Mirror

    As it describes a site not
fifteen
minutes from where I was born, ‘1892-1941’ has always been ‘my’
Zukofsky
lyric.  The only poem by LZ set in Washington, D.C., its subject
is
a monument, and therefore seems appropriate material out of which to
create
another monument – not of bronze, but words.  As if to validate
this
choice, turning to the poem in ALL: THE COLLECTED SHORT POEMS OF LOUIS
ZUKOFSKY, one finds ‘1892-1941’ on page 100…


     The shape of what
follows
may not seem conventional for a ‘critical essay’, but it is sympathetic
to Zukofsky’s own methods as given in his early essays and as shown in
the poem itself.  In 1931 Zuk wrote this definition of his
‘Objectivist’
poetics:

An Objective: (Optics)
–
The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus.  That which
is aimed at.  (Use extended to poetry) – Desire for what is
objectively
perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary
particulars.

‘1892-1941’ is a poem which acts as such a
lens,
in that it focuses various facts of observation, of history and
contemporary
particulars, onto an object.  And in turn,  because of its
sincere
desire to approach the subject on its own terms, the poem itself
becomes
an object which mirrors the function of what it investigates. 
This
tribute explores the poem in the same manner, approaching the poem on
its
own terms, as an object, and bringing to bear on it all of the
surrounding
‘historical and contemporary particulars’.  My own experience,
what
makes this poem speak to me, seems to have a bearing on important
issues
surrounding the text, which would not have manifested themselves to me
without the special personal experience I bring to this poem.  We
will start, therefore, in ignorance (mine) and hopefully move towards
an
understanding, and from that understanding build a monument to LZ.


 

    I.
The Search for Death

In 1990 I began my freshman year at Columbia
Union
College in Takoma Park, Maryland.  I was a local, having been born
a stone’s throw away at the adjacent hospital, and since birth had
lived
within a half hour of that epicenter aside from four years spent at a
boarding
academy in Virginia.  My sister, four years ahead of me, had
recently
graduated from the same school, and was working in a congressman’s
office
on Capital Hill.


     My sister arrived home
one friday afternoon after having lunch with a friend named Tim. 
When discussing weekend plans, Tim had told my sister that he and his
girlfriend
– a Washington tour guide – were spending their Saturday visiting
cemeteries
to look for a statue called ‘Death’.  By all accounts it was
extremely
moving to those who viewed it, since it depicted Death in  an
unconventional
way.  Upon seeing it, people were said to laugh, cry, or be struck
with ‘profound awe’.  This I had to see! ‘Where is it?’ I asked
her. 
‘Some big cemetery in Washington.’  Big help, Sis.  When
pressed,
she couldn’t supply me with any concrete details, but it was enough to
make me want to see ‘Death’.


     Over the next several
months, whenever I had a free afternoon I would drive to Washington and
search through the major cemeteries in hope of finding the
statue. 
With little to go on, and – typical male – unwilling to ask for
directions,
I was caught up in the search for its own sake.  Along the way I
learned
much about funerary art in Washington, at the very least…


     By 1992 I had not found
‘Death’.  Yet the idea of the statue, and the fact of the search
itself,
inspired me to write a short fictional piece titled ‘Searching for
Death’:

    
‘It affects each person differently,’ the man said.  ‘Some people
laugh, some cry, but it is so profound and unexpected that anyone who
sees
it is moved.’


    
‘Where can I find it?’ I asked.


    
‘Couldn’t tell you,’ replied the man.


    
I was searching for Death.

    
This search was more like a quest, and could have been more applicably
called an obsession.  It had begun several months before on a
dreary
holiday, when in my boredom I drove down town to the Washington, D.C.
Tour
Guide Association.  Being a native of the Washington area, I had
seen
all of the famous attractions at tedium: the Capitol, the Smithsonian,
the Washington Monument, etc, etc…  I had been told by a friend
that at the Tour Guide Association I could find a wealth of obscure
knowledge
about our nation’s capital.  But as I talked to each tour guide,
only
one predominant site escaped their lips: Death.  Supposedly, in
one
of the old cemeteries inside the city limits, there was a statue
entitled
‘Death’.  There are many sculptural tributes to the Grim Reaper,
but
this one was allegedly different.


    
‘When you are looking for it, you must have an open mind, because it is
nothing as you would expect death to be like.’


    
‘What does it look like?’  I asked.


    
‘I don’t know,’ replied the man.  ‘I’ve never actually seen it.’


