I am, as the gentle reader has no doubt noticed, well behind on my Cantos. I am perhaps a third of the way through and at this rate, will not be done until the end of 2012. But never fear: the coffee philosopher will prevail. He needs the Cantos as a proverbial notch on his bed post to give himself credibility when pontificating on high modernism.

But while I prevaricate (I am reading Middlemarch, A Dance with Dragons, and Possession far more assiduously than I am Pound), I wanted to comment on this article: Things Boundlessly 

Louis Zukofsky and his famous (more famous than read) “A” is definitely on the list. The great list of books to read, books to get around (that’s how I got started on The Cantos in the first place) includes it.  I first heard about him while reading an article about the “Objectivist” issue of Poetry that he edited in 1929 (I think; maybe it was 1928 or 1930; I wasn’t alive back then, so my memories from those days are necessarily fuzzy).

This quote from Things, Boundlessly seems to sum up some of the attraction of Zukofsky:

Neither Zukofsky nor “A” has any real claim on the public imagination. Even among poets he doesn’t seem to be much read, discussed, or taught, except by a handful of deeply entrenched partisans. I started to investigate whether—and why—this might be the case, but then I realized that I was squandering a huge opportunity. The question of whether Zukofsky is truly neglected (and of whether said neglect has been just) is far less interesting than the simple fact that one can approach Zukofsky with a readerly freshness—an innocence, if you will—that is perilously hard to come by for such art without equal. This is in starkest contrast to Pound’s Cantos, which has never fully emerged from its author’s divisive personal reputation (and probably never will). “A” is perhaps the last major work of American Modernism to feel like uncharted territory.

I know that “A” is an epic work. I know that it is political. I know that Zukofsky “founded,” after a fashion, the Objectivist school of poetry. I know little else.