I’s (pronounced eyes) (1963)

 

The title of this collection almost certainly relates to Bottom, which LZ was finishing during the period he wrote these various pieces. The section “Definition” in Part Three, which runs through the entire Shakespeare canon picking out passages as evidence of the theme that “love sees,” is presented in the form of a dialogue between the Son and I, who is first introduced as, “I. (pronounced eye)” (266). Internal evidence indicates that “Definitions” was written, compiled or finished in 1959, the same year as most of the poems in I’s (pronounced eyes) were composed. One might usefully consult Bottom’s index under “I,” which in particular directs attention to LZ’s interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s definition of the subject or I in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; see particularly quotations at 51-52.

 

(Ryokan’s scroll)

16 Dec. 1960/ Origin (April 1961)

 

Commentary

Corman, Cid. “Ryokan’s Scroll” Sagetrieb 1.2 (Fall 1982): 285-289.

 

Title            Ryokan’s scroll: Corman explains that he loaned LZ a scroll that reproduces a poem by the Japanese Zen poet Taigu Ryokan (1758-1831) in the poet’s own famous free-style calligraphy. The following poem, which typographically attempts to suggest a sense of the scroll, is LZ’s version of Ryokan’s poem working from a literal translation sent to him by Corman in a 13 Dec. 1960 letter: “the / first / snow / out / off / where / blue / eyes / the / cherry / tree’s / petals.”
             Ryokan’s scroll is mentioned and the poem’s images reappear in “A”-14.325.7. Ryokan’s calligraphy was reproduced on the cover of the original publication of I’s (pronounced eyes) by Trobar Press, but printed up-side-down, as noted in “A”-14 (a photo of the cover can be found in Scroggins, “Louis Zukofsky” 295).

 

Homage

17 Jan. 1959

 

Her Face the Book of—Love Delights in—Praises

18-19 June 1959/ Nation Review (Nov. 1962)

 

Title      Her Face the Book of—Love Delights in—Praises: as LZ indicates, splicing from two plays of Shakespeare, Pericles and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
From Pericles I.i; spoken by Pericles on the entrance of Antiochus’ daughter:
See where she comes, apparell’d like the spring, 
Graces her subjects, and her thoughts the king
Of every virtue gives renown to men!
Her face the book of praises, where is read
Nothing but curious pleasures, as from thence
Sorrow were ever razed and testy wrath   
Could never be her mild companion.
From The Two Gentlemen of Verona II.iv:
Proteus. Enough; I read your fortune in your eye.
Was this the idol that you worship so?
Valentine. Even she; and is she not a heavenly saint?
Proteus. No; but she is an earthly paragon.
Valentine. Call her divine.
Proteus. I will not flatter her.
Valentine. O! flatter me, for love delights in praises.

205.2    “will you give yourself airs / from that lute of Zukofsky?”: these quoted lines as well as 206.1 from Robert Duncan (1919-1988), “After Reading Barely and Widely,” probably written early 1959 and collected in Opening of the Field (1960): 88-92. Duncan had been responsible for LZ’s residency at San Francisco State College in the summer of 1958 and presumably the Zukofskys’ sent him a copy of Barely and widely on its publication in Sept. 1958.

206.5    Henry Birnbaum..: American poet who published an eight page poem, “Orizons,” in Poetry 94.3 (June 1959): 156-163, in the same issue that CZ and LZ’s first Catullus versions appeared. LZ quotes at 206.9-12 and 206.16 the first few lines of the third section of Birnbaum’s poem, which in full reads:
I ought to thank
            Zukofsky,
a wonderful voice,
            Zukofsky.
That makes me eclectic
wonderfully pejoratively
                        eclectic,
but I don’t care
and neither should he
should he
            so long as we
walk out on cartels
            and make sounds
that sound uncom
                          fort
                               able
in parlor chairs.

206.21  With their Stock / Opera House of vocables—: see following quotation at 206.26.

206.26  Father Huc’s tree / Of Tartary…: Évariste Régis Huc (1813-1860), French Catholic missionary in Asia, best known for his account Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China (1850), translated into English by William Hazlitt. Huc describes seeing the Tree of a Thousand Images at a Tibetan lamasery that sprang from the hair of Tsong-Kaba (1357-1419), the great Tibetan Buddhist reformer and founder of the Yellow Hat School of Buddhism; this tree had Tibetan characters discernable on each leaf as well as its trunk and branches. LZ’s allusion actually comes from James Russell Lowell’s essay, “Shakespeare Once More,” from which he quotes the following passage somewhat abridged in Bottom (192):
             “Shakespeare, then, found a language already to a certain extent established, but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers, —a versification harmonized, but which had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judges are insensible. That the language was established is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king speak as his country nurse might have taught him. It was Waller who first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone comported with the state of royalty. In the time of Shakespeare, the living tongue resembled that tree which Father Huc saw in Tartary, whose leaves were languaged, —and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression, fed from those unseen sources in the common earth of human nature.”
             In Bottom and again when the passage was incorporated into "A”-17, LZ explicitly associates this image of Father Huc’s tree with WCW’s “The Botticellian Trees” (see 17.387.28).

206.31  knee deck her: = Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), poet and long-time friend of LZ. The quotation 206.33-35 is from a 16 June 1959 letter from Niedecker, who is responding to a LZ letter in which he apparently quotes the opening lines of Duncan’s “After Reading Barely and Widely” (Penberthy 252-253). The reference to “drudgery” in the preceding line is taken directly from Niedecker’s letter and refers to the fact that at the time she was both resettling her house after being flooded out and working as a cleaner at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital. Niedecker responds to this passage and poem in a following letter dated 23 June (Penberthy 254).

