Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics

By Sandra Kumamoto Stanley

Viewing Louis Zukofsky as a reader, writer, and innovator of twentieth-century poetry, Sandra Stanley argues that his works serve as a crucial link between American modernism and post- modernism.

Like Ezra Pound, Zukofsky saw himself as a participant in the transformation of a modern American poetics; but unlike Pound, Zukofsky, the ghetto-born son of an immigrant Russian Jew, was keenly aware of his marginal position in society. Championing the importance of the little words, such as a and the, Zukofsky effected his own proletarian "revolution of the word."

Stanley explains how Zukofsky emphasized the materiality of language, refusing to reduce it to a commodity controlled by an "authorial/authoritarian" self. She also describes his legacy to contemporary poets, particularly such Language poets as Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520073576
• ISBN13: 9780520073579
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.7"