    
In fact none of the tour guides had ever seen ‘Death’, but no doubt
they
had all heard of it.  So that one afternoon changed my life’s
itinerary
.  I traveled to all of the cemeteries that I knew of, and then
bought
maps of the city to find the locations of others in which Death might
be
hiding.  Over a period of three months I had traversed through,
trampled
over, and read and unthinkable number of tomb markers, and I still had
not found ‘Death’.  There was one place left to look.


    
Driving south on North Capitol street one can see, on the right, the
oldest
church in Washington, along with the oldest cemetery.  I had
purposely
avoided it with the hope that I would never have to search through its
endless expanse of morbidity (on reflection it seems contradictory, my
loathing of morbidity when I was, in fact, looking for ‘Death’
itself). 
But even with my apprehensions, I entered the graveyard and started,
one
by one, to look at the tombstones.


    
It took me several trips to cover the entire place, five trips in four
days, to be precise.  But eventually I found ‘Death’.  It was
so profound that it didmove me.  I laughed at first, then
cried
a bit, then I just stood there for a silent moment, taking in the
significance
of the sight before me.


    
There was a large marble pedestal with a greenish bronze plaque which
read
‘DEATH’.  Nothing was on the pedestal, but under the bronze plaque
was a sign hanging by a string on a nail which read:

This piece of juvenilia may not hold up as a
story
(I shudder to read parts of it – oh, the leaps in logic!), but it must
be remembered that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Washington earned
the infamous moniker of ‘Murder Capital of the United States’. 
For
several years running, the murder rate exceeded 500 per year.  In
this light, ‘Searching for Death’ makes a point for its place and
time. 
But for us, the interest is in the knowledge – or more properly LACK of
knowledge – I had in 1992: I had never seen the statue, and only knew
of
it through second hand knowledge verging on urban legend.  In the
void created by the missing ‘facts’, I created an alternative based on
the mere notion of the statue and its properties.  Oddly enough,
at
the point in the story where ‘Death’ is encountered, there is no
physical
statue to be found.  The potential was greater than the limits of
my imagination, tho at least my imagination knew its limits! 
Whatever
else this scant knowledge caused, it at least surrounded the idea of
the
statue with Mystery; and the search attained the  status of a
quest
for a potentially numinous object.


     In 1992 I began
attending
college in England, and the search was left behind with
Washington. 
The following summer of 1993, however, brought new developments. 
It just happened that one of my friends from the UK, an Australian
named
Jamie Allen, also lived near Washington.  Since our term had let
out
so late in the summer, neither of us found work, and so spent our days
roaming Washington ‘looking for work’, and more often finding air
conditioned
havens to while away the hot afternoons.  During one of our
outings
I took him to Rock Creek Cemetery.  We were driving through
slowly,
listening to Fripp and Eno’s ‘Heavenly Music Corporation’, and I was
telling
Jamie about my search for this statue, and how I had not found it yet,
but that I thought it was possibly in this very cemetery.  Just at
that moment – I kid you not – Jamie in his casual way looked out the
window,
pointed, and said, ‘Isn’t that it over there?’  The car screeched
to a halt (as much as it could screech doing 15 MPH), and I jumped out
of the car, the door left open letting the ‘Heavenly Music Corporation’
waft through the graveyard.   Jamie followed as I skirted
several
plots to the place he had pointed to:  an area that looked like
shrubs
in the middle of tomb markers.  What Jamie had glimpsed in that
efficacious
second was the view available for only that short window of time – the
break in the shrubs that allowed one to see what was inside, a dark
statue
in front of a plinth of rose marble.  From a car, only a passenger
– looking back – could have seen it.  From the driver’s seat it
had
always appeared a bush.  Jamie had found ‘Death’ for me.


     Proud of this new
discovery,
I took friends to the site and told them of my sister, and how she had
told me of her friend Tim, who had told her of his girlfriend, and the
strange statue called ‘Death’ that caused some people to laugh, and
some
to cry, and others to ponder profoundly, the one that Jamie had found
for
me by glancing backwards.  While re-telling this story one day in
the presence of the statue, two women who were nearby approached. 
‘Excuse me’, said the one, ‘I could not help overhearing what you were
saying.  The statue is not called ‘Death’; it is ‘Grief’, and it
is
by a very famous sculptor named St. Gaudens’.  Ah, new
information,
and possible leads!  But now ‘Grief’, not ‘Death’ as I had first
been
told (but of course, I had not considered my sister a possibly
unreliable
narrator…).  About this time I wrote a poem, related to a
snapshot
of a girlfriend beside the statue:


 

PORTRAIT WITH
GRIEF

Stand next to Grief


     
and I will take your picture,


even tho Grief is black


    
and your face soft white.