 

Hill

27 Oct. 1959/ San Francisco Review (March 1961)

 

1959 Valentine

6-7 Feb. 1959/ Wagner Literary Magazine (Spring 1959)

 

Wire

1-2 March 1959

 

Motet

15 Jan. 1937

 

This poem is a rare case when LZ resurrects a poem written many years earlier.

 

Title      Motet: polyphonic or choral composition sung usually to a sacred text, often without accompaniment; a major musical form during the 13th through mid-18th centuries.

209.1            Maestoso: It. majestic; in music, to perform in a stately and dignified manner.
General Martinet Gem: Martinet means a rigid military disciplinarian, one who demands absolute adherence to forms and rules (AHD); from Inspector General Jean Martinet (d. 1672), French innovator of modern methods of military drills to effectively break in raw recruits. Cf. Général Gene Gem who commands toy soldiers at “A”-8.94.21, which LZ was working on during the time he wrote this poem.

 

Jaunt

20-21 July 1959/ Poetry (Feb. 1960)

 

Based on a cross-country car trip to Mexico with George and Mary Oppen in the summer of 1959, with the Zukofskys flying back as described in section 5 (Penberthy 94), evidently LZ’s first airplane flight (Scroggins).

 

1

210.13  maid Barbary’s song: refers to a song in Shakespeare, Othello IV.iii sung by Desdemona, which she says she learned from her mother’s maid Barbary:
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow:
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur’d her moans;
Sing willow, willow, willow:
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften’d the stones;—

Sing willow, willow, willow:
Sing all a green willow must be my garland.
Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve,—
I call’d my love false love; but what said he then?
Sing willow, willow, willow:
If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men.

210.22  alpha and omega: first and last letters of the Greek alphabet (thus equivalent to A and Z), and theologically used to mean eternity (specifically of God) or simply first and last, beginning and end.

211.13  Two Gentlemen / Proteus and Valentine: these are the two gentlemen of the title of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.

211.17  from fatal loins: from the Prologue sonnet to Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, a play set in Verona, Italy:
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

2

211.1    The cow scraped by / the hood of the car…: this section describes an incident when Oppen was driving and grazed a cow, which in fright shat on the car (Scroggins Bio 295).

 

Peri Poietikes

27 March 1959/ Nation (Nov. 1959)

 

Title      Peri Poietikes: when first published in Nation, a note by LZ states: “Peri poietikes: ‘About poetry,’ the opening words of Aristotle’s Poetics” (336), which were taken as that work’s title.

213.2    Look in your own ear and read: modernization of EP’s “Look into thine owne eare and reade” (EP/LZ 73; dated 18 Nov 1930), which in turn echoes the concluding line of the opening sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella: “’Fool, said my Muse to me, Look in thy heart and write” (Penberthy 259). See also Prep+ 23.

213.5            Pyrrhic: metrical foot having two short or unstressed syllables.

213.5    Pirke: when first published in Nation, a note by LZ states: “Pirke: that is, Pirke Aboth, ‘Chapters of the Fathers,’ included in Talmud and part of the orthodox Jewish ritual read on Sabbath afternoons” (336).

213.7    gnome: a short, pithy saying; an aphorism; e.g. gnomic verse. Also punning on -nome in metronome, from Gk. nomos, rule or division.

 

I’s (pronounced eyes)

1959-1960

 

According to Booth (110) these were originally written as separate poems and not assembled together until 1961. The composition dates of the individual poems is as follows: “Hi, Kuh”: 15 Jan. 1959; “Red azaleas”: 2 May 1959, rev. 11 June 1959; “Fiddler Age Nine”: 5 Feb. 1959 (line 3), 2 May 1959 (rest of poem); “HARBOR”: 13 June 1959; “FOR”: 13 June 1959; “Angelo”: 13 June 1959; “SEVEN DAYS A WEEK”: 13 June 1959; “TREE-SEE”: 29 Oct. 1959; “A SEA”: 10 Nov. 1959; “ABC”: 6 Nov. 1959; “AZURE”: 23 May 1960.

 

Commentary

In his 1968 interview with L.S. Dembo, LZ comments on the first poem of this sequence (Prep+ 242-243), and he made similar comments in his 1966 NET recording and reading (see Recordings of LZ).

Parsons, Marnie. Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. 100-102.

Rieke, Alison. Senses of Nonsense. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992. 162-164.

Scroggins, Mark. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998. 100-114.

 

Title      I’s (pronounced eyes): see note to the title of the collection.

214.1    Hi, Kuh: aside from the pun on haiku, kuh in Ger. means cow.

214.13  Fiddler Age Nine…: according to Scroggins this poem is based on a snapshot of PZ (108).

214.15            Détaché: violin bowing technique of separate, detached strokes for each note; see “Spook’s Sabbath, Five Bowings” (CSP 136).

215.4    two-by-four’s: 2 x 4s are standard lengths of lumber whose cross section measurements are 2 inches in height and 4 inches in width when untrimmed.

216.1    TREE—SEE?...: this poem is a collaborative effort between LZ and Lorine Niedecker. Responding to a letter Niedecker wrote to PZ in which she drew a tree, LZ wrote the first three-line phrase in a 16 Oct. 1959 letter, to which she in turn replied with the latter phrase, which LZ recognized as a found poem (Quartermain 90; Penberthy 10, 254).

 

To Friends, for Good Health

28 Feb.-2 March 1959/ Combustion (May 1959)