19 Facts About Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City's Lower East Side to Yiddish speaking immigrants from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire.

The only one of his siblings born in the United States, Louis Zukofsky was a precocious student in the local public school system.

Louis Zukofsky joined the Boar's Head Society and published in the Morningside, a student literary journal.

Louis Zukofsky would publish a revised version of this thesis as "Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography" in the journal Pagany, and Adams would remain a significant intellectual influence on Zukofsky's work.

Louis Zukofsky taught for one academic year in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the only time he lived outside the New York City area.

In 1934, Louis Zukofsky began work as a researcher with the Works Projects Administration, and over the course of the rest of the decade he worked on various WPA projects, most notably the Index of American Design, a history of American material culture.

Louis Zukofsky subsequently was a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut.

Just a few months after completing the latter work and proof-reading the complete "A", Louis Zukofsky died on May 12,1978.

Louis Zukofsky had been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1967 and 1968, the National Institute of Arts and Letters "award for creative work in literature" in 1976, and an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 1977.

Louis Zukofsky edited An "Objectivists" Anthology, published by George Oppen's To, Publishers, and for a brief spell there was the collective The Objectivist Press, but the group attracted only limited attention at the time.

In tandem with "A", Louis Zukofsky continued writing shorter poems throughout his life, although he had difficulties publishing outside of journals during the Depression era.

In 1948, Louis Zukofsky returned to "A" after a hiatus of eight years with the second half of "A"-9, which again copies the complex form of Cavalcanti's canzone, but now using content primarily derived from Spinoza's Ethics.

When finally published in 1964, Bottom was accompanied by a companion volume consisting of Celia Louis Zukofsky's musical setting of Shakespeare's play Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Since the 1930s, Louis Zukofsky worked in obscurity and found it difficult to publish, but gradually from the mid-1950s younger poets, most notably Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, began to seek him out because of their desire to reconnect with the more innovative strands of poetic modernism developing from Pound and Williams.

In 1968, Celia Louis Zukofsky presented her husband with an elaborate musical assemblage: against the musical score of Handel's "Hapsichord Pieces" she arranged four voices consisting entirely of quotations from across Louis Zukofsky's writings, suggesting one possible version of a single total work.

Louis Zukofsky promptly decided this would be the final movement of "A", although he still had two further movement to write.

Louis Zukofsky finished a novel begun in the early 1950s, Little, an autobiographical account centered on a child violin prodigy, based on his son Paul.

On finally completing "A" in 1974, Louis Zukofsky promptly started on his last major work, 80 Flowers, a sequence of eighty-one short poems, highly compressed reworkings of botanical and literary materials.