Stand next to Grief
and


    
I will take a shot;


It should turn out all
right


    
as long as you don’t smile;


Doesn’t look right to
smile
with Grief.


    
Ain’t proper neither.

For the next couple of years the statue was
‘Grief’ to me.


     Forward to 1996, when
I was living in Stratford-on-Avon while attending the University of
Warwick. 
I would often haunt the local used bookshops in the afternoons, looking
for bargains and books useful to my studies.  Browsing through the
Art section of the Stratford Bookshop, I spied a monograph on Augustus
St. Gaudens.  By that time I knew a bit more about St. Gaudens, as
his fame extended far beyond the figure in Rock Creek Cemetery. 
Flipping
through the pages of much grander commissions – the Shaw memorial in
Boston,
the gilded Sherman statue in New York, etc – I saw ‘Grief’ fly
by. 
I turned back a few pages, and there it  was, the statue from Rock
Creek.  But in the accompanying note it was called ‘The Adams
Memorial’. 
The Adams Memorial.  ‘Who is Adams?’  I thought, as I
returned
the book to the shelf, and moved on.


     At the start of 1997
I moved home to Maryland, and began teaching college courses part-time
while I worked on my doctoral thesis.  By then my interest in
modernist
poetry had reached fever pitch.  I was searching out and devouring
every poet I could find in the Pound/Eliot tradition.  During the
previous year I had come across mentions of ‘The Objectivists’, and so
began purchasing any texts by Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi
that
I could find.  As I had copies of ‘A’, and ALL, Zukofsky was
slated
the first to be read.  I began – I thought reasonably – with the
short
lyrics.  I must confess, however, that through the majority of 55
POEMS, I had little success figuring what, exactly, Zukofsky was
doing. 
I could divine no entry point, and received little from the shorter
poems
using the conventional methods I had been taught to use when reading
poetry. 
By the time I read ‘Mantis’, and ‘Mantis: an Interpretation’, however,
I began to see what was happening – Zukofsky had given the reader some
assistance, and wisely so.  The ‘Mantis’ poems, of course, were at
the end of his first book.  Several poems into the following
volume,
ANEW, I came across ‘1892-1941’.   A few lines in, I read,
‘…Cast,
the statue rests, stopped: / a bronze – not “Grief”…’  After
having
nearly nothing to cling to in Zukofsky’s lyrics, there was something I
recognized – I knew a bronze statue which was ‘not “Grief”, with a
visitor’s
bench, and shrubs surrounding it; and it was ‘but a cab’s
jaunt’
from the  U.S. Capitol.  And by the end, the confirmation:
‘in
“the cemetery known as Rock Creek”’.


     I had my ‘in’. 
Zukofsky, by writing a poem on this particular sculpture, had allowed
me
to link into his poetry.  While I did not understand the title, or
know who was buried in the plot (there is no name dropping, after all,
in the poem), I did have a firm grip on what he was describing, and
where
it was located.  It came to me that Zukofsky and I had shared
experience,
if not in time – an impossibility – in a certain physical space. 
I still did not know who ‘Adams’ was, tho I had seen the figure labeled
‘The Adams Memorial’ in the St. Gaudens book.  The oddity of the
poem,
as I saw it, was how concretely descriptive it was, while being
simultaneously
obscurantist.  Shortly afterwards I found Zukofsky’s 1924 MA
thesis
on Henry Adams in PREPOSITIONS: THE COLLECTED CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
The
connections between Adams and Zukofsky, the statue and the poem, began
to clarify themselves.


 


 

II. 
a lady of Nineteen Forty One met by


chance,
asked where you could be found, took us three here…

     In a letter dated ‘Aug
25/41’
Zukofsky told William Carlos Williams, ‘P.S. We’ll probably be away
from
home and looking for jobs in Washington Aug 30 to Sept 7 …’ (Ahearn
2003
284).  Not long thereafter, on October 25, 1941, LZ sent a letter
thanking Williams for his review of 55 POEMS (Decker 1941).  He
also
enclosed a copy of the poem ‘1892-1941’ (ibid. 297).  (Both the
review
and ‘1892-1941’ appeared almost a year later in the September, 1942
issue
of POETRY (Chicago).)  From this we can assume that Zukofsky
visited
Rock Creek Cemetery during his trip to Washington, sometime between
August
30 and September 7, 1941.  We can also know, then, that the
composition
of the poem ‘1892-1941’ began with that visit, and that the poem was
finished
sometime prior to October 25 of the same year.


