Webster’s Collegiate and Louis Zukofsky’s “A”

Abstract

Chapter 2 shifts its focus to Zukofsky’s long poem “A”, uncovering oblique political references to contemporaneous tensions in Jerusalem, the Triangle Factory fire, and African American musical revues. In addition to discovering the source of Zukofsky’s definition of “Objectivism” and clarifying local interpretive cruxes, the chapter elaborates the transitive principle by which seemingly unrelated terms (blood, tide, horse, pulse) and figures (Bach, Marx, Moses) are concatenated like the dictionary’s own structure of definitions. Zukofsky not only quotes from the dictionary, but he mimics its mode: condensing various denotations from distant discursive registers under a single word (such as camel) and lacing expanding networks that connect several—but not all—of the terms in transitive series. Accordingly, while any given line may seem oblique and incomplete, when read as a network the text reveals its most cryptically opaque phrases to be fully explained.