“A”-1
1928, rev. 19 July 1942
1.1 A: among the various obvious
significances of this initial “A”, a is the note sounded to which all
instruments of the orchestra are tuned. Although the rest of the early
movements do not begin with “a”, LZ seems to have decided quite early to move
from “a” to “an” in the second half of the poem; in the event, the “an”
movements begin with “A”-14 and all subsequent movements begin with an/an- (see
12 Dec. 1930 letter to EP in EP/LZ 80).
1.2 Bach: the contemporary setting of the opening of “A”-1 is a
performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion (Matthäuspassion)
at Carnegie Hall in NYC on Thursday, 5 April 1928, the eve of Good Friday,
which LZ attended (1.21-25). This contemporary performance is paralleled by the
work’s initial performance conducted by Bach himself on Good Friday, 15 April
1729 in Leipzig (current scholarship puts the probable first performance in
1727). Although LZ’s primary source of information on Bach was Charles Sanford
Terry’s scholarly biography, in this case the information on the original
performance of St. Matthew Passion in
“A”-1 appears to have come from the program notes of the performance LZ heard.
Ron Silliman notes that on the facing page of the New York Times for Friday, 6 April 1928 that reported the Carnegie
Hall performance there is an article on the new A logo for the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team (New Sentence 128).
In
the brief Foreword to the publication of “A”
1-12 (1959), LZ states: “‘A’ / a poem of a life / —and a time. The poem
will continue thru 24 movements, its last words still to be lived. Bach is a
theme all thru it, the music first heard in 1928 affecting the recurrences of
changes as may be of the story or history” (Prep+
228; see also Contributor’s note to An
“Objectivists” Anthology). CZ claims (“Commemorative Evening” 25) that the
genesis of “A”-1 was in a letter describing the performance to WCW, who was
unable to attend with LZ; the letter apparently has not survived, but see WCW’s
letters in WCW/LZ 4-5, which LZ
recalls in his 1958 “A Citation” to WCW (Prep+
46). In a 12 Dec. 1930 letter to EP, LZ states that “A”-1 developed directly
out of line 309 of “Poem beginning ‘The’”—“Our God immortal such Life as is our
God”—which is itself quoted from LZ’s uncollected poem “For a Thing by Bach”
written in 1925 (EP/LZ 79).
1.3 Come, ye daughters, share my anguish…: this and the
following italicized lines in “A”-1 through “A”-7 are from a translation of the
libretto of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion;
the version LZ quotes here and through the first seven movements is evidently
from the program notes of the performance he attended at Carnegie Hall,
although there appear to be various versions of the same basic translation and
there is no guarantee that following quotations are the precise ones he used.
This work required a double choir that alternately sing these opening lines in
culminating antiphonal mode (No.1 Chorus and Chorale):
Come, ye Daughters, share my anguish,
See him! Whom? The
Bridegroom see;
See him? How? So like a lamb;
See it? What? His love untold!
Look! Look where? Our guilt behold!
Look on Him, betrayed and sold,
On the cruel cross to languish.
Chorale:
O Lamb of God, most holy,
The bitter Cross undergoing,
O Saviour meek and lowly,
Despite and scorn only knowing,
Else were we left despairing.
On us have mercy, O Jesus!
1.10 Black
full dress of the audience: the conductor of the Carnegie Hall performance,
Ossip Gabrilowitsch, “had requested plain dark dress and a silent reception of
the masterpiece” as reported in the New
York Times on 6 April 1928 (Scroggins 196).
1.19 twenty–two
/ children: a slight exaggeration. In his two marriages, Bach had 20
children in all, only half surviving to adulthood; at the time of the first
performance of St. Matthew Passion in
Leipzig (assuming the 1729 date), Bach would have had seven surviving children
and six who had already died.
1.21 The
Passion According to Matthew, / Composed…: see 1.2.
2.2 (Heart turned to Thee): from Bach, St. Matthew
Passion, the concluding No. 68 Chorus:
Double Chorus: Around thy tomb here sit we weeping,
Hearts turned to thee, O Saviour blest:
Rest thee softly, softly rest.
Long, ye weary limbs, lie sleeping.
This cold stone above thy head
Shall to many a careworn conscience
Be a sweet refreshing pillow;
Here the soul finds peaceful bed.
Closed in bliss divine
Slumber now the weary eyes.