     Aside from accuracy,
we might glean other insights from this timeline.  Despite
Zukofsky’s
intimacy with Adams and his work from his 1924 MA thesis, he had not
visited
the grave site before 1941.  Also, Zukofsky’s visit to Rock Creek
may have been in homage, but it was not a pilgrimage.  At least,
Zukofsky
did not seem in a rush to visit Washington, as it had been seventeen
years
since he had completed his thesis.  It was the prospect of job
hunting
that took him there, not Adams.  But saying this, since he was in
Washington, he certainly took the opportunity to visit the grave and to
see the famous statue that sat upon it.  If Zukofsky had wanted to
make the experience have symmetry, he would have made a special trip in
1942 – fifty years after Adams had recorded seeing the memorial for the
first time.  But it was not a contrived event; rather, the visit
was
conditioned by the flow of everyday concerns and commonplaces. 
Zukofsky
viewed the statue as any other visitor on any other chance day, tho his
was no common understanding, but a sincere and intimate knowledge –
albeit
secondary – of the circumstances of the memorial’s inception, and the
personage
who had mandated its creation.


 So what uncommon knowledge and
understanding
did Zukofsky bring to the statue?  For that we must have a look at
Zukofsky’s MA thesis.


     Zukofsky wrote his MA
thesis only six years after Adams’ death and the posthumous publication
of THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS.  As such, his thesis is an early
example of Adams criticism, one that did not have the benefit of the
numerous
scholarly works that followed: volumes of letters, biographies, and
critical
works.  For ‘Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography’, Zukofsky
utilized an unusual form for the first time.  The majority of the
essay is an arrangement of quotations from the writings of Adams, with
a slender amount of comment linking these parts together into a
whole. 
It allows Adams to give the particulars, allows the work to show the
way. 
The subtle ‘argument’ is more in the arrangement.


     From the outset
Zukofsky
shows an affinity with his subject:

These chapters on the
writings
of Henry Adams illustrate two actuating forces of his nature: poetic
intellect
is its continual undertow, and detached mind the strong surface current
in the contrary direction. (Prepostions 86)

Zukofsky, working closely with Adams’
writings,
read himself into the material.  The description of Adams, with a
‘strong surface current of detached mind’ and an ‘undertow’ of ‘poetic
intellect’ is in many ways the true mirror (an image exact but inverted
in the glass) of Zukofsky, of whom it could be said, ‘had two
actuating
forces of his nature: detached mind is its continual undertow, and
poetic
intellect the strong surface current in the contrary direction’(!). 
Such was his sympathy for his material that it extended to the type of
information Zukofsky allowed in the thesis about the statue.


     There are three main
sections of the thesis which pertain to the St. Gaudens figure. 
Looking
at these, the reader is able to receive an overview  of the
statue’s
history,  simultaneously learning the extent of Zukofsky’s
knowledge
of the subject.  The first reference is in a section simply dated
December
6, 1885. Here we learn that Adams’ ‘wife had died’.  No hint
of
how or why she died; all that is given is aftermath:

Adams lived it all
through,
but ever so silently.  He might imply that his life had been a
broken
arch, but he felt repose and self-restraint as nothing else. 
Leaving
art to make the best of death in a monument at Rock Creek, Adams went
on
submissive.  To the heart, at least, infinite peace meant
something.


    
Adams’ world lay all before him.  His best works were yet to be
written. 
Still, to the sensitive with whom great contacts were few, and these a
very quiet matter, the greatest was never to be recorded. 
(Prepositions
108)

This ‘greatest matter’, not recorded by
Adams,
is recorded with the most extreme economy by Zukofksy: a mere 153 words
in a forty-five page essay –  Zukofsky is nearly as quiet as Adams
himself about this monumental event.  There is no more about the
death
of Mrs. Adams in the thesis, but there is, as there is in THE
EDUCATION,
a bit more about the St. Gaudens figure.  This famous excerpt
describes
the first time Adams viewed the memorial in 1892, which had been built
during a period of wandering and world travels in the years after his
wife’s
death:

