that in the 1930s and 1940s, Zukofsky had work published in the New Masses, The Left, Front, and Partisan Review. 56. See a letter dated March 1, 1936, addressed to Burke, Schneider, and Bur• gum, lodged in the Columbia University Library manuscript collection, where through a series of quotations from Longinus, Dante, Engels, and Marx, Zukofsky asserts that one must not lose sight of the importance of di• alectical historicism that enabled Marx to escape from the abstracting inver• sions of Proudhon and the forms of thought which might now be called Hegelian idealism. Included with the letter were copies ofZukofsky's paired poems "Mantis" and "'Mantis,' An Interpretation,'' as an example of an aes• thetic with an immanent historical critique. 57. See the poem by Arturo Giovannitti, "On Lenin's Birthday," quoted in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 62, in which the imagery of a pathbreaking, winged god is also used. 58. William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters ofWilliam Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1957), 102-3. Notes 265

59. Aaron, Writers on the Left, 63. 60. See Eric Hornberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-1939 (Bas• ingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). Chapter 7, "Communists and Objectivists," gives a very informative and useful account of the politics of the Objectivist position and the reaction of various Socialist writers. In this discussion, Hornberger argues that it was ultimately the extreme hermeticism of the Ob• jectivists' writing that proved inaccessible to the Communists. 61. Mike Gold, New Masses 6 (September 1930): 4-5. 62. Gold, New Masses. 63. With the rise of fascism in Germany during the 1930s, the Frankfurt School relocated itself at Columbia University in New York, but as Martin Jay has described, its members deliberately withheld integrating their work with their American Marxist colleagues and counterparts. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London: Heinemann, 1973), 114, and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 144-46. 64. Theodor W. Adorno, "Reconciliation Under Duress," Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1977), 153. 65. Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, 153. The page reference in the quotation is to the English translation of Lukacs' The Meaning of Contemporary Real• ism (London: Merlin, 1963). However, the quotation from Lukacs has been altered from the Merlin original, which leaves the source ambiguous, but is probably a version of "accurate account of reality'' or "truthful depiction of reality." In both these cases, the Merlin original translation makes the "vul• gar-materialist shibboleth to which he doggedly clings" even more clear, re• vealing as it does the mechanical ontological basis of Lukacs' aesthetics where the notion of aesthetic identity, art as a "true" representation of "real• ity," escapes all critical reflection. 66. The Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC contains a type• script of a radio broadcast Zukofsky made on Station WNYC, presenting "The Human Side of Art" for the Works Progress Administration Art Pro• ject on June 7, 1937, in which he calls for such a cooperative poetic venture (Booth Catalogue No. !.38, new). 67. From an interview Zukofsky gave for an Hungarian newspaper in 1933 and subsequently translated by 1ibor Serly, and quoted in Charles Norman, Ezra Pound, rev. ed. (1960; London: Macdonald and Co., 1969), 319. 68. Draft typescript in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue No. E.14.2, new). 69. The Doubleday edition of';

Chapter 2 Notes 1. Luke Carson, Comumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofiky and Ezra Pound (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 2. 266 The Poetics ofthe Limit

2. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1981), 271. 3. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 342. 4. Letter from Louis Zukofsky to Babette Deutsch, dated March 27, 1961, in the New York Public Library, in which he describes that Yiddish is associated with "jargon'' and Hebrew with "speech" and that the Yiddish has veered such a long way from his Hebrew roots as to deal with Japanese mat• ter in the love song to the Samurai warrior Shimaunu-San. 5. For Zukofsky's connections with Bach apropos the construction of~." see Cid Corman, "if-2: Getting On with It," Sagetrieb 3.3 {Winter 1984): 107-14. 6. Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, lOth ed. (London: Ox• ford University Press, 1970}, liv. 7. L. S. Dembo, "Sincerity and Objectification," in Terrell1979, 265-81. 8. Manuscript in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue No. C.6, a).

Chapter 3 Notes 1. See Louis Zukofsky interview in L. S. Dembo, "Sincerity and Objectifica• tion," in Terrell, 1979, 265-281. This interview is reprinted from "The 'Ob• jectivist' Poet: Four Interviews" conducted and reported by L. S. Dembo in Contemporary Literature 10.2 (Spring 1969}: 155-219. See also chapter 1, note 14. 2. Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1, patt 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 218. 3. Marx, Capital vol. 1, part 1, 218. 4. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3, trans. Jack Cohen (London: Lawrence and Wishatt, 1972), 129. 5. Quoted from Theodor W. Adorno, The jargon ofAuthenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986}, 139-40, in Mattin Jay, ''Adorno and the Lulcicsian Concept of Totality," Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984}, 271. 6. "Nietzsche was one of the few afrer Hegel who recognized the dialectic of enlightenment." Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkbeimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1986}, 44. See also Gillian Rose's discussion of Adorno and Nietzsche (Rose: 22-24). 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968}, 267. 8. "Objectification appears as a loss of the object to such an extent that the worker is robbed not only of the objects necessary for his life but also of the objects of his work. ... The appropriation of the object appears as alienation to such an extent that the more objects the worker produces, the less he can possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, capital. All these consequences follow from the fact that the worker relates to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For it is evident from this presup- Notes 267

position that the more the worker externalizes himself in his work, the more powerful becomes the alien, objective world that he creates opposite himself, the poorer he becomes himself in his inner life and the less he can call his own.... The worker puts his life into the object and this means that it no longer belongs to him but to the object. So the greater this activity, the more the worker is without an object. What the product of his labor is, that he is not. So the greater this product the less he is himsel£" David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writing.r (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 78-79. 9. The socialist song that follows tells of the trials and exploitations of the la• borers and how the time has come for revolution. The strength of the work• ers derives from the land, and the conclusion exhorting the workers to "March I From hirer unchained" ( ~"-8: 49) is reminiscent of the poem cel• ebrating Lenin in All, as are the later idealizations of Soviet communism and mythicizations of Lenin in this Movement (~'~8: 59-60). The lyric's third stanza proleptically includes words from the lyrical conclusion to ~·~8, words that are part of the opening words of the Movement: "Light lights in air blossoms red.... " (~"-8: 48). An altered version of this socialist lyric was published separately in the New Masses, pasted in the middle of Bruce Minton's article, "Labor Prepares for the Polls," New Masses 27.6 (3 May 1938): 14, a call to trade unions for militant action. The poem shows ele• ments of a mechanistic proletarian politics, which seeks to mobilize art for the specific purpose of raising the political consciousness of the masses in a classic "agitprop" fashion. 10. Rainer Nagele, "The Scene of the Other: Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Di• alectic in the Context of Poststructuralism," Boundary 2 11.1-2 (Fall-Win• ter 1982-83): 59-79. 11. In a letter to Pound dated March 20, 1928 (PIZ Letters: 9), Zukofsky refers to Spinoza's Ethics (Part I, Prop 29, note), which defines "active nature" (natura naturans) and "passive nature" (natura naturata). These concepts be• come more significant in the later Movements and are discussed in chapter 4. 12. , Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986), 140. 13. Karl Marx, "The German Ideology," in Marx and Engels: 1845-1847 (1976), vol. 5 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 45 vols. to date, ed. Jack Cohen eta!. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975-91), 44. 14. , "Art and!as Labor: Some Dialectical Patterns in ~"-1 through ~"-10," Contemporary Literature 25.2 (Summer 1984): 205-34. 15. See Barry Ahearn, "Origins of~": Zukofsky's Materials for a Collage," Eng• lish Literary History 45 (1978): 152-76. 16. Groupe Mu, eds., Collages (Paris: n.p., 1978), 34-35. 17. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfort Institute (Brighton: Harvester, 1978), 132. 18. See Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Language as Work and Trade: A Semiotic Homol• ogy for Linguistics and Economics, trans. Martha Adams and others (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1983). 268 The Poetics ofthe Limit

