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7. Roland Barthes, a Lover's Discourse, Fragments (I 977; Harmondsworth: Pen• Guin, 1990}

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7. Roland Barthes, a Lover's Discourse, Fragments (I 977; Harmondsworth: Pen• Guin, 1990} Notes Introduction Notes 1. Ron Silliman, "Language, Poetry, 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. David Antin, "Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry," 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. Louis Zukofsky, in an interview with L. S. Dembo in Terrell 1979, 272. 12. William Carlos Williams, Imaginatiom, ed. Webster Schott (New York: 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. Ezra Pound, 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 Ohio 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 Susan Howe (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Bob Perelman's The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, joyce, Stein, and Zukofiky (Berkeley: University of California 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" poets, which dovetail with exami­ nations my own Ph.D. thesis 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, England, 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 Humanities 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 Literature (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; Michael Heller, 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: Objectivism," 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
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