His first step, on
returning
to Washington, took him out to the cemetery known as Rock Creek, to see
the bronze figure which St. Gaudens had made for him in his absence …
He supposed its meaning to be the one commonplace about it – the oldest
idea known to human thought … The interest of the figure was not in
its
meaning, but in the response of the observer.  As Adams sat there,
numbers of people came, for the figure seemed to have become a tourist
fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning.  Most took it for a
portrait-statue,
and the remnant were vacant-minded in the absence of a personal
guide. 
None felt what would have been nursury-instinct to a Hindu baby or a
Japanese
jinricksha-runner.  The only exceptions were the clergy, who
taught
a lesson even deeper.  One after another brought companions there,
and, apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out
passionately
against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism,
of denial.  Like the others, the priest saw only what he
brought. 
Like all great artists, St Gaudens held up the mirror and no
more. 
The American layman had lost sight of ideals; the American priest had
lost
sight of faith.  Both were more American than the old, half-witted
soldiers who denounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which
should
have been given for drink. (Prepositions 109)

Zukofsky included this excerpt from the
single
page of THE EDUCATION that refers to the statue, and by obscure
association,
to Mrs. Adams.  In it, Adams switches attention away from the
‘why’
of the statue, which he writes is ‘not the interest’, and focuses
instead
on ‘the response of the viewer’, stating that ‘like all great artists,
St Gaudens held up the mirror and no more’.  Through his seeming
delight
in anonymously overhearing the reactions of the curious visitors to the
site, Adams suggests that most people view the statue as presenting a
riddle
and look to it for an answer, not realizing that all they receive back
is their own reflection.


     In the final section
of Zukofsky’s thesis, he includes this detailed account of the memorial:

Henry Adams lies buried
in
Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington.  The casual visitor might
perhaps
notice, on a slight elevation, a group of shrubs and small trees making
a circular enclosure.  If he should step up into this concealed
spot,
he would see on the opposite side a polished marble seat; and placing
himself
there he would find himself facing a seated figure, done in bronze,
loosely
wrapped in a mantle, which, covering the body and the head, throws into
strong relief a face of singular fascination.  Whether man or
woman,
it would puzzle the observer to say.  The eyes are half closed, in
reverie rather than in sleep.  The figure seems not to convey the
sense either of life or death, of joy or sorrow, of hope or
despair. 
It has lived but life is done; it has experienced all things, but is
now
oblivious to all; it has questioned, but questions no more.  The
casual
visitor will perhaps approach the figure, looking for a symbol, a name,
a date – some revelation.  There is none.  The level ground,
carpeted with dead leaves, gives no indication of a grave
beneath. 
It may be that the puzzled visitor will step outside, walk around the
enclosure,
examine the marble shaft against which the figure is placed; and,
finding
nothing there, return to the seat and look long at the strange
face. 
What does he make of it – this level spot, these shrubs, this figure
that
speaks and yet is silent?  Nothing – or what he will.  Such
was
life to Henry Adams, who lived long, and questioned seriously, and
would
not be content with the dishonest or the facile answer. -Carl Becker.
(Prepositions
129-30)

It should be noted immediately that this
description
is from a secondary source, as Zukofsky would not, as noted above,
visit
the site until 1941.  Secondly, Becker’s description includes much
of the physical detail found in the poem ‘1892-1941’.  Notice, as
well, Becker’s statement on what the viewer will find: ‘Nothing – or
what
he will’.  Yet while Becker states that reactions will be
subjective,
he perhaps takes a swipe at popular misconceptions by adding, ‘Adams
…
would not be content with the dishonest or the facile answer’. 
This
accurate description gave Zukofsky foreknowledge of what he would see,
and no doubt informed (and blunted?) his initial reactions.


     By focusing primarily
on Adams’ writings, Zukofsky’s thesis gives us a version of Adams’ life
as can be divined through his own published and therefore sanctioned
words. 
While at times it goes beyond what Adams himself recorded, for the most
part it allows mysteries to stay mysteries, and does not allow the
thesis
to become a speculative analysis of Adams and his suppression of
certain
facts about his life.  Where the average critic or historian would
find a gold mine of intrigue and scandal to unravel, Zukofsky stays
true
to the temper and intent of the writings, which are the ‘objects’ on
which
his thesis focuses. We will reference this strategy again shortly when
we discuss the poem itself, but before we do that it might be useful to
discuss Adams, his works, and how these effect his ‘reading’ of the
statue.


