“Mantis”
27 Oct.
1934/ Poetry (March 1935) and New Directions (1936)
Commentary
Brown, Norman O. “Revisioning Historical
Identities.” Tikkun 5.6 (Nov./Dec.
1990): 36-40, 107-110. Rpt. Apocalypse
and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991): 163-168.
Charters, Samuel. “Essay Beginning ‘All’.” Modern Poetry Studies 3.6 (1973):
241-250.
Conte, Joseph. Unending Design: The Forms of
Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1991. 185-191.
Davidson, Michael. “Dismantling ‘Mantis’:
Reification and Objectivist Poetics.” American
Literary History 3.3 (Fall 1991): 521-541. Rpt. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1997): 116-134 [besides “Mantis” also includes
extensive discussion of “A”-9].
Dembo, L.S. "Louis
Zukofsky: Objectivist Poetics and the Quest for Form." American Literature 44.1 (March 1972):
74-96. Rpt. Terrell (1979): 295-298.
Golston, Michael.
“Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying
Mantis.” Modernism/Modernity 13.2
(April 2006): 325-347.
Heller, Michael. “Objectivists in the Thirties:
Utopocalyptic Moments.” The Objectivist
Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter
Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999. 144-159.
Scroggins, Mark. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. Tuscaloosa: U of
Alabama P, 1998. 311-321.
Taggart, John. “Zukofsky’s ‘Mantis.’” Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary
Poetry and Poetics. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1994. 51-66.
Vanderborg, Susan. “‘Words Ranging Forms’:
Patterns of Exchange in Zukofsky’s Early Lyrics.” In Scroggins (1997): 192-213.
Using the
sestina form, LZ particularly has in mind the example of Dante’s "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra,”
translated as “To the short day and the great sweep of shadow” at 69.6, which
also provides him with the terminal words “stone” (pietra) and “leaves” (erba).
LZ comments on his use of the sestina form in his interview with L.S. Dembo in
1968 (Prep+ 240-241), and Taggart
analyses the poem’s form in detail.
Title Mantis from Gk. meaning seer or prophet
(see 66.23); the insect has long been credited in many cultures with spiritual
associations due to the seemingly praying posture of its front legs, but is
also notorious because the females eat their male partners after mating. See
Golston for a discussion of the Surrealist obsession with the praying mantis,
to which LZ is responding.
66.10 papers make money: see note at 71.32.
66.17 old Europe’s poor / Call spectre,
strawberry…: Golston (330) has identified the source of these more
colloquial designations for the praying mantis, as well as the folklore belief
that it points the way home to lost children, as an essay by Roger Caillois
(1913-1978), “Le Mante religieuse. De la biologie à la psychanalyse” (The Praying Mantis),
published in the French Surrealist journal Minotaure
5 (May 1934). This essay summarizes a wide range of research on the biological,
cultural and psychological significance of the mantis and became the fifth
chapter of Caillois’ The Necessity of the
Mind, which although written in the early 1930s was only published complete
after his death. “Spectre” here also evokes the opening of the “Communist
Manifesto”: “A spectre is haunting Europe.” The relevant passages from Caillois
as translated by Michael Syrotinski:
“[…] in a passage quoted by J.H. Fabre (Souvenir entomologiques [Entomological
Memories], vol. 5, ch. 20), recounts that the mantis, when questioned by
children who are lost, shows then the right way by extending its finger, only
rarely, if ever, misleading […]” (70).
”[…] sometimes the mantis is called an ‘Italian girl’ or a ‘phantom,’ and less
explicably a “strawberry’ or a ‘madeleine” (71).
