"A Stony Language: Zukofsky's Zadkine", in The Idea and The Thing in Modernist American Poetry (editor Cristina Giorcelli) - "Preface" to The Idea and The Thing in Modernist American Poetry (ed. Cristina Giorcelli).

In the "Preface" -- the editor and author of an essay-- Cristina Giorcelli explains how, thanks to Heidegger's, Schopenhauer's and Wittgenstein's categories, Modernist American poets gave visual, phonetic, and iconic relevance and, thus, "concreteness" to language in order, on the one hand, to avoid Romantic sentimentalism and Symbolic conventionalism, and, on the other, to enhance the word's semantics and polyhedrical value. The volume is eminently interdisciplinary in that poetry is studied in relation to: philosophy, the visual arts, history, and the world of classic myth. In her essay (pp.109-139) on "A Stony Language: Zukofsky's Zadkine," Cristina Giorcelli examines a long composition by the "objectivist" poet, Louis Zukofsky who -- at a crucial time in his highly innovative career -- wrote an ekphrasis centered on a sculpture by the Russian expatriate and political refugee in the United States, Ossip Zadkine, entitled "La Prisonniere." The poem has never been examined before. The essay is a close, learned analysis of the way in which Zadkine's sculpture -- with its distortions and reversals, its cleavages, and its spatial-dynamic relationship between mass and volume -- is rendered by Zukofsky's words, rhymes, rhythm, etymological and cross-linguistic puns, metonymies, anagrams, echoes, and mythological references. Furthermore, while this analysis traces Zadkine's tie to Vladimir Tatlin's aesthetics, it illustrates Zukofsky's bond to Apollinaire, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, while also showing Zukofsky's extraordinary and long lasting originality and impact on contemporary poets (paramount among them, the so called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets).