Speech against Power, or Poetry, Love, and Revolution: “A”-9

Abstract

This chapter analyses Louis Zukofsky’s poem “A”-9 from his major work “A”, a poem published in two parts over eight years. Like the film Moses and Aaron, Zukofsky’s work consists of verbatim quotations of pre-existing texts—Karl Marx’s Capital and Value, Price and Profit, H. Stanley Allen’s Electrons and Waves: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, and Spinoza’s Ethics and botanical writings—which are applied to a complex and pre-existing poetic structure, Guido Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi priega”. The chapter examines the publication history of the poem as well as the implications and difficulties of such a structure on the poem’s reception, the continuities Zukofsky is suggesting by connecting Marx, Allen, and Spinoza, and the poem’s politics. Furthermore, it deepens the comparison between Straub and Huillet’s work in Moses and Aaron and in general and that of the Objectivists.