Ordering Bottom: Richard Parker on Louis Zukofsky and his Shakespeare book

Richard Parker's essay in issue 19 of The Wolf (Winter 2008/2009) looks at the American poet Louis Zukofsky and the way he orders his work, with Bottom: On Shakespeare as the main case. Parker begins with a short biography: birth in January 1904 on New York's Lower East Side, Yiddish as a first language, Ezra Pound's early backing, the 1931 special issue of Poetry that launched the Objectivists, and the anthology of the following year published with George Oppen's money. He follows the decades of near oblivion, the support of Cid Corman, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, and the late recognition by the Language poets. Bottom was begun in 1947 and appeared in full in 1962, after an agreement over Zukofsky's papers with a Texas library.

The first argument concerns titles. Parker reads the odd names Zukofsky gave his books as compact commentary on their contents: the quotation marks round Objectivists, the missing possessive, the letter "A" as the first line of its own poem and the pronunciation Peter Quartermain proposes for it, and the apostrophes of I's and After I's. The lesson he draws is that compression rules. Zukofsky says two things together, through syntax rather than spelling games, and the titles act as labels pinning each work to a place in a system.

Bottom itself gets the longest treatment. Parker unpacks the title: Nick Bottom the weaver, the lowest depth, the bass note, a bodily part, and the ballad called 'Bottom's Dream' because it hath no bottom. The book leans on Pericles more than on the comedy, and Zukofsky said it was written to do away with all philosophy. The short piece 'Bottom, A Weaver' supplies the image of weaving. Pound's boxed copy, sent by Celia Zukofsky and found unread, marks the point where Zukofsky starts to shed his Poundian inheritance.

The last third is a close reading of the 'Continents' section of 'An Alphabet of Subjects'. Parker follows a run from Ocellus Lucanus and Pound's ninetieth canto through Noah's sons, Pythagoras, Confucius and the Buddha, and sees refutation, parody and homage at once. He then describes Zukofsky's layered systems of alphabet, chronology, geography and dialogue, and the link of Melville and Poe through the shared word 'see'. His conclusion contrasts Pound's open ideogram with Zukofsky's closed net of correspondences.

Work

Bottom: On Shakespeare

Author

Louis Zukofsky

was written to do away with all philosophy

Louis Zukofsky, as quoted by Richard Parker, The Wolf, issue 19

nearly always saying two things at once

Richard Parker, The Wolf, issue 19