 


 


 

III. 
The man who answers will be doomed to eternity like the men who
answered
the sphinx

    The major works of Henry
Adams,
MONT ST. MICHEL AND CHARTRES and THE EDUCATION, are works of
indeterminate
genre.  The CHARTRES is a ‘travel guide’, and a book of French
mediaeval
culture and architecture, while THE EDUCATION is an autobiography which
gives great insight into American culture of the 19th century. 
Taken
together, the two volumes create a philosophy of history comparable in
its geometries to Spengler and Yeats.  In other words, neither are
what they first seem; they offer some things on the surface and others
by insinuation or gradual revelation.


     This same distinction
can be said of the St. Gaudens figure.  At once it is
self-evident:
a great piece of bronze and marble sitting in the open for any person
to
visit and ponder.  Yet, by comparison to the standard monuments in
Rock Creek, it obscures ‘meaning’ by its lack of names, dates, and
symbols
of a religious or civic nature.  We know from Zukofsky’s thesis
that
‘Adams lived it all through, but ever so silently’, and the general
retreat
from the public eye that was both in his nature and his upbringing as a
member of a famous family (avoiding the paparazzi of his day); but of
this
Adams created an intellectual game that both allowed and justified his
obscurity.  And there can be no doubt that he reveled in it. 
As with the philosophy expounded by the CHARTRES and THE EDUCATION,
Adams
allowed the meaning to build after the fact, and did not, perhaps,
intend
it to begin with.  It was only when so many questions and multiple
interpretations surfaced, and the statue became the fodder for public
contemplation,
that Adams mandated that no one interpretation be allowed to formulate
the figure.  According to Adams’ biographer Ernest Samuels, the
multiplicity
of meaning was encouraged in that “Adams himself helped to throw about
the figure veil after veil of significance, making it the mirror for
his
changing moods.” (Samuels 1954 57)  Even after the death of St.
Gaudens,
when the newspapers and gossip magazines continued to offer specious
interpretations
of the memorial, Adams wrote to the sculptor’s son:

Do not allow the world
to
tag my figure with a name!  Every magazine writer wants to label
it
as some American patent medicine for popular consumption – Grief,
Despair,
Pear’s Soap, or Macy’s Suits Made to Measure.  Your father meant
it
to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will
be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx. (Samuels
1954
89)

It was the FIXING of a meaning, more than
hatred
of any individual’s interpretation, that bothered Adams.  If, for
example, one view asserted itself so strongly as to be taken for the
absolute
‘truth’, it would have destroyed the interactive qualities caused when
the viewer, confronted by the mystery, was forced to create a
‘meaning’. 
As Adams wrote to a person inquiring about the figure, “All
considerable
artists make it a point of compelling the public to think for itself
…
Every man his own artist before a work of art.” (Samuels 1954 88) 
St. Gaudens was a ‘great artist’ by this definition, and as long as the
mystery of the memorial remained, the public was forced to ‘think for
itself’,
and to become part of the creative act.


 


 

IV. 
To be moved comes of want, tho want be complete


as
understanding

     In his well known poem
‘Mantis’,
Zukofsky carefully records all the ‘historical particulars’ surrounding
the event of seeing a mantis on the subway.  The poem records the
multiple events and associations that occurred during the few seconds
of
the event, the “thoughts’ torsion” swirling in the form of the
sestina. 
‘Mantis’ shows his sincerity in recording all the aspects of the event,
and achieves ‘Objectification’ when these elements find suitable
concrete
form – the sestina itself.  In comparison, ‘1892-1941’ achieves
the
same level of ‘Objectification’ as it, too, approaches its subject with
‘sincerity’, and carefully records all the various ‘historical and
contemporary
particulars’ surrounding the central object – in this case not an
insect
but a statue.  But it all the same achieves, as much as Mantis, a
‘rested totality’ (with two bodies in a grave, quite literally!).


     The poem, then,
utilizing
‘Sincerity’ and ‘Objectification’ is written from a vantage point of
knowledge. 
Just as in his MA thesis, Zukofsky approaches the ‘object’ on its own
terms,
records its physical details and the context of its historical moment
in
the duration of Zukofsky’s own visit.  THE EDUCATION provided a
model,
recording not only what Adams saw in the statue, but what the tourists
and curious gawkers said as well.