19. Carroll F. Terrell, "Louis Zukofsky: An Eccentric Profile," in Terrell1979, 64. 20. This process is well documented in rwo essays: Alison Rieke, "'Quotation and Originality': Notes and Manuscripts to Louis Zukofsky's .It,"' The Li• brary Chronicle ofthe University ofTexas at Austin ns 38-39 (1987}: 77-105; and Michele J. Leggott, Reading Zukofikjs "80 Flowers" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989}. 21. Zukofsky summarily dispatched any delimitation of meaning. On one occa• sion, Guy Davenport recollects: "I once asked Zukofsky what the 'mg. dancer' is who dances in ~·~21, a milligram sprite, a magnesium elf, a mar• gin dancer, or Aurora, as the dictionary allows for all of these meanings. ~1,' he replied." Guy Davenport, "Zukofsky,'' The Geography ofthe Imagination (London: Picador, 1984), 103.

Chapter 4 Notes 1. Luke Carson, Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofiky and Ezra Pound (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 13. 2. As the dates of composition on the draft manuscripts of ~"-9 in the HRHRC indicate, there is a ten-year gap berween the commencement and completion of the Movement. The first canzone of ~·~9 was written be• rween August 1938 and April1940 (see Booth Catalogue Nos. B.3. b, d, f and C.9. b). The second canzone was written berween August 1948 and Au• gust 1950 (see Booth Catalogue Nos. C.9. d, e, f, g, h). 3. Carson, Consumption and Depression, 244. 4. Letter dated April 15, cited in P/Z Letters: 203. The original mimeograph publication of the First Half of ~·~9 is dated February 28, 1940. See the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue No. A.3). 5. The manuscripts for the second canzone of ~'~9 in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC are littered with specific references to Spinoza's Ethics, occasionally with page references to the Everyman Edi• tion of 1910. In addition to this, Zukofsky wrote to Pound enclosing the whole "double canzone" in 1951: "You will recognize the Spinoza in A- 9 ...."Letter dated May 7, 1951 (PIZ Letters: 206). 6. See "The Form," in the First Halfof~'~9, p. 37. Ezra Pound's essay "Cav• alcanti" is reprinted in T. S. Eliot, ed., Literary Essays ofEzra Pound (London: Faber, 1954), 168. 7. In the First Halfof~"-9, Zukofsky explains how he has arranged the ratio of the accelerations of sounds "r" and "n'' to coincide with the ratio of the accelerations of the coordinates "x" and "y'' of a particle in a circular move• ment. One might supplement this formal description with the further dis• cussion in Peter Quartermain, "'Not at All Surprised by Science': Louis Zukofsky's First Half of .11~9,'' in Terrell 1979, 207-8; reprinted in Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofiky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Notes 269

8. These details are omitted &om the published version of the First Half of 'i4"-9 but are to be found included in a dra& version of "The Form'' &om the First Halfof 'i4~9 in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue No. B.16, c). 9. For the "Notes" to "Anew," which includes a quotation &om Marx on the "Metamorphosis of Commodities," Capita~ vol. 1, chap. 3 (and quoted in the First Halfof'i4"-9, p. 8), see CPS: 103-4. The letter to Pound is dated January 18, 1939 (PIZ Letters: 199). 10. Letter to Ezra Pound, dated June 7, 1935 (PIZ Letters: 171). 11. See Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," in David McClellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 78. 12. See Quartermain, in Terrell1979, 208, and footnote. 13. Quartermain, in Terrell1979, 203-25. 14. Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry (London: Pandora, 1987), 98. See also the descriptions of the conventional sonnet form in Joel Fineman, Shake• speare's Perjured Eye: The Invention ofPoetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berke• ley: University of California Press, 1986), and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "The Politics of Astrophil and Stella," Studies in English Literature 24.1 (Winter 1984): 66-67. 15. Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry, 98. 16. Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry, 98. 17. In First Halfof'i4"-9, Zukofsky quotes several passages &om Marx's Capital, especially &om "Part One: Commodities and Money," o&en selecting pas• sages where Marx identifies the mysterious, enigmatic, disguised, dazzling, secretive, or metamorphic properties of money, value, the commodity form, or surplus value. 18. Letter dated July 11, 1936 (PIZ Letters: 184-85). 19. Barry Ahearn, Zukofiky's 'i4": An Introduction (Berkeley: University of Cali• fornia Press, 1983), 115. 20. Quartermain, in Terrell1979, 204. 21. Tom Bergstein, {)Jtantum Physics and Ordinary Language (London: Macmil• lan, 1974), xi. See also RogerS. Jones, Physics as Metaphor (London: Wild• wood House, 1982), 118, and the discussion of the misconceptions deriving &om conventional linguistic models to describe quantum phenomena. 22. H. Stanley Allen, Electrons and ~ves: An Introduction to Atomic Physics (London: Macmillan, 1932), 48. 23. On the indeterminacy principle and the wave-particle duality that arises &om the difficulties observing and measuring atoms, see Richard Feynman, "Probability and Uncettainty-the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature," The Character ofPhysical Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 127-48, and David Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (London: Rout• ledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 71 and 82-83. 24. J. P. Dalton, Rudiments of Relativity, 1921, quoted in Allen, Electrons and ~ves, 50-51. 270 The Poetics ofthe Limit

25. See Terrdl1979, 99. The book is cited as Anton Reiser, Albert Einstein (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930) in Cdia Zukofsky, A Bibliography of Louis Zukofiky (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1969), 37. 26. These occur on the recto of two working drafts of the third strophe of the second canwne of ~·~9, dated August 15, 1950 (Booth Catalogue No. C.9, g). The quotations are from Albert Einstein, Out ofMy Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 52-53 and 60-61. 27. Andrew Ross, "The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American Writing," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 361-80. 28. William Carlos Wuliams, "The Poem as a Field of Action'' (1948), in The Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1954), 290. 29. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 199. 30. Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," Textual Strategies, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 121-40. 31. Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique ofAesthetic Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1988), 50. 32. See the discussion of Spinoza's influence a propos ~"in Ahearn, Zukofiky's ~. " 114-15. 33. The drafts in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC are dated from August 1948 to August 1950 (Booth Catalogue Nos. C.9, d, e, f, g, h, i, j; B.3, a). 34. See the entty for "Ptilotrichum" in The Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary ofGardening: A Practical and Scientific Encyclopaedia ofHorticulture, 5 vols., vol. 4, ed. Fred}. Chittenden (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), 1712. 35. The Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Cata• logue No. C.9, f). 36. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics V, prop 1 (1910; London: Everyman Dent, 1986), 202. All references in the text will take the form of Ethics fol• lowed by a Part number, a proposition number, and then a page number in brackets. 37. Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins ofModern Critical Theory (Ox• ford: Blackwell, 1991), 59. 38. Jonathan Bennett, A Study ofSpinoza's Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni• versity Press, 1984), 14 and 127. 39. See the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC (Booth Cat• alogue No. B.3, a). 40. Bennett, A Study ofSpinoza's Ethics, 126. 41. Norris, Spinozaandthe Origins ofModern Critical Theory. 61. See alsop. 60 and p. 66. 42. Norris, Spinoza and the Origins ofModern Critical Theory. 37-38. 43. See Bede, A History ofthe English Church and People, Book 2, Chapter 13, trans. L. Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 124-25. Notes 271