66.21 Killed by thorns (once men)…: this and
other imagery in this stanza and the following is from Roger Caillois’ essay
(see preceding note): “According to [the Hottentots and the Bushman] the
supreme deity and creator of the world is precisely the mantis (Cagn), whose
loves are, it seems, ‘pleasing,’ and it is especially attached to the moon,
having made it out of one of its old shoes. Note that its main function seems
to be to obtain food for those who beg for it, and that in addition it was
devoured and vomited alive by Kwaï-Hemm, the devouring god. […] Among its other
avatars, it is worthwhile to point out that when killed by thorns that once
were men, and eaten by ants, it was resuscitated, its bones having been put
back together again; in this adventure digestion still plays a certain part and
links it to the very rich mythical cycle of the dispersed and resuscitated god
of the Osiris type” (Golston 331; qtd. from The
Necessity of the Mind: An Analytic Study of the Mechanisms of Overdetermination
in Automatic and Lyrical Thinking and of the Development of Affective Themes in
the Individual Consciousness, trans. Michael Syrotinski. Venice, CA: The
Lapis P, 1990: 72-73).
66.27 Android…: Cf. Roger Caillois, “The
Praying Mantis” (see 66.17): “‘The insect seems to us very much like a machine
with a perfect mechanism [or, “wheelwork”], capable of functioning
automatically’ [quoting Léon Binet]. Indeed, the assimilation of the mantis to
an automaton—that is, in view of its anthropomorphism, to a female android—seems to me to be a consequence
of the same affective theme: the conception of an artificial, mechanical,
inanimate, and unconscious machine-woman incommensurable with man and other
living creatures derives from a particular way of envisioning the relationship
between love and death and, more precisely, form an ambivalent premonition of
finding the one within the other, which is, in fact, something I have every
reasons to believe” (82).
66.31 the moon, it / Is my old shoe…: see
quotation at 66.21.
66.33 Fly, mantis, on the poor, arise like leaves
/ The armies of the poor…: Brown notes (165) that the coda to “’Mantis’”
echoes “L’International,” which is also evoked in the title and elsewhere in Arise, Arise (see esp. 33):
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation,
A better world's in birth.
“Mantis,” An Interpretation
4 Nov.
1934/ New Directions (1936)
LZ
acknowledges in a 22 Oct. 1941 letter that this “Interpretation” of “‘Mantis’”
was provoked by WCW’s “comment of the time” (WCW/LZ 295); see 70.5 below. LZ owned a set of The Temple Classics
editions of Dante’s works with original Italian text and translations on facing
page; the volume he refers and quotes from below is: The Vita Nuova and
Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri, translated by Thomas Okey (La vita nuova)
and P.H. Wicksteed (1911).
67.1 Nomina
sunt consequential rerum…: from Chap. XIII of Dante, La Vita Nuova, with translation by
Thomas Okey immediately following. Dante is quoting Thomas Aquinas, but LZ may
also have in mind a key passage of EP’s “Vorticism” (1914): “The image is not
an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce,
call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are
constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this
necessity came the name ‘vorticism.’ Nomina sunt consequentia rerum, and
never was that statement of Aquinas more true than in the case of the vorticist
movement” (Gaudier-Brzeska 92).
67.4 Incipit Vita Nova…: It. “here begins
the new life,” from the introductory paragraph of Dante, La Vita Nuova. The following two lines are immediately translated
from Okey: “In that part of the book of my memory before which little could be
read is found a rubric which saith: Incipit
Vita Nova. Beneath which rubric I find written the words which it is my purpose to copy in this little book, and
if not all, at least their substance.”
68.13 la battaglia delli diversi pensieri . .
.: from Dante, La Vita Nuova, the
opening sentence of Chap. XIV; LZ immediately translates (Okey has: “the battle
of the divers thoughts”).
69.1 Dante’s rubric / Incipit: see 67.4.
69.3 Surrealiste / Re-collection: in the
early 1930s both EP and LZ agreed that the dream vision poetry of Dante
anticipated surrealism and that the latter was nothing new (see e.g. EP/LZ
162). See Golston on “Mantis” as a response to Surrealism.