 But unlike the tourists, who saw what they
brought reflected in the statue (‘Grief’, ‘Despair’, ‘Atheism’,
‘Silence’,
‘Pear’s Soap’…), Zukofsky, in writing the poem, caused an effect
unlike
any other viewer: he held up a mirror to a mirror.  ‘1892-1941’ in
one sense gives no more than the memorial itself: neither Adams or his
wife are mentioned by name; the dates given, tho appearing as years of
‘birth’ and ‘death’, we now apprehend as the year Adams first viewed
the
statue (1892) and the year Zukofsky did the same (1941).  Beyond
this,
we know ‘two of them lie there’ – it is a grave holding two
people. 
In short, the reader unfamiliar with Adams or the memorial is given a
certain
set of information: ambiguous dates, a location (Rock Creek Cemetery,
not
far from down town Washington, D.C.), specific details of the figure
and
its surroundings (very accurate, as confirmed when comparing it to
Becker),
and that the narrator of the poem is visiting the site and seeing these
things on a particular day in 1941.


     These elements, added
together, do not provide much insight beyond what any visitor would see
at Rock Creek.  As Barry Ahearn has noted, ‘The poem tests, in a
small
way, any American reader’s familiarity with the story of Henry Adams’
(Terrell
1979 126).  This is true, as the poem includes quotations from THE
EDUCATION which any reader familiar with Adams’ work would most likely
recognize: ‘the cemetery known as Rock Creek’ and ‘One’s instinct
abhors
time’ have an instant resonance to the initiated ear.


     But here’s the crux:
what about the un-initiated?  Many readers might come to the poem
ignorant of Adams and the memorial.  How would they read it? 
Would these readers take anything away?  If a poem is meant to
communicate,
to add the particular insights of the poet in aid of understanding,
then
wouldn’t ‘1892-1941’ be a failure to the vast majority of readers?


     Perhaps we can look at
it another way.  Whether familiar with the exact statement or not,
it seems Zukofsky was aware that ‘the man who answers will be damned to
eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx’.  With our
knowledge
of the ‘historical particulars’ surrounding the writing of the poem, we
can see that Zukofsky approaches the memorial with ‘sincerity’, that in
writing his poem he strives – just as in ‘Mantis’ –  to ‘live with
objects as they exist’.  The statue, as Zukofsky knew, purportedly
reflected whatever the viewer brought.  Zukofsky, like Perseus
approaching
Medusa, used his perceptions as a mirror, and in creating his poem
captured
the blank reflective qualities of the statue itself: any obscurity of
the
poem is due to an accurate and sympathetic rendering of what the statue
itself emanates.


     Yet while allowing the
mystery to stand, Zukofsky gives enough hints that show he knows more
than
he would divulge openly: the dates of the poem’s title; the quotations
from THE EDUCATION; the location and description.   These
elements
are possible to decipher under the right circumstances and coincidences.


     This brings us back to
my own experience with the memorial and Zukofsky’s poem.  Far from
being ‘trivial’, my history is a concrete example of how both the
memorial
and Zukofsky’s poem function.  The ‘meaning’ of the memorial
changed,
in a very literal way, depending on the knowledge (or lack of) that I
brought
to it at any one point.  From the abstract ‘Death’, to the
concrete
‘Grief’, to the historical ‘Adams Memorial’, the figure held
significance
and inspired creation on my part.  In a sense, fruitfulness was
due
to mis-information; but like Sir Thomas Browne’s URNE BURIAL, the error
in historical fact (mistaking Anglo-Saxon burial urns for Roman ones)
seems
less important than the creative act that resulted in the process of
meditation
on the urns, whatever their origin.


     Just as the meaning of
the memorial depends on what is brought to it, the same can be said of
the poem.  ‘1892-1941’, in full sympathy with the memorial it
records,
will reflect what is brought to it.  If the reader is not familiar
with Adams or the memorial, or of Zukofsky’s own work that connects him
to Adams, then the poem will be as the statue to the average visitor:
an
object without apparent meaning, and in this case the reader must
create
meaning, even if it is to say ‘I get nothing’ (as Becker said of the
St.
Gaudens figure, the viewer can make of it ‘Nothing – or what he
will’). 
I think back to the happenstance of my encounter with the poem, and how
differently my reaction would have been if I had not by coincidence
been
familiar with the statue; ‘1892-1941’ would simply have been another of
those Zukofsky poems that did not resonate for me, and I expect this is
the reaction of many readers.   For those in the know,
however,
the poem is amazingly accurate in its detail and sentiments.