44. Norris, Spinoza and the Origim ofModern Critical Theory, 35. 45. Bennett, A Study ofSpinoza's Ethics, 125. 46. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 50-51. 47. See Ethics IY, props 54, 66, 67, 68 [178; 186-88]. 48. There are nineteen entries for "blest (blessed)" in the index of ~. "808. 49. Norris, Spinoza and the Origim ofModern Critical Theory, 39. 50. Michael Heller, "Some Reflections and Extensions: Zukofsky's Poetics," MAPS 5 (1973): 22-25. 51. Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism," Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986), 139-41.

Chapter 5 Notes 1. PIZ Letters: 184. Zukofsky uses some of these quotations from Marx in ~"-8: 45. 2. Mark Scroggins, Louis Zukofiky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 225. 3. It is arguable that many philosophers of ethics presuppose that ethical ac• tions and dispositions are the free choice of autonomous, discrete "subjects." Bernard Williams concludes his Ethics and the Limits ofPhilosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) by stating that "in one sense, the primacy of the individual and of personal disposition is a necessary truth ..." (201); while G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica (1903; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) considered "Ethics [to be] undoubtedly concerned with the question of what good conduct is" (2). 4. Emmanuel Levinas, "Language and Proximity," Collected Philosophical Pa• pers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 124. 5. Barry Ahearn, Zukofiky's ~":An Introduction (Berkeley: University of Cali• fornia Press, 1983), 30-32; 147-49. 6. "The khu, or spirit, is usually mentioned in connexion with the ba or soul, and it seems to have been regarded as a shining or translucent part of the spiritual economy of a man which dwelt with his soul in the sahu or spiri• tual body." E. A. Wallis Budge, ed., The Book of the Dead, 3 vols., vol. 1 (1910; London: Arkana, 1985), lxiii. 7. See Mark C. Taylor's discussion of death and writing in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida in Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 297-98. See also Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Balti• more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 17 and 208, where he makes the same pun on "en-graving" as Zukofsky. 8. Levinas states that "Eros is not accomplished as a subject that fixes an object, nor as a pro-jection, towards a possible. Its movement consists in going be• yond the possible" (Tl: 261). See a discussion of the importance of love in Levinas' thinking in Tma Chanter, "Feminism and the Other," in The Provo• cation of Levinas: &thinking the Other, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 43-44. 272 The Poetics ofthe Limit

9. Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley, "The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas," in The Provocation ofLevinas, eds. Bernasconi and Wood, 168 and 169-70. 10. Steven Gans, "Levinas and Pontalis: Meeting the Other as in a Dream," in The Provocation ofLevinas, eds. Bernasconi and Wood, 88. 11. A similar dual movement is elaborated on by Levinas in the chapter "The Ambiguity of Love" (Tl: 254-55). 12. For a discussion of the role of justice, see Luk Bouckaert, "Ontology and Ethics: Reflections on Levinas' Critique of Heidegger," International Philo• sophical Quarterly 10 (1970): 402-19. 13. I owe much of my outline ofLevinas at this point to Steven Gans' succinct article, "Ethics or Ontology: Levinas and Heidegger," Philosophy Today 16.2 (1972): 117-21. 14. This is also stated in other terms: "The relation with Being that is enacted as ontology consists in neutralizing the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it. It is hence not a relation with the other as such but the reduction of the other to the same" (TI: 45-6). IS. Julia Kristeva acknowledges that one of the pitfalls of structuralist concepts of subjectivity is its inability to deal with the ethical. See her essay "The Ethics of Linguistics," in Desire in Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 23-35 (hereafter cited in the text as Kristeva, followed by a page number). Her argument is that the decentering of the subject from a site of utterance, no longer conceived of as the structuring and regulating agent of utterance, means that one looks for truth in the internal coherence of the of the utterance, which coherence is itself already predetermined by the method• ological criteria within which the utterance is judged. This treatment of ut• terance as an object of knowledge potential excludes an account of the ethics of utterance, since ethics occurs only within a social and historical context. In ignoring this latter fact, structuralist research on the enunciation proves itself truth-governed and object-oriented, and thereby excludes the ethical imperative oflanguage. (I will return to this essay later.) 16. Similar questions are raised in a discussion of Derrida's analysis of Levinas' affiliation to Heidegger in Robert Bernasconi, "Deconstruction and the Pos• sibility of Ethics," in Decomtruction and Philosophy: The Texts ofjacques Der• rida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122-39. 17. Ron Silliman, "Why the MLA Can't Read," The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987), 142-47. 18. Emmanuel Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," in Decomtruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 350. 19. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem ofEthical Metaphysics (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 22. 20. See Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 79-153; Rudolph J. Gerber, "Torality and Infinity: He- Notes 273

braism and Hellenism-The Experiential Ontology of Emmanuel Levinas," Review ofExistential Psychology and Psychiatry 7 (1967): 177-88; and Shira Wolosky, "Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse," Proof texts: A journal ofjewish Literary History 2 (1982): 283-302. 21. Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," 348. 22. Zukofsky occasionally signed himself Odysseus in his letters to Pound. For example, see PIZ Letters: 207. 23. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "Odysseus or Myth and En• lightenment," The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1987), 43-80, and their thesis about the return of myth in the Enlightenment, based on the story of Odysseus: "Like the heroes of all true novels later on, Odysseus loses himself in order to find himself, the estrangement from nature that he brings about is realized in the process of the abandonment to nature he contends with in each adventure; and, iron• ically, when he, inexorable, returns home ... ," 47-48. 24. Wright, Hughes, and Ainley, "The Paradox of Morality," in The Provocation ofLevinas, eds. Bernasconi and Wood, 179-80. 25. Paul Smith, Pound Revised (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983), 133-54. 26. Taylor, Altarity, 206-7. 27. This is an explicit echo of several passages in Spinoza, Ethics III, prop 2 [87-88], ("No one has thus far determined what the body can do, ..."), which I have discussed in relation to the poem's preoccupation with the body in chapter 4. 28. Taylor, Altarity, 204. 29. This exegetical process is well demonstrated in Michele J. Leggott, Reading Zukofiky's "80 Flowers" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 30. See Kristeva, "The Ethics of Linguistics." Heidegger outlines comparable notions in his concepts of "Sprache" and "Rede" ("speech" and "discourse") in Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Black• well, 1962), 55ff. See also his discussion of"Saying" in "The Nature of Lan• guage," On the Wzy to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 57-108. 31. Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, trans. Jules L. Moreau (: Westminster Press, 1954), 65. 32. Levinas comments on "the strange and mysterious ambiguity or polysemy which the Hebrew syntax permits [in which] words co-exist rather than falling immediately into structures of co-ordination and sub-ordination, unlike the dominant tendency in the 'developed' or functional languages." Emmanuel Levinas, "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition," trans. Sarah Richmond, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 193. 33. See Jacques Derrida, "The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Lin• guistics," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 175-205, where the copula describes relations and not appellations. Consider a related passage in Adorno's attack on Heidegger's ontological phi• losophy in ND: 100-104. 274 The Poetics ofthe Limit

34. This is one of the main arguments in Negative Dialectics, but Adorno lays the foundations for this critique in his analysis of Husserl's phenomenology in Agaimt Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). 35. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Fragments of 1844," Marx and En• gelr: 1843-44, vol. 3 of Karl Marx/Frederick Engelr: Collected WOrks, 45 vols. to date, ed. Jack Cohen, et al. {London: Lawrence and WIShart, 1975-91), 304.