69.6 “To the short day and the great sweep of
shadow”: see introductory note to “Mantis”; translation by P.H. Wicksteed
in the Temple Classics. Dante’s sestina, designated as Canzone, is included in TP
143-144 as translated by D.G. Rossetti.
70.5 —Our world will not stand it, / the
implications of a too regular form: quoting a 30 Oct. 1934 letter from WCW
in response to “Mantis”: “I myself dread the implications of too regular form—our
world will not stand it. The result of the implied comparison being unreality.
This is usually interpreted as falsity” (WCW/LZ
202).
70.9 Millet in a Dali canvas: Salvador Dali
(1904-1989) did a number of paintings—particularly L'Angelus
arquitectonic de Millet (1933) and Reminescence Archeologique de L'Angelus de Millet (1935)—that “translate” Jean-François Millet’s L’Angelus,
which depicts two poor peasants praying out in a field to the ringing bells of
a church (L’angelus) in the distance. Roger Callois (see 66.17) mentions that Dali discusses the mantis in
the critical work that compliments his Angelus
paintings. On Dali’s interest in the mantis figure in relation to Millet’s and
his own paintings, see Golston 332-334. Lorine Niedecker mentions seeing Dali’s
first major exhibition in NYC in late 1933, which presumably LZ probably saw as
well (Penberthy 22-23).
70.9 Circe in E’s Cantos: Circe appears
scattered through the early Cantos of
EP, but particularly in Canto I from whom Odysseus and his men set out for
Hades and to whom they return and in Canto XXXIX which evokes Odysseus and his
men malingering at Circe’s house. LZ appears concerned here with the idea of
the recurrence of past figures in contemporary work. See Golston who draws a
connection between Circe as a predatory female and the mantis figure in Dali’s
reworking of Millet (346).
71.31 The
Wisconsin Elkhorn Independent: a community paper; Elkhorn is not far
from Madison and LZ must have heard of the paper during his year teaching at
the University of Wisconsin in 1930-1931.
71.32 “Rags make paper, paper makes money…:
although LZ’s precise source is unidentified, but possibly The Wisconsin Elkhorn Independent, this is a traditional jingle
often identified as 18th century and showing up in various versions. “Rags”
here refers to the common use of rags as the primary pulp material in early
paper manufacture (Jane Kamensky & Lindsay Silver, personal communication).
72.1 Provence myth: deliberately or not, LZ
is being somewhat loose here; Roger Caillois’ essay on the mantis (see 66.17)
mentions various French folklore about the insect, much but not necessarily all
from the southern or Languedoc region. Caillois remarks: “In more general
terms, it seems that we must agree with the opinion of De Bomare, who writes
that in all Provence, the mantis is regarded as sacred and that people avoid
causing it the slightest harm” (trans. trans. Michael Syrotinski).
72.2 Melanesian self-extinction myth: again
LZ is not recalling or replicating accurately; as the quotation at 66.21
indicates, this is an African myth. It is possible LZ is working from confusing
notes, since the preceding paragraph of Callois’ essay does mention mantis
related facts from Melanesia.
72.3 airships: airships or zeppelins were
much in the news in the early 1930s; one of the more famous disasters was the
crash of the U.S.S. Akron in April
1933, although the most spectacular, the Hindenburg,
would not happen until 1937.
72.4 creation myth (Melanesia)…: ditto note
at 72.2.
72.32 jelly for the Pope: perhaps alludes to
the Concordat signed in June 1933 between Pope Pius XI and Hitler’s government,
as well as other acts perceived as appeasing the fascist powers.
72.33 la mia nemica, Madonna la pieta…: from
Dante, La Vita Nuova, the sonnet in
Chap. XIII, with translation by Okey immediately following.
73.4 La calcina pietra…: from Dante’s
sestina (see introductory note to “Mantis”), which is one of a number of poems
addressed to a lady named Pietra (stone).
73.9 com’huom pietra sott’ erba…: the final
phrase from Dante’s sestina, with Wicksteed translation.