2.3 I,
too, was born in Arcadia: motto adopted by Goethe for his Travels in Italy (Ger. Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren). In
the earlier version of “A”-1 published in An
“Objectivists” Anthology (1932), the motto is in German. According to
Corman, Henry Adams quotes this motto in German in an 18 Nov. 1903 letter to
Henry James (“Z Gambit” 87). The Latin original of this epigrammatic remark, Et in Arcadia ego (I too was in Arcadia)
is usually attributed to the Italian painter Bartholomew Schidoni (1560-1616),
from whom it was echoed in the works of many other artists, although apparently
this was often found as an epitaph on ancient tombstones, since the implied
subject is Death.
2.8 Ecdysis:
shedding of skin by snakes or insects; here punning with “exit” and perhaps
“ecstasy.”
2.10 chamfer:
a flat surface formed by cutting off the edge or corner; or a furrow or groove
as in a column. So here the beveled edge of steps whose shoulder would be the
bit that sticks out. Apparently there were no marbled steps in Carnegie Hall
then or since, so possibly referring here to red carpet (Richard Parker,
personal communication).
2.15 Desire
longing for perfection: Cf. 6.24.23 and LZ’s definition
of “an objective” in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry (Feb. 1931); see
Prep+ 12/191. This formulation is
informed by Spinoza for whom perfection is identical with an entity’s reality
or realization as defined by its nature (see quotations at 6.24.23).
2.16 And as one who under stars / Spits
across the sand dunes…: Cf. WCW, Spring and All (1923), which LZ
always considered WCW finest work: “Thus / the movies are a moral force /
Nightly the crowds / with the closeness and / universality of sand / witness
the self spittle / which used to be drowned / in innocence and intoned / over
by the supple-jointed / imagination of inoffensiveness […]” (Collected Poems
I, 214).
2.21 “Camel”
smoke: Camel is a well-known brand of cigarettes; LZ was
a life-long smoker. Ahearn suggests (42) that the famous image on the cigarette
packet of a camel against a background of a pyramids, palm trees and desert
refers back to the previous stanza’s mention of “sand dunes.”
3.3 Thomas
Hardy: British novelist, died 11 Jan. 1928; he originally studied to be an
architect.
3.5 Sherry-Netherland:
luxury NYC hotel on 5th Avenue at 59th Street, opened in 1927.
3.13 Chirping
quatrain on quatrain; / And the sonneteers…: the poets LZ has in mind here
through the rest of this passage can be reasonably identified as the major
groups of conservative modernists, who were at the height of their influence on
contemporary American poetry at the time: the poets “Down East” (generally
speaking, refers to New England) would include Robert Frost, those of the
“Middle West” would include Carl Sandburg and other mid-west poets associated
with Poetry magazine, and those of
the “West coast” would include Robinson Jeffers and Yvor Winters. All those
poets are at least mentioned dismissively and sometimes analyzed in the
original version of LZ’s “American Poetry 1920-1930,” published in The Symposium in Jan. 1931; these more
negative and polemical comments were edited out of the essay for collection in Prepositions (1967).
3.16 holluschickies:
young male fur seals (<Russian, meaning bachelors), in other words, those
that may be legally killed for their fur.
3.18 “mélange
adultère de tout”: Fr. adulterous medley of everything. A famous phrase
from Tristan Corbière (1845-1875), the poem “Épitaphe pour Tristan-Joachim-Edouard Corbière, Philosophe: Épave,
Mort-Né,” which was also used as the title of a French poem by T.S. Eliot
included in Poems (1920).
3.23 Who
sang of women raped by horses: according to Cid
Corman, a reference to Robinson Jeffers (“Z Gambit” 77); in any case, a
reference to the Greek mythological subject matter of the Centaurs’ attempted
rape at the wedding of the Lapiths (see 6.35.21).
3.24 elevated:
train on raised rails; used to be common in NYC.
3.27 Pennsylvania
miners: the bitter Rossiter coal strike in Indiana county, southwest Pennsylvania
lasted from April 1927 to August 1928. Strikers were treated with extreme
brutality by mining company police and were subject to a notoriously
heavy-handed legal injunction by Judge Jonathan Langham, which prohibited any
actions on behalf of the strike and even forbade the singing of hymns in the
church situated just opposite the mine. Media reports of this injunction
brought the strike to national attention and gained the strikers wide-spread
sympathy. The plight of the strikers was furthered highlighted by the visit of
a Congressional committee headed by Senator Robert Wagner in late Feb. 1928,
which sharply questioned the legality of the injunction, although no effective
action was taken against it (thanks to Kenneth Sherwood).
3.29 Carat:
Mike Gold (1893-1967) wrote the well-known proletariat novel, Jews Without Money (1930) and in 1928
became editor of the The New Masses,
taking a strongly pro-Soviet line (Corman, “Z Gambit” 77-78). Gold, born Irwin
Granich, grew up on the same street as LZ in the Lower East Side of NYC, which
he vividly recalls in his novel.
