A History of American Literature

364 Making It New: 1900–1945

testify, the opposite is true. A poem like “Ferry,” for instance, uses a vivid verbal

structure to make the reader share the experience, feel the cold night, the water, the

fog, the silence punctuated by the sound of the siren – as these lines from it suggest:

Gleams, a green lamp

In the fog ...

Siren and signal

Siren to signal

Other poems, such as “During the Passaic Strike of 1926,” can convey fierce politi-

cal passion through the use of hissing sibilants and harsh gutturals, and others, like

“To my baby Paul,” employ gentle labials and soft consonants melting into one

another to suggest delicate but deep personal emotions. Many use typography as

well as verbal pattern to recreate a particular moment. In “Ferry,” for instance,

Zukofsky deploys the blank spaces between each verse paragraph to intimate, or

suggest, the foggy emptiness within which the lights and sounds of the ferry are

forced to operate – and, perhaps, the vacuum that we must all try to negotiate with

our signs and signals.

Nor was Zukofsky just a composer of vignettes. In 1927 he began writing a long

poem entitled “A.” “A” 1–12 was published in 1959, “A” 13–21 in 1969, and “A” 22 &

23 in 1977, shortly before his death. Zukofsky described the poem as an autobiogra-

phy. “The words are my life,” he explained. “The form of the poem is organic – that

is, involved in history and a life that has found by contrast to history something like

perfection in the music of J. S. Bach.” The poem opens, in fact, with memories of

a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; and then, with characteristic frugality

of speech, precision of cadence, and warmth of feeling, Zukofsky considers the

injustices and inequalities of contemporary America, personal memories and

affections, and aesthetic experience. Bach jostles alongside Henry Ford; the Chinese

and Chinese poetry are celebrated for their clarity and brevity of utterance; and,

despite the size of the work, there is the feeling that each word has been chosen, and

each line chiseled with scrupulous care. Zukofsky’s aim, essentially, is to evolve

something shapely, rhythmic, and structured out of experience, something with its

own intrinsic life, its own capacity for change and surprise. One critic has called it a

continuous day-book. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an Objectivist

epic which, like other great epics in the American tradition, is destined never to end.

A poet who was perhaps more aware of growing out of the Imagist movement, as

well as the Objectivist, was George Oppen (1908–1984). “What I felt I was doing was

beginning from imagism as a position of honesty,” he said once. “The first question

at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.” “At that time”

was the time of writing the poems in his first book, Discrete Series, which was

published in 1934. These early poems are remarkable for their attention to the word

as the primary unit of meaning and to the relationships between words and images

and things. They slow down the mind, concentrating it on words and things one at

a time and so quicken it, eventually, into a new sense of the relations between them.

GGray_c04.indd 364ray_c 04 .indd 364 8 8/1/2011 7:53:50 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 50 AM