Zukofskymas Eve

Welcome.  Tomorrow marks Louis Zukofsky's 110th birthday.  Ten years ago I had my tenth graders memorize his poems for extra credit for his 100th birthday.

Last month a wonderful classical piano CD came out from Jai Jeffryes: http://www.jeffryes.net/ .  It reminded me of a conversation I had with Jai thirty years ago about Zukofsky's definition of poetry as an integral from speech to music.  Jai commented that that definition put poetry in a central position in the arts.  I think Zukofsky would agree, but thinking about it recently, I don't see poetry at the center of my life the I did thirty years ago, and I don't see poetry as playing as central role in our culture as it used to.

Poetry seemed more central in 1922 the year The Waste Land appeared.  I remember in freshman English in college in 1979 my teacher called the 1920's "The Waste Land Decade."  William Carlos Williams said The Waste Land set American poetry back twenty years.  The poem had a decided impact on a culture without computers or television.  Movies didn't have talking, and radio had just come along.   Poetry could still make a big impact.

The closest thing since then seems Ginsberg's reading aloud of Howl with Kerouac sitting on the platform shouting "GO!" at the end of each breath unit in 1955 or 1956.  That reading shows up in things I've read by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Creeley, McClure, Whalen, Snyder, etc.  Last night I glanced at David Byrne's How Music Works and he mentions Burroughs and Ginsberg living in his neighborhood in New York in the 70's.  Ginsberg and the Beats in general certainly marked a lot of the people in shaped the sixties, from Dylan to the Beatles to Zeppelin, etc.  I don't know that poetry plays as great a role in 2014.  We live in what Eric McLuhan calls a post-literate age.  Reading and appreciating novels seems a step back to a previous age, the age of the novel.  Many people make that leap, reading Harry Potter or Proust.  Appreciating poetry involves taking two steps back, back to the age of poetry which dominated literature up until 250 years and the rise of the novel.  Some people still make that leap but fewer than those who appreciate novels.  Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Ginsberg seem some of the last poets to really mark the mass culture.