3.32 It
was also Passover…: 5 April 1928, when LZ attended the performance of St. Matthew Passion, was the first day
of Passover.
4.13 “There
are different techniques…: from EP, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony
(1924): “[Henry] Lawes’ work is an example of how the words of a poem may be
set, and enhanced by music. There are
different techniques in poetry; men
write to be read, or spoken, or declaimed, or rhapsodized; and quite differently to be sung”; see EP and Music 271 (Ahearn 44). See
headnote to “A”-7.
4.17 “I
heard him agonizing…: from WCW, A Voyage to Pagany (1928) in a chapter
on Bach in which he describes a performance of St. Matthew Passion he attended in Vienna in 1924: “Funny old
figure he must have been going across the street having generated another child
in the night. Over to the old organ loft. Something uncanny about it. —Dev [the
novel’s autobiographical protagonist] was concerned. A light—coming, I saw him,
I heard him and not like a man on the street. I heard him agonizing. I saw him inside,
not cold but he lived and I was
possessed by his passion” (179-180) (Ahearn 45). See also 17.377.12-13. LZ
reviewed the novel in 1928; see Prep+
51-53.
4.19 “Everything
which / We really are…: from E.E. Cummings, the play Him (1927): “I can’t describe it—a shyness, more shy than you can
ever imagine, a shyness cohabiting very easily and very skillfully everything which we really are and
everything which we never quite live”
(120). LZ actually quotes the latter half of this sentence without designating
it as such in his review of Cummings’ play in The Exile 4 (Autumn
1928); see Prep+ 84-85 (original
title of essay was “Mr. Cummings and the Delectable Mountains”).
4.24 Cold stone above Thy head…: from J.S. Bach, St.
Matthew Passion; the first line and a half is taken from the concluding No.
68 Chorus around Jesus’ tomb (see 2.2), while what follows appears to be a
conflation of No. 67 Recitative, immediately preceding the previous, and No. 26
Recitative, which is the moment when Jesus finds his disciples asleep at
Gethsemane (Matthew 26:40f); the latter is more clearly referred to in the
original printing of “A”-1, before LZ revised it.
[No. 67 Recitative:]
And now the Lord to
rest is laid,
His task is o’er, for all our sins he hath atoned.
O weary broken body! See!
With repentant tears we would bedew it.
Which our offence to such a death has brought.
My soul shall bless thee all my days with thousand thanks.
4.29 liveforever: common name for various plants, but LZ almost certainly
has in mind the genus Sempervivum (L.
always living), specifically Sempervivum
tectorum or common houseleek (Leggott 148). These are succulents that grow
in rosettes with rows of thick leaves around a clear center. Leggott examines
in detail the recurring appearance of liveforever in many of the movements of “A”
and extending to related or alternative image-terms, such as everlasting, a
literal translation of the genus’ Latin name (144-164), see note at 2.7.19. For
other appearances of liveforever, see 2.7.8 & 19, 7.40.18, 7.41.24,
12.142.25 & 237.22, 15.359.13 and then the closely related “live here ever”
at 22.508.14.
5.6 Ready
to give up the ghost in a cellar: Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet I.v.171-173:
Hamlet: Ah, ha,
boy! sayst thou so? Art thou there, true-penny?
Come on,—you hear this fellow in the cellar-age,—
Consent to swear.
5.11 ‘Production
exceeds demand…:
5.12 Wobblies:
members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary
industrial union.
5.15 great
Magnus: although Corman identifies Magnus as Henry Ford
(the magnate) (“Z Gambit” 80), who figures prominently in “A”-6, Ahearn has
located a letter in which LZ identifies this as Magnus W. Alexander
(1870-1932), an American engineer, business leader and first president
(1916-1932) of the National Industrial Conference Board, a pro-business
research and lobbying group. LZ worked for the NICB from Oct. 1927-March 1928.
Etymologically, magnus < L. = great.
5.15 confrères:
Fr. colleagues, associates.
5.19 “We
ran ’em in chain gangs…:
5.27 “Ye lightnings, ye thunders / In clouds are
ye vanished? / Open, O fierce flaming pit!”: from St. Matthew Passion, No. 27b Chorus; at
the moment of Jesus’ arrest:
Ye lightnings, ye thunders,
in clouds are ye vanished?
Then open, O fierce flaming pit, all
thy terrors
Engulf them, devour them,
destroy them, o’erwhelm them
In wrathfullest mood.