Chapter 6 Notes 1. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester Univer• sity Press, 1990). 2. Andrew Bowie, "Music, Language and Modernity," in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Rout• ledge, 1989), 79. 3. Raymond Williams also argues that the modernists' interest in the materiality of sound and rhythm lies in "the attempt to rationalize it for specific ideolog• ical purposes of which the most common ... is the deliberate exclusion or de• valuing of all or any referential meaning." "Language and the Avant-Garde," The Politics ofModernism, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 65-80. 4. Bob Perelman, ".:4~24," in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, eds. and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 292-93. 5. Zukofsky makes several references in Bottom to the Zohar, a Jewish text cen• tral to Cabbalism. See Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (1974; New York: Dorset, 1987), 213ff. Furthermore, the Tan Spiral Notebook of notes for ~"-22 and ~"-23 in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue No. B.21. new, b) has lengthy quotations &om Abraham Abulafia, an important Cabbalist philoso• pher, whose principal work Sefer-ha-Ot ("The Book of the Letter") is a med• itation on number mysticism and on the letters of the alphabet and their combinations. (See Scholem, 53-57.) 6. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymological roots of the word "mystery" lie in the classical Greek secret religious ceremonies that were witnessed only by the initiated, who were sworn never to disclose their nature. Hence, a derivative meaning of "mystery'' is a riddle or enigma whose truth is inexplicable or beyond comprehension. 7. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981), 89. 8. Derrida, Dissemination, 90. 9. Derrida, Dissemination, 93. 10. See Emmanuel Levinas, "Tout Autrement," Noms Propres (Montpellier, : Fata Morgana, 1976). For the significance of this trope of chiasmus in Levinas' work, see Simon Critchley, "The Chiasmus: Levinas, Derrida and the Ethical Demand for Deconstruction," Textual Practice 3.1 (April 1988): 91-106. Notes 275

11. For an interesting and elucidating description of the way in which Zukofsky increasingly immersed himself in writing, quotation and textual reference dur• ing the composition of the later movements of ::4, "see Alison Rieke, "'Quo• tation and Originality': Notes and Manuscripts to Louis Zukofsky's .:4, ~ The Library Chronicle ofthe University ofTexas at Austin ns 38-9 (1987): 77-105. 12. For a discussion of the predominance of the eye in Zukofsky's poetics, see Erica Hunt, "Beginning at Bottom," Poetics journa/3 (May 1983): 63--66. 13. Charles Bernstein, Contenfs Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1986), 151. 14. William Carlos Williams, "Louis Zukofsky," 3.6 (December, 1964): 1-4. 15. Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary ofMusic and Musicians, vol. 13 (london: Macmillan, 1980), 846. 16. Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, lOth ed. (London: Ox• ford University Press, 1970), !iii. 17. Scholes, Oxford Companion, !iii. 18. First printed separately as Iyyob (London: Turret Books, 1965). The ::4"-15 manuscript (Booth Catalogue No. C.14.1, new a, as detailed in Cathy Hen• derson, "Supplement to Marcella Booth's 'A Catalogue of the Louis Zukof• sky Manuscript Collection,'" The Library Chronicle ofthe University ofTexas at Austin ns 38-9 [1987]: 121) in the HRHRC (hereafter Henderson Cata• logue) details the pertinent verse references beside each line of the poem. 19. Sophocles, Antigone, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Loeb Classical Li• brary, vol. 21 (1919; Cambridge, MA: Press, 1994), 377. Zukofsky cites the reference to Antigone in the margin of the manu• script in the HRHRC (Booth Catalogue No. C.15). 20. Denise Leverrov, Light Up the Cave (New York: New Directions, 1981), 64--65; and John Cage, Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1968), 34. 21. Gerald Burns, "De Improvisatione: An Essay on Kora in Hel~" Inventions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 145-59. 22. , Pre-Faces and Other Writings (New York: New Direc• tions, 1981), 151. 23. Guy Davenport, "Louis Zukofsky," Agenda 8.3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1970): 130-37. 24. In 1973, Zukofsky was sent a questionnaire on rhythm and lineation, and his responses (albeit characteristically brief and precise) show that he paid very meticulous attention to these aspects of verse, always with a view to opening up the process of meaning rather than circumscribing it. A copy of the questionnaire and Zukofsky's answers are printed in Kenneth Cox eta!., "Supplement: On Rhythm from America," Agenda 11.2-3 (Spring-Summer 1973): 37--66. 25. The drafr manuscript in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC originally had "The unstated always present" instead of "The tacit always present and apposite," and then "unsaid" when "unstated" was erased (Booth Catalogue No. C.13, a). 276 The Poetics ofthe Limit

26. This distinction between the Saying and the Said lies at the heart of Emmanuel Levinas' book Otherwise Than Being: or, Beyond Essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981). For a useful commentary on this distinction, see Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Ed• inburgh University Press, 1997), 141-70. 27. Zukofsky appears to have been involved with an artempt to dramatize Ulysses in the early 1930s. Among the papers in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC is a synopsis of a dramatization of the opening of Ulysses (Booth Catalogue No. H.1, a). See Joseph Evans Slate, "The Reis• man-Zukofsky Screenplay of Ulysses: Its Background and Significance," The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin ns 20-21 (1982): 106-39. However, see Jerry Reisman's letter addressed to Slate, denying Zukofsky's involvement in the project other than as a proofreader (appended to Booth Catalogue No. H.1, a). 28. Stephen Heath, ''Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce," in Post-struc• turalist joyce, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 39 (hereafter cited in the text as Heath, followed by a page number). 29. Quoted from Julia Kristeva, "Semeiotike: recherches pour une semanalyse," in Heath, 31. 30. Paul Smith drew my artention to this instance of the "death'' ofZukofsky the author subject in Pound Revised (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983). In an earlier essay, Zukofsky wrote to his son, "Writing this, Paul, for a time when you can read, I do not presume that you will read 'me.' That 'me' will be lost today ..." (Prep: 19). 31. Scholem, Kabbalah, 89. 32. , Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1958; Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 192-97. 33. Interview with L. S. Dembo, in Terrell1979, 270. 34. Fredric Jameson, Fables ofAggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fas• cist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 2. 35. The manuscript for ';4'~12 (Booth Catalogue No. C.12, b) in the HRHRC shows that Zukofsky originally considered the word "curriculum" for "course." This initial word has very specific links with Charles Olson's no• tion that his project in The Maximus Poems is in some sense "A GRAPH" or "a 'mapping' the whole culture strategy, called something like THE ETY• MOLOGY OF ALL THINGS." See Charles Olson, Letters for Origin, 1950-1956, ed. Albert Glover (London: Cape Golliard, 1969), 11; 86. 36. Barry Ahearn, Zukofiky's ';4':· An Introduction (Berkeley: University of Cali• fornia Press, 1983), 223. 37. Michel Foucault, The Order ofThings (London: Tavistock, 1970), 217ff. 38. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Marx and En• gels: 1851-53, vol. 11 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 45 vols. to date, ed. Jack Cohen et al. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979-91), 99. Notes 277

