All There Needs to Be Said

August Kleinzahler

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky by Mark Scroggins
Shoemaker and Hoard, 555 pp, $30.00, December 2007, ISBN 978 1 59376 158 5

Born on the Lower East Side in 1904 to immigrant Russian Jewish parents, Louis Zukofsky spent his entire life in New York City, reading and writing and doing as little else as possible. He was abstemious, hypochondriac, a chain-smoker; he cared little for food, took almost no exercise and insisted that the windows of his apartment be shut tight at all times: he was very susceptible to draughts. At 35 he married a Jewish pianist and composer called Celia Thaew, whom he had met six years before while supervising a Work Projects Administration programme. She had had a copy of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical prodigy and now a well-known violinist and conductor.

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[*] Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukovsky (1993).

Vol. 30 No. 10 · 22 May 2008 » August Kleinzahler » All There Needs to Be Said (print version)
Pages 25-27 | 3690 words

Letters

From W.S. Milne

August Kleinzahler rightly stresses the influence of Louis Zukofsky on the work of Basil Bunting (LRB, 22 May). It is difficult to think of any other British poet influenced by Zukofsky, except possibly Ian Hamilton Finlay, who introduced him to a British public with his publication of 16 Once Published in 1962, and maybe also Charles Tomlinson. The London poetry magazine Agenda published a special issue on Zukofsky’s work in 1964, and I remember the poet Peter Dale (who had worked on that issue) telling me some years ago that Zukofsky and his wife, Celia, regularly visited the editor, William Cookson, at his flat in Battersea to oversee publication. After countless visits necessitated by the mistakes made by the magazine’s Polish printers, Celia told Dale that she heard her husband use the F-word for the first and last time in her presence. ‘Oh, fucking forget it,’ he told Cookson, and returned to New York, hoping that, despite the difficulties, his customary precision and clarity, as Kleinzahler describes it, might still shine through in the issue.

W.S. Milne
Esher, Surrey

From Charles Bernstein

Is the ‘L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E’ to which August Kleinzahler refers in his piece on Louis Zukofsky (LRB, 22 May) L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine Bruce Andrews and I edited from 1978 to 1981? Probably not, since his description of our work and relation to Zukofsky does not fit. And is it ‘A’, Zukofsky’s best-known work, that Kleinzahler has in mind when he refers to A? Probably not, since his review misses the delight it provides to ear, eye and intellect. In the 165 small-format pages allotted for the Library of America edition of Zukofsky’s Selected Poems, I endeavoured to present all aspects of the poet’s work. I wonder why Kleinzahler feels Zukofsky’s work would be better served by someone who, like himself, appreciates only a small part of it? Isn’t that the kind of appropriation for which he scolds me?

Charles Bernstein
New York