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University of California Press

Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics


by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley (Author)
Price: $39.95 / £34.00
Publication Date: Apr 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780520340947
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.25

About the Book

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.


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 parti

About the Author

Sandra Kumamoto Stanley is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Northridge.

Reviews

"An excellent and original study of a crucial twentieth-century American poet."—James Breslin, author of From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945 to 1965