Louis Zukofsky

His father Pinchos (ca. 1860–1950) immigrated to the United States in 1898, and was followed in 1903 by his wife, Chana (1862–1927), and their three children.

Pinchos worked as a pants-presser and night watchman for many decades in New York's garment district.

The only one of his siblings born in the United States, Louis Zukofsky was a precocious student in the local public school system.

As a boy he frequented the nearby Yiddish theatres on the Bowery, where he saw classic works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Tolstoy performed in Yiddish.

Zukofsky began writing poetry at an early age, and his earliest known publications were in the student literary journal of Stuyvesant High School, from which he graduated at age 15.

While when young he translated from the modern Yiddish poetry of Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarten), there is no indication he ever considered writing in Yiddish himself.

Zukofsky attended Columbia University, where he studied English.

Some of his teachers and classmates were to become important figures of culture, namely Mark Van Doren, John Dewey, John Erskine, Lionel Trilling and Mortimer Adler.

He joined the Boar's Head Society and published in the Morningside, a student literary journal.

Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet.

In the same year, he met Celia Thaew (1913–1980) and they married in 1939; their only child, Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017), was a child prodigy violinist and went on to become a prominent avant-garde violinist and conductor.

During World War II, Zukofsky edited technical manuals at a number of electronics companies working in support of the war effort.

One of Zukofsky's closest friends during the 1920s was his Columbia classmate, Whittaker Chambers, and throughout the 1930s he aligned himself with Marxism, although he never joined the Communist Party.

Zukofsky graduated from Columbia in 1924 with an M.A., writing a thesis on Henry Adams.

He would publish a revised version of this thesis as "Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography" in the journal Pagany, and Adams would remain a significant intellectual influence on Zukofsky's work.

However, his first distinctive work was the long poem, "Poem beginning 'The,'" composed in 1926 and published by Ezra Pound in his journal The Exile in 1928.

Demonstrating a precocious assimilation of modernist styles, this is an autobiographical portrait of the young poet.

The poem satirizes the older modernists for their pessimism, particularly T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, examines his cultural identity and the question of assimilation as the son of immigrant Jews, and concludes by asserting his poetic independence from the claims of family and his Jewish heritage, opting instead for a more cosmopolitan poetic identity.

Zukofsky's major work was the very long poem "A"—he never referred to it without the quotation marks—which he began in 1928 and would work on intermittently for most of the rest of his life, finally completing the poem in 1974.

He predetermined that the work would have 24 sections, which he called movements, but both formally and thematically he allowed the poem to develop as the occasion dictated.

"A"-1 opens at a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, whose fugal intricacies became one of the formal models for the poem.

The first six movements are predominately autobiographical but all directly or indirectly considering the question of the proper form for the poem at hand—"A"-6 ends by posing the question: "With all this material / To what distinction—."

The preliminary answer is "A"-7, often taken to be Zukofsky's first distinctly individual poem that looks forward to much that will follow.

Zukofsky taught for one academic year (1930–1931) in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the only time he lived outside the New York City area.

Their relationship over the course of the 1930s became severely strained because of Pound's increasingly strident fascism and anti-semitism, yet Zukofsky always maintained the highest regard for Pound's poetic abilities.

Pound put Zukofsky in contact with William Carlos Williams, who would remain a major supporter of and influence on the younger poet.

Pound persuaded the editor of Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe, to allow Zukofsky to edit an issue showcasing younger poets, resulting in the famous "Objectivists" issue (Feb. 1931), which included Zukofsky's statement "Sincerity and Objectification."

Although all the poets, including Zukofsky, denied any intention of forming a distinct poetic movement, a core group became identified as the Objectivist poets, which included besides Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, as well as Zukofsky's friends, Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker.

Zukofsky edited An "Objectivists" Anthology (1932), published by George Oppen's To, Publishers, and for a brief spell there was the collective The Objectivist Press, but the group attracted only limited attention at the time.

In 1934, Zukofsky began work as a researcher with the Works Projects Administration (WPA), and over the course of the rest of the decade he worked on various WPA projects, most notably the Index of American Design, a history of American material culture.

Pound remained an important supporter of Zukofsky in the following years, famously dedicating Guide to Kulchur (1938) "To Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting strugglers in the desert."

Throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, the Zukofskys lived in Brooklyn Heights, then from 1964 to 1973 in Manhattan, and finally they retired to Port Jefferson, New York, on Long Island, where he completed his magnum opus "A" and his last major work, the highly compressed poetic sequence 80 Flowers.

Williams found Zukofsky to be a valuable critic and editor of his own work, which he acknowledge by dedicating The Wedge (1944) to L.Z..

In 1947, he took a job as an instructor in the English Department of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he would remain until his retirement at the rank of associate professor in 1965.

He subsequently was a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut.

He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City's Lower East Side to Yiddish speaking immigrants from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire.

He had been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1967 and 1968, the National Institute of Arts and Letters "award for creative work in literature" in 1976, and an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 1977.

As a student Zukofsky wrote prolifically in imitation of many styles, both traditional and free verse.

Just a few months after completing the latter work and proof-reading the complete "A", Zukofsky died on May 12, 1978.