Louis Zukofsky's life work is "A"—not the, mind you, but a, for as he said, "a case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a…." The good life is one thing, then, and a life quite another…. [The] first section of the poem (there are 24 in all, which number echoes for me significantly the human measure of a day) was written in 1928, when the poet was 24 years old. The last writing is dated 1974 ("A" 23), so that one has the range of 46 years—without question a life's commitment, in all possible respects, to what does come and go, of a day, and what does stay put—as value, as measure, as possibility.

Unlike Pound's "Cantos" (whose time of composition might be seen as parallel), Zukofsky's work is grounded in a triad, a life lived with two intensively significant other people, his wife Celia and his son Paul. They are presences in the poem as much as the poet's own. So there is a clear domestic locus, and the fact of these three is humanly vulnerable always, yet tenaciously coherent in that they are a human relationship, a seemingly timeless pattern of organic order: becoming, being and ending. There is also the world, of course, and all that it proposes and/or constitutes. And the art of poetry….

Zukofsky's art, in this work, is without equal. No poet of our time can so sound the resources of language, so actuate words to become all that they might be thought otherwise to engender…. But how begin to suggest all that is heard here—all ears hear here, one's tempted to say. For, led by Bach ("A / Round of fiddles playing Bach …") into this complexly various dance, there follow all this life's responses to all: "… mathémata/swank for things/learned ('like' caged/'silence' which pulses)—/yet in each/case what happens…." So come Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, J. Q. and H. Adams, Swift, among many signifying others…. (pp. 15, 40)

The close of the poem is a melding, "a five-part score—music, thought, drama, story, poem"—as its title says, "L. Z. Masque"—in which his wife Celia composed "four voices" of his writings following the "one voice" of Handel's "Harpsichord Pieces" in the order noted (from "Prepositions," his collected essays, "Arise, Arise," a play, "It was," a story, and "A" itself)—to effect a polyphony of senses, simultaneously, where all had begun and now ends. In that shifting, reiterating order, no one is now dominant—or rather, all is now one. And who had been speaking to us is forever now this mingling, recollective harmony. Because—as he once wrote in the wish to define his own commitment to this art, "For My Son When He Can Read"—the poet's "major aim is not to show himself but that order that of itself can speak to all men…." Pray, friends, that we can hear. (pp. 40-1)