Plums and Ashes Book

Zukofsky's enormous poem is the last major work of modernist poetry by an American. It's stunning in its range, complexity, hermeticism, and formal accomplishment. "A" is notoriously difficult, but isn't anything new, enlightening, and beautiful difficult? In any case, Zukofsky's difficulties are a pleasure:

An impulse to action sings of a semblance
Of things related as equated values,
The measure all use is time congealed labor
In which abstraction things keep no resemblance
To goods created; integrated all hues
Hide their natural use to one or one's neighbor.
So that were the things words they could say: Light is
Like night is like us when we meet our mentors
Use hardly enters into their exchanges,
Bought to be sold things, our value arranges;
We flee people who made us as a right is
Whose sight is quick to choose us as frequenters,
But see our centers do not show the changes
Of human labor our value estranges.

Just listen to that (and if you haven't read it aloud, you haven't listened to it.) Sure the syntax is complicated, but you can work it all out in time. It may or may not help to know that in this passage, Zuk is quoting Marx while keeping exactly (right down to the rhyming sounds) the form of Guido Cavalcanti's 14th century canzone "Donna mi Priegha". Anyhow, listen to it. It sounds like bells.

Something of a critical industry is developing around Zukofsky, in much the same way it's been built up around Joyce, Pound, etc. It's nice that attention to Zuk has been growing, but I'm hoping that average readers aren't scared away. The poem is innovative and formally challenging, yes, but it's no bloodless exercise in literary modernism. Zukofsky can sometimes be maddeningly difficult or obscure, but isn't everyone?

This is one of the books I'm always reading, and always will. I'm really looking forward to seeing what this poem will be like in thirty years or so.