39. Burton Haden, "Zukofsky, Wittgenstein, and the Poetics of Absence," Sagetrieb 1.1 (Spring 1982): 63-93. 40. Celia Zukofsky, "Year by Year Bibliography of Louis Zukofsky," in Terrell 1979, 385-92. 41. Terrell 1979, 24: "But to Wittgenstein he carne quite late-Celia says around 1960-and it was Wittgenstein the Second rather than the First that he was most taken with" [my italics]. This is further corroborated by the ap• pearance of quotations from Wittgenstein's later work (The Blue and Brown Book, Philosophical Investigations, and Remarks on the Foundation ofMathe• matics) in the Spiral Notebooks for ';4"-22 and ';4'~23 (Booth Catalogue No. B.21, new b, as detailed in Henderson Catalogue, 1987) and in the text of ';4'~23: "impossible's I sort-of think-cramp work x" (';4"-23: 563), from Remarks on the Foundation ofMathematics. 42. See the interview with L. S. Dembo, "Louis Zukofsky: Sincerity and Objec• tification," in Terrell1979, 265-81. 43. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §67. 44. James Joyce, Finnegans Wilke (1939; London: Faber, 1975), 18. 45. Louis Zukofsky, ';4."-22 & 23 (New York: Grossman, 1975). 46. Walter Benjamin, The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 179. 47. See Alan Brownjohn, "Caesar 'ad Some," New Statesman 1 August 1969: 151, a review of Catullus: "The Zukofsky version is an enterprise of almost unbelievable crankiness ..."; see also N. Moore, "Hot Cat on a Cold Tin Roof Blues (or, Get your boots laced, Fullus-Here comes that guy 'Cat' Ullus," Poetry Review 62.2 (Summer 1971): 179-87, who describes Catullus as "gibberish": "[Zukofsky] perverts [Carullus'] literal meaning out of all recognition even where it is easily understood." 48. Carol Jacobs, "The Monstrosity of Translation," Modern Language Notes 90.6 (1975): 755-66. 49. Christie McDonald, ed., The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with jacques Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 122. 50. Carol Jacobs in "The Monstrosity of Translation." See also the informative discussion by Andrew Benjamin, "Walter Benjamin and the Translator's Task," in Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (London: Routledge, 1989), 86-108. 51. The ';4'~ 19 manuscript in the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection in the HRHRC has a marginal note that indicates that the idea of a world being made out of language derives from Zukofsky's use of the myth of Pegasus, and as throughout the text of ';4, "horses are associated with the purity of language (Booth Catalogue No. C.l5.2, new a). 52. Gregory Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism," in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto, 1985), 95. 53. Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism," in Foster 1985, 95. 278 The Poetics ofthe Limit

54. Cid Corman, "The Z Gambit: Appendix to "~~1," Origin 5th ser. 2 (Win• ter 1983): 70-87. 55. "'!\. may be a key signamre, a principle of order to which the music refers ... a sound anterior to the music: 'A I Round of fiddles playing Bach' ('lt'~1:1)." Thomas Anthony Duddy, "The Measure of Louis Zukofsky," Modern Poetry Studies 3.6 (1973): 250-56. 56. Zukofsky demonstrates an etymological link between dancing (a gigue, from Old French giguer-to dance) and a fiddle (Teuton, geige-a fiddle) in 'lt'~12: 176. 57. For this observation, I am indebted to William Harmon, "Eiron Eyes," Par• nassus 7.2 (Spring-Summer 1979): 5-23. 58. M. Corvin, Petite Folie collective (Paris: Tchou, 1966), 19: "[Puns] ... drag the mind along the slope of the Same the better to leave room for the break• in of the Other." Quoted in Walter Redfern, Puns (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 32. 59. David Levi Strauss, ''Approaching 80 Flowers," in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, ed. (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1983), 79-102. 60. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 123. 61. The 'lt"-22 and 23 composition notes in "The Black Notebook" held in the HRHRC (Henderson Catalogue No. B 21, new a) contains these notes on p. 74. 62. The '/t"-22 Tan Spiral Notebook held in the HRHRC (Henderson Cata• logue No. C.16.2, new a) contains these notes on p. 2. 63. Ahearn, Zukofiky's 'It," 185. 64. F. Max Muller, Lectures on the Science ofLanguage, Delivered at the Royal In• stitution of Great Britain in 1863, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Green, Roberts, 1864), 1 and 3; Walt Whitman, "Slang in America," in The Col• lected Writings of "Walt Whitman: Prose WOrks 1892: Volume 2: Collect and Other Prose, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 572-77. 65. See L. S. Dembo, "Louis Zukofsky: Objectivist Poetics and the Quest for Form," in Terrell1979, 283-303, which argues that Objectivist poetics is es• sentially nominalistic. This nominalism might find support in some of Zukofsky's poetic statements, such as "The economy of presentation in writ• ing is a reassertion of faith that the combined letters-the words-are ab• solute symbols for objects, states, acts, interrelations, thoughts about them" (Prep: 22). 66. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, rev. ed. (London: Fontana, 1974), 33. In his distinction of phonetics &om phonology, Saussure tries "to determine the extent to which phonology can help linguistics to escape the delusions of writing," 33. 67. , Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 7. Notes 279

68. De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 141. 69. See Michele J. Leggott, Reading Zukofiky's "80 Flowers" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 70. Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 11.

Chapter 7 Notes 1. See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Man• heim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 60-61; also Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 47. 2. , "Statement on Poetics," Sagetrieb 3.3 (Winter, 1984): 27. 3. Quoted from the George Oppen manuscript collection in the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), microfilm reel number 14, Notes, ]otting.r, etc. Each citation from this collection will give the microfilm reel number and the name of the Oppen notebook. 4. Oppen, "Statement on Poetics," 26. 5. Emmanuel Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 350-53. 6. L. S. Dembo, "The 'Objectivist' Poet: Four Interviews," Contemporary Lit• erature 10.2 (Spring 1969): 159-77, 169. 7. Edward Hirsch, "'Out There Is the World': The Visual Imperative in the Po• etry of George Oppen and ," in George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Burton Haden (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), 169-80, 173. 8. Paul Naylor, "The Pre-Position 'Of': Being, Seeing and Knowing in George Oppen's Poetry," Contemporary Literature 32.1 (1991): 100-15. 9. Naylor, "The Pre-Position 'Of,"' 104. 10. Peter Nicholls, "Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen," journal of American Studies 31.2 (1997): 153-70. Reprinted in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poet• ics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 240-53. 11. Alan Golding, "George Oppen's Serial Poems," Contemporary Literature 29.2 (Summer 1988): 221-40; 227. Reprinted in DuPlessis and Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus, 84-103. 12. Naylor, "The Pre-Position 'Of,"' 109. 13. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought ofMartin Hei• degger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 149-50. 14. Quoted in Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material WOrd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65. 15. Karen A. Weisman, "'The Most Beautiful Thing in the World'?: George Oppen's Quest for Clarity," American Poetry 7.3 (Spring 1990): 20-30. 16. Emmanuel Levinas, "The Other in Proust," in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 165. 280 The Poetics ofthe Limit

17. Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," 346. 18. Emmanuel Levinas, "The Transcendence of Words," in The Levinas Reader, ed. Hand, 149. 19. Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, 77. 20. George Oppen, "The Mind's Own Place," Kulchur 3.10 (Summer 1963): 7. 21. Oppen, "The Mind's Own Place," 3. 22. Oppen, "The Mind's Own Place," 3. This sratement was clearly an impor• tant formulation for Oppen, since he repeats it in a number of places, most notably in a letter to his friend Charles Humboldt when explaining his po• etics (see Opp Letters: 61). 23. Dembo, "The 'Objectivist' Poet: Four Interviews," 173. 24. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the W'est (London: Routledge, 1990), 14. 25. Golding, "George Oppen's Serial Poems," 221-40. 26. Golding, "George Oppen's Serial Poems," 234. 27. Abby Shapiro, "Building a Phenomenological World: Cubist Technique in the Poetty of George Oppen," in George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Haden, 243-56. 28. Charles Bernstein, "Hinge, Picture," Ironwood 13.2 (Fall1985): 240. 29. Dembo, "The 'Objectivist' Poet: Four Interviews," 170. 30. Dembo, "The 'Objectivist' Poet: Four Interviews," 166.

Chapter 8 Notes 1. This agenda is made dear in the collective statement by Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten, "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto," Social Text 19-20 (1988): 261-75. 2. Ron Silliman, Crow (Ithaca, NY: Ithaca House, 1971), 10. 3. Gertrude Stein, "Sentences," in How to Write (New York: Dover, 1975), 208. 4. Bruce Andrews,Jeopardy (Windsor, VT: Awede, 1980), 21. 5. Quoted from an interview with Ron Silliman in The Difficulties (Ron Silli• man issue), ed. Tom Beckett, 2.2 (1985): 34. 6. Charles Bernstein, "Outrigger," in The Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1987), 27-30. 7. First printed as introduction to Charles Bernstein, ed., "Language Sampler," The Paris Review 86 (Winter 1982): 75-125. Subsequently collected in Charles Bernstein, Contents Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986) (hereafter referred to in the text as CD followed by a page number). 8. Ron Silliman, ed., In the American Tree (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foun• dation, 1986). 9. , ed., "Language" Poetries: An Anthology (New York: New Directions, 1987), 4. See also Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet-Jour• naud, eds., 21 +1: American Poets Today (Montpellier, France: Delta, 1986). 10. Messerli, ed., "Language" Poetries: An Anthology, 4. Notes 281

11. Marjorie Perloff, "The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties," in The Dance ofthe Intellect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 215-38. 12. Andre Breton, "Silence Is Golden," in What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings: Andre Breton, ed. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto, 1978), 269. 13. Breton, "Silence is Golden," 270. 14. Barrett Watten, Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 5. 15. William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All," in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1971), 150. 16. Ezra Pound, "How to Read," in Literary Essays by Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), 25. 17. Cited from a single-page flyer accompanying the anthology 21 +1: American Poets Today (see note 10 above). The flyer announces the reasons for the pub• lication of the anthology, among which is the fact of the writings' similar un• derlying preoccupations with "language, language considered as the raw material of the poem and not as an instrument for its expression or as an aes• thetic varnish." 18. Burton Haden and Tom Mandel, "Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and ," in Carroll F. Terrell, ed., George Oppen: Man and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1985), 38. 19. Denise Levertov, Light Up the Cave (New York: New Directions, 1981), 49 and 60. 20. Stephen Rodefer, "Preface to Four Lectures," in In the American Tree, ed. Sil• liman, 518. 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §115. 22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettal 2nd ed., eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, ttans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 161 and 172. 23. Further references to Wittgenstein's interest in music and language are exten• sive, and only a small indication may be given here: see Philosophical Investi• gations, §3 and §527; Philosophical Grammar, ed. Ruth Rhees, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 72 and 78-79; Zettal 157-9; 160; 163 and 165; The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 166--67. 24. Bob Perelman, a.k.a. (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984), 30 (here• after cited in the text as a.k.a., followed by a page number). 25. Zukofsky writes of "the entirety of the single word which is in itself a rela• tion, an implied metaphor, an arrangement, a harmony or a dissonance" (Prep: 23). 26. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981), 277. 27. Greg Ulmer, "Op Writing: Derrida's Solicitations ofTheoria," in Displace• ment: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: University ofln• diana Press, 1983), 29-58. 282 The Poetics ofthe Limit

28. Mark Krupnick, "Introduction: Sensible Language," Displacement: Derrida and After, 22. 29. Ulmer, "Op Writing," 37. 30. Jacques Derrida, "Tympan," in Margim of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Athlone, 1982), xxviii. 31. Derrida, Margim ofPhilosophy, xxviii. 32. "In tone music forsakes the element of external form and its sensuous visi• bility, and requires for the apprehension of its results another organ of sense, namely hearing, which, as also the sight, does not belong to the senses of ac• tion but those of contemplation; that is, in fact, still more ideal than sight." See chapter 2, "Music," G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy ofFine Art, vol. 3, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: Bell, 1920), 340-41. 33. James Joyce, Finnegam mzke (London: Faber, 1975), 623. 34. Charles Bernstein, "The Klupzy Girl," in Isletsl!rritatiom (New York: Jordan Davies, 1983), 47. 35. Silliman et al., ''Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry," 266. 36. George Hardey, "Realism and Reification: The Poetics and Politics ofThree ," Boundary 2 16.2-3 (Winter-Spring 1989): 311-34. 37. Ron Silliman, "The New Sentence," The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987), 63-93. 38. David Melnick, Pcoet (San Francisco: G.A. W.K., 1975), 1. 39. Watten, Total Syntax, 53. 40. David Melnick, "A Short Word on My Work," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (February 1978): 13. 41. Joan Retallack, "The Meta-Physick of Play: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, U.S.A.," Parnassus 12.1 (Fall-Winter 1984): 213-44. 42. Ron Silliman, TheAgeofHuts(NewYork: Roof, 1986), 13. 43. Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure," in Writing/Talks, ed. Bob Perel• man (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 270-91; 272. 44. Lyn Hejinian, The CeO (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1992), 9 {hereafter cited in the text as The Cell followed by a page number). 45. Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure," 271. 46. Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure," 285. 47. Silliman et al., ''Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry," 271. 48. Bernstein, Islets!!rritatiom, 47. 49. Bruce Andrews' introduction to Adrian Clarke and Robett Sheppard, eds., Floating CapitaL· New Poets from London (Elmwood, CT: Potes and Poets Press, 1991), iv. Index

