Louis Zukofsky

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Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky (born January 23, 1904 in New York City , † May 12, 1978 in Port Jefferson , New York ) was an American writer and poet who was one of the founders of the objectivist poetry movement ( Objectivists ).

Life

Zukofsky comes from a Jewish family with an Orthodox orientation. The parents immigrated to the USA from Lithuania . After attending school, he studied at Columbia University and graduated in 1924 with a Master of Arts (MA) and wrote his first poems during this time . Influenced by the minimalist school of William Carlos Williams , he was one of the so-called Objectivists in American literature alongside Charles Reznikoff , George Oppen and Carl Rakosi . In 1932 he published with Williams An Objectivists Anthology , in which his poems were also published.

He worked on his most important work, the poem A , for several decades until his death and published the first part First Half of "A" in 1940. The full version appeared in 1978 in the year of his death and is mainly concerned with the relationship between literature , Music , aesthetics , history and philosophy .

His first own anthology appeared in 1941 under the title 55 Poems . In 1947 he was appointed to a professorship at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University , where he taught for almost twenty years until 1966.

He has also published other volumes of poetry, some of which were composed during the 1920s , such as Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958 (1965) and All: The Collected Short Poems, 1956-1964 (1966 ). In addition to the novella Little: A Fragment for Careenagers (1967) and the novel Ferdinand (1968), he also published a collection of his essays Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky in 1968 . In 1962 the play Arise, Arise (1962) was published.

Zukofsky's works, which also appeared in the literary journal Schreibheft , were translated into French by Anne-Marie Albiach and Claude Royet-Journoud .

His son is the violinist and conductor Paul Zukofsky , who caused a sensation as a musical child prodigy back in the 1950s .

literature

  • Mark Scroggins: The poem of a life: a biography of Louis Zukofsky . Shoemaker & Hoard, [Emeryville CA] 2007, ISBN 978-1-59376-158-5
  • Chambers Biographical Dictionary . Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2 , p. 1648
  • B. Ahearn: Louis Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction . 1980

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Zukofsky, Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1978
Place of death Port Jefferson , New York