Chocolate Lovers:

Afnan Abo-Al-HassanAmal WaznaRazan Al-Ali

Salwa Al-HmyaniSara Al-khattabi

Louis Zukofsky“A”-6

• Objectivist Poet’s Definition…• Louis Zukofsky’s Biography…• The start of Objectivism…• The Epic…• From “A”-6 text…• His structure in writing the epic…•

The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged

in the 1930s.

They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and

William Carlos Williams.

The basic belief of Objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the

poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to

look clearly at the world.

His Life….

Born: January 23, 1904, in United States.Died: May 12, 1978, in United States.Nationality: American Education: Columbia University. Career: Writer. Awards/Honors:

Anthology awards, 1967 and 1968, all for excerpts from "A“

And many other prizes.

Zukofsky is the most formally essential poet to appear among the second-wave modernists who composed in the wake of such first-generation innovators as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein.

Zukofsky’s special issue, “‘Objectivists, 1931” uncovered what would later become the Objectivist movement.

The start…

In 1932, he edited An “Objectivists” Anthology, which further defined the group, though without representative any single aesthetic position.

Zukofsky’s own contribution to the anthology included the first seven movements of “A,” an ambitious poem in a juxtapositional style akin to that of The Cantos in its cohesiveness and length.

Despite the attention Objectivism received as a major poetic movement of the 1930s, Zukofsky’s own work never achieved much recognition outside literary circles.

Zukofsky spent his life working on "A" increasing the epic to 24 sections, reflects the hours of the day.

The poem combine:• Politics and family.•Traditional forms and free verse.

It features Zukofsky's own father as a major theme.

The complete version of "A" was finally at the printers when he died.

The Epic…

"A" is Zukofsky's "poem of a lifetime":

800 pages, in 24 movements, written over 50 years. Its 9th movement is a brilliant recreation of the human mind in dynamic motion.

The poem proves to be a love poem, and the words refer cut to an experience.

From “A”-6…

The melody! the rest is accessory: … My one voice. My other: is

An objective – rays of the object brought to a focus,

An objective – nature as creator – desire for what is objectively perfect

Inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars

The poem takes its form, and rhyme scheme, directly from Calvalcanti’s “Donna Mi Prega”.

Zukofsky’s poems operate within an period that he describes, in “A”-12, as “Lower limit speech / Upper limit music”. The music of poetry, in Zukofsky’s sense, refers to the difficult patterning of sound that everywhere goes into his work.

These poems are not representations of ideas but rules of thoughts in motion, expressed as sound. Zukofsky loved to create patterns; some of which are apparent and some of which doesn’t recognizable.

Often Zukofsky’s poems have no speaker; they are what are, things in the world.

Zukofsky’s poems-as-objects are not impersonal so much as independent.

The materiality in Zukofsky’s poetry is always a social materiality. It’s not a matter of what it says, but of what it is; or, better, it is not a matter of what it is, but of what it does.

Words are things too, and in Zukofsky’s poetry they have a power, a hardness, a thickness that we can count on and which counts on us.

The poem’s recurrent motif is for a rescaling of values toward that which is created by “hands” and “hearts” – that is, by the production of good and goods made by human hands; rather than by commodity value, that is, by how much a thing is sold for. “Labor as creator.”

“A” -9 is the crux of “A” – a supreme realization of what Zukofsky called “rested

totality”; that is, “desire for what is objectively perfect.”

“A”-9 has two halves, written, respectively, before and after Word War II. The second half of

the poem is a mirror image of the first. Its sources include the images of the poem.

Information about other “A”s…