GOING TO PATCHOGUE and ZUKOFSKY

Last night I was in The Strand and noticed on the new books table this fortuitous juxtaposition.

Most likely it will not be there a day later and within the week both books will no longer be "new."

Zukofsky was an early subject of this blog since he was born a few streets south of where I sit.

Zukofsky had a summer bungalow in a town across Long Island from Patchogue.

Zukofsky has gradually found readers.

GOING TO PATCHOGUE has found fewer readers. I did meet once a young man on Fifth Street who stopped me asking if I was who he thought I was and I asked him why he was stopping me: I had been looking for the blood near the police-station on Fifth Street, that you had written about.

Of course I am happy to see GOING TO PATCHOGUE again available but it is a source of an aching sadness as no one has been willing to publish what comes after: FORGET THE FUTURE, NOTHING DOING, JUST LIKE THAT (A Beginning and an End of the so-called 60s) or what I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL

POETRY READING NOT POETRY WRITING, LOUIS ZUKOFSKY, HENRY ADAMS

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EZRA POUND

T.S. ELIOT

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

ROBERT FROST

WALLACE STEVENS

and then... if one continues with LORINE NIEDECKER

if one continues with JACK SPICER

if one continues with ROBERT DUNCAN

if one continues with CHARLES OLSON

if one continues with RONALD JOHNSON

if one continues with JAMES MERRILL

and finally if one continues with LOUIS ZUKOFSKY and then announces that this list pretty much sums up what anyone really needs to know about American poetry in the Twentieth Century...

I was thinking about this because finally a biography of LOUIS ZUKOFSKY is about to appear: THE POEM OF A LIFE by MARK SCROGGINS and this afternoon I am going to walk down to 97 Chrystie Street a few blocks away from where I am sitting on this cold day after Thanksgiving, to see if the building where Zukofsky was born in 1904 is still there...

In the 60s I used to go into the Catholic Worker place on Christie Street to pick up copes of THE CATHOLIC WORKER to sell in front of St. Francis de Sales Church in Patchogue--- for the cover price of one penny.

But I have been thinking about ZUKOFSKY whose body of work is still mostly unknown but from what I am able to read is the one gorgeous bloom before the last flowering of that great list above, RONALD JOHNSON---

Maybe you have heard of ZUKOFSKY'S : "A" and then BOTTOM the two volumes on Shakespeare, the Catullus translations, the A USEFUL ART Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design, LE STYLE APOLLAINAIRE and PREPOSITIONS the collected critical essays in which he quotes from one of his favorite writers, HENRY ADAMS, writing about being a student at Harvard in THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS:

No one cared enough to criticize, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his own limits.

DO YOU GET IT??????


NO ONE CARED ENOUGH TO CRITICIZE

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It is no accident that I quoted early on in this bog from WHITTAKER CHAMBERS... who people will discover was a good friend of Zukofsky's at Columbia...

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By taking into your heart and brain the poetry of the above poets...