The Other Cheek: Zukofsky's Bottom
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Tail end of a notation-review by Laura Steele, begun here with the whole thing now to be found here.
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Bottom reads best as an experimental horror novel, a precursor to Danielewski's House of Leaves, full of quotes and a mad thesis on poetry (on the figure of echo in House; this endless and, after fifty pages, naggingly tedious idea of "eyes" in Bottom). The plot involves kidnapping all of Shakespeare's characters and forcing them to all say the same thing under duress of being snipped up and rearranged. Spine-tingling.
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When considering the rush to either fall in love with Zukofsky (Zuk to young U.S. fans) or disparage him, I find myself wanting to make this discernment: I think "A" and 80 Flowers and the essays on kettles and so on collected in A Useful Art are all fascinating; but Bottom falls far short in any of the too-often made comparisons with the work of that shopping-mall ghost, Walter Benjamin. The organising method of Bottom is not as audacious as that of Benjamin, or of Jennings in his Pandemonium; Zukofsky's rhetoric is one arrow which points from everywhere towards his idea of the definition of love. In contrast to these other collage works, politics and society keep going missing. The result is a rather dull crystal where the facets only look inwards, turning in its own ahistorical slow spin.
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Zukofsky is himself presumably the "reader who is inclined to feel that one book judges and is judged by all other books" (in that dusty library-crystal). His reconstitution of Shakespeare is as profound as that brief vogue for collage-collections of Shakespeare's Insults. "What a coil's here, serving of becks and jutting out of bums!"
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Peter Riley, at the end of a review of Peter Minter (at Jacket), expresses an anti-Zukofsky sentiment which is probably typical of Zuk-detractors, "Do Australians really still take poets such as Zukofsky seriously? Shallow hobbyist manipulation of word-play?" Take the latter sentence and put it in a different paragraph and it could be praise – wide and shallow not falsely deep; hobbyist lover not odious professional; and I would have thought "manipulation of word-play" is an odd accusation between poets (between Riley and the soi-disant "Zoo-zoo-kaw-kaw-of-the-sky"). But I think Riley's comment does apply to Bottom. Much of Zukofsky's commentary on music and on Spinoza here is glossed from various standard accounts of the time, and has dated because the sparks of comprehension which might renew these critical pieces of prose are largely absent (as they are in most of the pieces collected in the Prepositions volume.) His attempts to reconstitute everything he touches are cemented by sentences characteristic of the bore with a thesis, "It seems obvious to me. . ."
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As a whimsical scholar of the eye in literature, Zukofsky collects a huge trove of quotes but, jammed eagerly together, one quote never sees eye to eye with the next despite the short pieces of commentary intended as the passage of judgement between texts: "purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight."