Adorno, Theodor, 7-8, 10, 13, 42-3, autonomous art, 13, 14, 25, 33, 42-3, 45-7,68,69-101,129,152, 48-9, 52,66,68, 168,181 162-5,168,206,230,249 see also conceptualization, music, Aesthetic Theory, 43, 46, 85, 93, 98 rationality constellation, 13, 58, 70, 71, 89-101, 150, 211; see also collage Bach, Johann Sebastian, 47, 51, 55-6, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, The, 74, 58,89-90,127,139,168,169, 273 n.23 199-200 identity thinking, 7, 10, 70-83, 85, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 54, 254, 261 n.27 88,91-4,206 Barthes, Roland, 5, 28, 177, 183 mimesis, 7-8, 22, 91-2 Image-Music-Text, 28, 61, 183, Minima Moralia, 8, 60, 73, 82, 199-200 131, 152, 163 being, 4, 5, 6, 8, 134-5, 142-4, 148-9, Negative Dialectics, 75, 82, 92 161-2,215-33 negative dialectics, 7, 10, 87, 90-5, Benjamin, Walter, 42, 46, 71, 82, 96, 107,230 98,171,200-3,211 reconciliation, 10, 13, 42-3, 45-9, Bennett, Jonathan 70, 181 Study ofSpinoza's Ethics, A, 121, aesthetics, 9, 10, 13, 18, 20-6, 122, 124 33-44,47-9,70,107,141, Bernstein, Charles, 15, 175, 231, 236, 154,237 239,240-1,243-4,246-8,250, Ahearn, Barry, 20, 99, 135, 149, 172, 252-4 196,207,212 '~fice of Absorption," 246 alterity, 11, 71, 73, 89, 133, 143-4, "Kiupzy Girl, The," 247-8, 253-4 148-9,151,171,220-6,249,252 Poetics, A, 254, 255 see also otherness Brooks, VanWyck, 33, 25-6, 41 Andrews, Bruce, 235, 236, 238, 239, 248,250,254-5 Carson, Luke, 47, 103 anti-Semitism, 9, 31, 37, 44, 133, 163 Cavalcanti, Guido, 104, 105, 109, 111 Apollinaire, 37 Chambers, Whittaker, 37, 264 n.53 assimilation, ethnic and cultural, collage, 2, 13, 28-9, 62, 68, 70-1, 27-33,44 76-7, 89-101, 154-5, 211, see also judaism 213 284 The Poetics ofthe Limit

see also Adorno, Theodor, exile, 8-9, 45, 49, 53, 131, 155, constellation 163-4,173,201,219 communism, 18, 26, 29, 37, 39, 43, 110, 131-2, 220, 264 n.54 family, 132, 134, 135, 140-1, 169, 172 see also marxism, American Left form, 27, 33-44, 45-68, 70, 81-2, conceptualization, 7, 25, 48, 71-83, 89-101, 105-6, 115-16, 89-101,151-2,221 167-214,232,238,246, see also autonomous art, music, 252-3 rationality see also structure Corman, Cid, 203-4, 229, 259 n.2 Foucault, Michel, 6, 197 Cornell, Drucilla, 10, 11, 45, 73-4, 91-2 Frank, Waldo, 33 Crane Hart, 36, 37, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 31-2, 123 cubism, 37, 98 Oedipus myth, 29-30 cummings, e. e., 28, 36, 37 Gibbon, Edward, 190-1 dadaism, 37, 241 Gold, Mike, 18, 40-1, 43 Davenport, Guy, 177, 268 n.21 deconstruction, 10, 161, 181, 215, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 2, 37 245-6 Heidegger, Martin, 74, 133, 142-3, Deleuze, Gilles 148-9,162,177,215-33 Spirwza: Practical Philosophy, 123, 126 Hejinian, Lyn, 15, 239, 252-3 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 84, 162, 171, 181, My Life, 239, 252, 253 202,237,245-6 The Cell, 252-3 Margins ofPhilosophy, The, 245, 273 Hermes, 170-1, 185, 187, 213 n.33 histoty, 14, 26, 28, 32-3, 35, 49, 55, Of Grammatology, 24 66-7, 77, 78-80, 82-3, 86, 88, desire, 151-2 89-90,96,100,189-90,192-3, dialectics, 69-101, 108-9, 153, 195 195-6,208,211-12

Eastman, Max, 34, 39 identity, 27, 31-3, 45, 52-3, 72-5, Einstein, Alfred, 78, 111, 113 109,134,137,157-9,182,230, Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns), 19, 27-33, 249 36, 44, 259 n.3 ideology, 25-6, 39-40, 68, 237 "Love Song ofJ. Alfred Prufrock, imagism, 12, 17, 18-20, 23-6, 144-5, The," 32 227,232 Sacred Wood, The, 31 see also Pound, Ezra tradition, 28-31 intertextuality, 28-9, 77, 105 Waste Land, The, 13, 18, 27-33 epistemology, 3, 5, 8, 22-6, 34-5, jewish, 8-9, 38, 52-8, 71, 133, 169, 40-1, 78-80, 138, 146, 173-4, 176, 185, 186, 204, 273 n.32 189, 199, 217-19 Wandering Jew, The, 9, 153 ethics, 1, 2, 3-5, 6-7, 10, 14, 49, 58, Joyce, James, 36, 182, 199, 203, 246 62,68, 70-1,73,101,103-30, Finnegans Wlke, 38, 182, 211 131-65,172,180,193,201, Ulysses, 28, 251-2, 276 n.27 205,214,215-33 judaism, 8-9, 13, 18, 29-33, 49, 52-8, see also responsibility 65-6, 133, 153, 161-2 Index 285

see also assimilation, ethnic and Das Kapital 38, 70, 72, 76, 104, cultural I05, 106-7, 109, 269 n.I7 justice, 9, I42, I44, I49, 233 marxism, I4, 25-6, 30-I, 69-IOI, I03, I06, I3I-2, I33, I63-5, Kabbalah, I69, I85, 204, 274 n.S I92 Kristeva, Julia, I60, I82, 272 n.I5 American Left, I3, I8, 26, 3I, 33-44, llO labor, 2, I4, 68, 7I, 75-80, 8I-2, 86, see also communism 93, 103-30 McCaffrey, Steve, 236, 237, 248 Lacan, Jacques, I 59 Melnick, David, 236, 250-I language, 9, I3, I8-20, 23-6, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 206 32-3, 52, 53-5, 58-68, 77, modernism, 5, 9, IO, I3, 2I-2, 27-33, 86-IOI, IIO-II8, I39, 85-6 I46-7, I57-8, I60-2, modernist poetics, 2, II, I8, I9-20, I67-2I4, 2I5-33, 235-55 li-2,27,242 and music, I4, 24-5, 60-8, I00-1, Moore, Marianne, 28, 36, 37 I??-8,237,240-8 morality, see erhics and world, 8 music, ll, I4, 22, 24-5, 44, 47-8, "Language" poetry, I, 2, II, I5, 93, 50-2, 55-7, 58-62, 77, 8I-2, II4, I69, I75, I79,235-55 97-IOI, ll6-I7, I57, I68-9, Lenin, Vladimir, 38-9 I72-89,237,240-8 Levertov, Denise, 2, I76, 242-3 see also autonomous art, Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 8-9, I4, conceptualization, rationality I3I-65, I7I, I72, 20I, 2I7, 2I9,220-2,224-6,228,230, New Masses, 35, 37, 40, 267 n.9 233,249,254-5 Niedecker, Lorine, 5, 37, I4I face of the other, 4, I39-40, I63, Nierzsche, Friedrich, 74-5 20I, 229, 254 nonidentity, 8, 45-6, 87, 89-IOI, otherness, 4, I34-5, I38, 139, I76-7, I80 I43-4, I45, I48-9, 20I, 2I7, see also Adorno, Theodor, identity 220-2,224-5,255 thinking Otherwise Than Being or, Beyond Norris, Christopher, II8, I21, 122-3, Essence, I33, I48 127 saying/said, I59-62, I80, 25I Totality and Infinity, I33, I35, objectification, 22-3, 43, 74, I30, I32, I38, I39, I42-4, I48-9, I44-9, I64, 228 I50-I, I59 objectivist, 2, 5, 13, I4, 20-6, 36-7, love, 3-5, 8, IO, I4, 22, 73-4, I03-30, 39, 5I,63,64,66-7, 69-70, I72-3, 223 76, 8I, 84, 9I, I32, I60, 220, Lukacs, Georg, 42-3, 226 n.65 226-33,252 see also objectification, sincerity, Mallarme, Stephane, 137, I9I Zukofsky, Louis, objectivist Man, Paul de, 6, II8 poetics Marx, Karl, 7I, 72, 75-6, 78, 80-I, objects, 5-6, 7-8, 2I-2, 23, 4I-2, 50, 86, 88, I03, I09, I20, I22, 68, 70, 9I, I00-29, 133, I45, I23, I28, I98, 266-7 I94,2I6-I7,226,229, 249 286 The Poetics ofthe Limit

