Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky

by Mark Scroggins (Editor)

Scroggins provides a provocative and advanced introduction to the
thought and writing of Louis Zukofsky, aptly described as one of the "first
postmodernists." Poet, translator, and editor, Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City
in 1904. Raised to speak first Yiddish and then English, he was fascinated
by language from an early age. This deep preoccupation with language--its
musicality, complex constructions, and fluid meaning--later became a key
component in the development of his poetry. Friend to William Carlos Williams,
Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, mentor to Robert Creeley and influence
on many of the Language Movement poets, Zukofsky and his work stand squarely
at the center of American poetry's transition from modernism to postmodernism. Mark Scroggins advances thoughtful readings of Zukofsky's key critical
essays, a wide variety of his shorter poems, and his "poem of a life", "A". He carefully situates Zukofsky within his literary and historical
contexts, examining his relationship to Pound, his 1930s Marxist politics,
and his sense of himself as a Jewish modernist poet. Scroggins also places
Zukofsky within an ongoing tradition of American poetry, including the
work of Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer,
and John Taggart.

Genres: Poetry

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 1997

About the author

Born as military brat just down the street (he likes to imagine) from where Theodor Adorno was lecturing on the culture industry & modernist aesthetics. Bounced all over in his formative years -- Monterey CA, Syracuse NY, various bits of Germany, west Texas, western Kentucky -- then more or less settled down in middle Tennessee, but not before contracting a permanent sense of dislocation. Studied at Virginia Tech & Cornell University, with concomitant degrees. Now in south Florida, where he lives with his wife, a scholar of early modern & contemporary drama, & his two just unbelievably beautiful daughters.

Considers poetry his first calling (after several ephemeral chapbooks, Anarchy [2003] his first full-length collection), but has been deeply involved in scholarship on the poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), whose biography he has written.