     The poem begins, ‘To
be moved comes of want, tho want be complete / as understanding’. 
What at first seems to be a confession – that the speaker cannot be
moved,
since his lack of understanding makes his want insufficient – may be
more
a statement of fact.  If a viewer’s understanding IS lacking, then
the want will not be sufficient to be moved by the statue.  But we
know Zukofsky DOES have complete understanding, therefore his ‘want’
must
also be complete, and ‘to be moved’ comes from that complete
want. If we can say the same as we approach his poem, then we are moved
dependent
on our level of understanding of its impetus and circumstances.


     Having explored the
‘historical
particulars’ surrounding both the Adams memorial and Zukofsky’s poem,
we
may see a chain of occurrences:

ADAMS seeing the figure in 1892, with the
full
knowledge that the figure sat upon the grave of his wife, who killed
herself. 
Yet he records only the mystery of the figure, and the popular
speculations
surrounding it.  He states, for the record, ‘St. Gaudens held up
the
mirror and no more’.  The viewer, according to Adams, merely saw
him
or herself reflected.  ZUKOFSKY in 1941, knowing all of the
circumstances
of the death of ‘Clover’ Adams, and of the controversy over the meaning
of the statue.  In full sympathy with Adams, he writes a poem
around
the object of the statue, and does not ‘interpret’, but merely reflects
back, detailing the particulars of his visit.  As Barry Ahearn has
written:

The title, brief as a
riddle,
suggests a particular balance. It puts Zukofsky and Adams in close
alliance,
denoting as it does a shared point in physical and mental space, yet
there
is a gap of fifty-nine years [sic – actually 49].  Two generations
cannot be so easily dismissed.  This tension between alliance and
division is the friction that generates the poem (ibid.).

Zukofsky and Adams are met in the ‘shared
point
in physical and mental space’.  The relative stasis of the statue
– in bronze, as lasting as any of our human monuments – becomes
something
unchanging, something outside the boundaries in time.  The actual
point in time may not be co-habitated, but the sharing of a first
impression
is possible.  One may think of the last section of Basil Bunting’s
BRIGGFLATTS (1966) – another poem intended as monument –  which
successfully
illustrates ‘Then is Now’ in a literal sense: the light from a certain
star travels 50 years before it is seen in the present, and by looking
at its light, the present is melded with the past into one .  In
that
brief epiphany, time is nullified.  It seems appropriate that
Bunting,
Zukofsky’s good friend, should express this concept so eloquently
twenty-five
years after Zukofsky’s poem was written.


 


 

V. 
A ‘Monumental Mirror’

     This essay (and the
reader)
takes part in the chain as well.  Tho no piece of art, it records
the complex and varied ‘historical and contemporary particulars’
surrounding
both the Adams memorial and ‘1892-1941’ – including my own history,
which
has a bearing on the individual approach and understanding of the
poem. 
In following Adams’ pronouncement of St. Gaudens, Zukofsky holds up the
mirror, and no more.  And in doing so reflects a bronze monument,
while making of the poem a monument in its own right.  This essay
has tried to hold up another mirror, and in reflecting the poem and the
particulars that surround it, is a sincere monument to its maker
inscribed:

__________________________________

WORKS REFERENCED

Adams, Henry.  THE EDUCATION OF HENRY
ADAMS. 
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

—.  THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM
CARLOS
WILLIAMS AND LOUIS ZUKOFSKY.   Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2003.

POETRY: A MAGAZINE OF VERSE.  Vol. LX,
No.
VI.  September, 1942.  Zukofsky’s ‘1892-1941’ appears on pp.
315-315; William Carlos Williams review of Zukofsky’s book 55 POEMS
appears
on pp. 338-340 with the title, ‘An Extraordinary Sensitivity’.

Samuels, Ernest.  HENRY ADAMS: THE MAJOR
PHASE. 
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1954.

Terrell, Carroll F., ed.  LOUIS
ZUKOFSKY:
MAN & POET.   Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation,
[1979]. 
Ahearn, Barry.  ‘The Adams Connection’. pp. 113-128.

Zukofsky, Louis.  ALL: THE COLLECTED
SHORT
POEMS.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1965.  p. 100.

—.  PREPOSITIONS: THE COLLECTED
CRITICAL
ESSAYS OF LOUIS ZUKOFSKY.  Expanded Edition.  Berkeley, CA:
University
of California Press, 1981.