“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), “La Mante
religieuse. De la biologie à
la psychanalyse” (The
Praying Mantis, from biology to psychoanalysis), 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 following passages
from Caillois here and below are 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:
“[…] 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
them 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 are 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” (72-73; qtd. Golston 331).
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 reason to believe” (82). For the “moon” and
“old shoe” see preceding note.
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. 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’s translation.