Olson, Charles, 2, 22, 168, 196, 276 quantum physics, 105, 110-18, 128 n.35 Quartermain, Peter, 108, 111 ontology, 4, 5-6, 8, 127, 131-65, 173--4, 187, 216-17 Rakosi, Carl, 5, 20, 37 Oppen, George, 5, 14-15, 20, 37, rationality, 5, 8, 9, 10, 40-1, 71, 73-5, 215-33,242 91-2, 131, 141, 148, 151-2, "Mind's Own Place, The," 226-7, 162,216,219,223 228,231 see also autonomous art, "Of Being Numerous," 218-19, conceptualization, music 221,222,230 redemption, 27, 33, 70, 173 "Parousia," 215-16, 217, 219, 221 see also utopian "Product," 216-17, 219 referentiality, 1, 15, 50, 58-9, 95, 252 "Statement on Poetics," 216 reification, 15, 69, 70, 74, 78, 86, 93, otherness, 8, 10, 68, 72-3, 87, 89, 94, 99-100,235,244,250-1 130, 133-5, 142-4, 145, 155-6, responsibility, 1, 11, 15, 139, 143--4, 157,159-62,167-214,217, 172,220,222,224 220-2,224,231,246,252 see also ethics see also alterity Rexroth, Kenneth, 37 Reznikoff, Charles, 5, 20, 37 Palmer, Michael, 213, 242 Rose, Gillian, 93, 98, 100 particulars, 15,21,26,35,47, 50-1,64, Rothenberg, Jerome, 177 66-7,70,71-84,89-101,230-1 Rukeyser, Muriel, 44 Perelman, Bob, 15, 169, 235, 236, 248-9 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 33, 209, 225 a.k.a., 248-9 Scholem, Gershom, 185, 204 phenomenology, 5, 33, 70, 103, 132, Scroggins, Mark, 11, 12, 132 142-44,145-6,253 self, 8, 52-3, 86, 97, 106, 132, Plato, 3, 4, 218, 229 133--40, 150-64, 169, 172-3, Republic, The, 4 213,217,222,228-9,231, Symposium, 3 248-55 politics, 14, 15, 18, 25-6, 27-33, Shakespeare, William, 56, 118-19, 33--44,48-9,67,71,81,88, 137, 138, 139, 141, 193 135,141-2,190-3,198,221-2, sight, 3--4, 83--4, 119-21, 137, 139, 226,232,248-55 152-3,173-7,215-16,225, poststructuralism, 6, 28, 137, 188 243-6 Pound,~,2,9, 12,17-26,28,36, signifier/signified, 23-6, 28, 33, 58, 37,44,97,99, 104-5,111, 87,89,92, 177,199,203,210, 119,133,155,177,182-3,232, 250 237,242 Silliman, Ron, 1, 114, 149, 236, 238, Cantos, The, 17, 25, 36, 153, 155, 239,241,249 259 n.3 Age ofHuts, The, 239, 251-2 see also imagism sincerity, 5, 8, 20-5, 75, 83, 130, 132, public sphere, 49, 56, 110, 140-1, 144-9,228,229,232,233 192-3,232-3,246 socialism, see communism, Marxism; see Pythagoras, 137,184-5,192-3,211 also socialist realism Index 287 socialist realism, 13, 40-3 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 147, sound, see music 199 Spinosa, Baruch, 4, 5, 14, 32, 56, 75, 84, 103, 118-30, 133, 138, 139, zaum poetry, 208, 210, 212, 241, 251 151, 152, 156, 158 Zukofsky, Celia, 37, 99, 110, 127, 139, Stein, Gertrude, 36, 38, 237, 242 140, 141, 169, 170, 186, 198, Stevens, Wallace, 37, 261 n.16 199,200,212 structure, 50-2, 53, 55--6, 58--68, 85, Zukofsky, Louis 91,93-101,104,110-30, ~."2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 13-14, 17, 38, 153-4, 167-214 40,42,44,45--68,69-101, see also form 103-30,131--65,167-214,238, subjective, 21-2, 51-2 242,244 subjectivity, 4, 8, 10, 11, 20, 23-4, 26, All· The Collected Shorter Poems, 3, 60,68,85, 109,123,132,142-4, 4, 188; see also under individual 147-8, 150-1, 153-4, 183, poem heading.r 195-8,217,223,228-9,248-55 Bottom: On Shakespeare, 2, 118-20, surrealism, 37, 241 138, 139, 152, 160-1, 167, 182, symbolism, 21-2, 26 198-9,220 Catullus, 167, 171, 176, 177, thing, see object, objectification 200-2 Thoth, see Hermes 80 Flowers, 154, 160, 169, 198, translation, 14, 104-30, 171, 193, 205--6, 213, 242 199-203,255 First Halfof~"-9, The, 103-30 transliteration, 54, 105--6, 176, 212-13 "In Memory ofV. I. Ulianov," Trismegistus, see Hermes 38-9 Trotsky, Leon, 30, 34, 38 "Mantis" poems, 34-5, 42 objectivist poetics, 5, 8, 13, 20--6, utopian, 9, 10, 13, 38-9, 45-9, 73, 35,51,63,64,66-7,69-70, 173,214,242,255 76,81, 84,91,144-9,226-33, see also redemption 252; see also objectification, objectivist, sincerity Volosinov, Valentin, 261 n.27 "Objectivists" Anthology, An, 36-7, Marxism and the Philosophy of 59-40,83,144,227 Language, 25--6 "Poem Beginning 'The,'" 9, 13, 18, 27-33,34,35,42,44,49,53, Watten, Barrett, 236, 239, 241, 248, 252 119 ~trnan, Walt,208,223 Prepositiom, 100, 101, 146, 152, Williams, William Carlos, 2, 5, 8, 17, 162,177,194,208,214 20, 35, 36, 37, 39, 116, 141, "Reading and Talking,'' 3 175,190-1,237,241 "Sincerity and Objectification," 5, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 56, 147, 187, 20-5,35,66-7,94,119,132, 198-9, 243, 277 n.41 144,227 Philosophical lnvestigatiom, 147, Zukofsky, Paul, 110, 135, 139, 141, 198-9,243 154,168-9,186,212