self-promotional department

It's nice to find one's own face staring out at one from the internets, particularly in as astonishingly flattering a photograph as Shannon O'Brien's. Shoemaker & Hoard, in short, have put up a page for the forthcoming The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. (Note handy link to the amazon.com page for the book, in case you have $20 burning a hole in your pocket.)

Indexing, aesthetics of

Various views of the index: The Chicago Manual stance, in which the index is the indispensible tool for finding what you want to find, for getting to the heart of the book & tearing it out (as Dr Johnson was said to read books, handling them so roughly his friends ceased lending them to him). An elegant road-map, an aerial photograph of the text’s territory.

Or – the index as a re-seeing of the volume, a re-reading of what one has already written. Zukofsky’s own indices: the index to Prepositions, which is nothing but concepts; the collaborative index to “A” – LZ indexed only “a,” “an,” and “the,” and his wife Celia did the rest, chiding him that no-one would find a three-word index of any earthly use. As if anyone “uses” the index to “A” that way. (Note to self: re-read “A”, not from the beginning, but thru the index.)

Alice couldn’t abide books without pictures or conversations: I love a book with a long, rich index. My ideal of the index is an endless labyrinth of topics, subtopics, cross-references, rich asides & inside jokes. Hugh Kenner used to tag proper names with little titles: Derrida, Jacques (deconstructeur).

But I have less than three weeks to weave my ideal index, and 450-odd pages to sort thru. No wonder more often than not one meets with a sigh the pallid index of the academic study, all proper names & titles, nary a concept or event or argument. My publisher sends along as a handy example of an “author-indexed book” a copy of David Castronovo & Janet Groth’s Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson. Blurb: “a romantic biography of Edmund Wilson, detailing his shagfests with luscious luminaries…as well as satisfying nights on the town with drinking buddies… Big kiss.” (Note to self: write a book that will win the words “shagfests” and “luscious luminaries” on the back.) I turn to the index: no “shagfest”; no “sex”; under “Wilson, Edmund” no “favorite positions” or “loses virginity to Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Just a list of names & book titles. Sigh.

Pity me my laptop and printout and three-colored highlighters.
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Good Zukofsky talk in as yet (by me) unvisited corners of the blogosphere, here and here.

Announcement!

So here's what you've all been asking about:

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky has been in progress since 1998. It is a full-length critical biography of Zukofsky, covering the whole of his life and taking note of his writings in all genres. It incorporates the findings of many hundreds of hours of archival research among manuscripts & correspondence, & draws upon numerous interviews with Zukofsky's fellow poets, his students, & his family members. The book as a whole clocks in just a little short of 600 pages; I'm not sure precisely how much short, since I haven't yet generated the index – which will be comprehensive, scrupulous, & highly useful.

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky is scheduled to be released in jacketed hardback, with a cover price of $30 (a bargain or what?), in early December 2007. It will be published by Shoemaker & Hoard. S&H is the latest venture of the legendary editor & publisher Jack Shoemaker, the motive force behind Sand Dollar Press (Ronald Johnson's Radi Os, Robert Duncan), the long-lived & extraordinary North Point Press (Gary Snyder, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Palmer, William Bronk, Ronald Johnson, Guy Davenport, Evan S. Connell, Wendell Berry, Stanley Cavell, Hugh Kenner, & too many others to name), and more recently Counterpoint Press (with many of the same authors, & Geoffrey Hill to boot). Jack has for 30 years been one of the major names in American independent publishing, & I'm proud that he's elected to bring out The Poem of a Life. Of course, I think he's absolutely right to do so.

So that's the news: the proofs have been corrected; the 8-page photo insert of mostly hitherto unpublished LZ-related photos has been set up; the index has yet to be generated, but once that's done there's nothing left but the waiting. As Ray points out, it's not up on Amazon yet (tho it is on the database of the Library of Congress), so I'll let you know when you can start pre-ordering the book. In the meantime, I'm gearing up to do some promotion. Chicagolanders with access to talk series or bookstore appearance scheduling – I haven't yet made any plans in re/ the next MLA, but I certainly could make it up there this December. Anybody else with open Spring lecture spots, keep me in mind – I've got a book to sell, & lots to talk about!

So if you've got a blog, by all means link to this announcement; send it out to whatever listservs might find it of interest; tell your friends & relatives; tell your professors; tell your students; put the damned thing on your holiday wish list...
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(And in the interim, there's still that pesky poetry manuscript burning a hole in my hard drive...)
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Recently read & recommended: Martha Ronk, In a Landscape of Having to Repeat (Omnidawn, 2004), & Carla Harryman, Baby (Adventures in Poetry, 2005).

Behold...

...what Mr UPS brought by this afternoon.

Am I happy? I am happy.