In October, Literary Hub held a symposium in honor of the 100th anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” which it called “the most important poem of the 20th century.”
One of the participants, Jahan Ramazani, a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, noted that Eliot’s poem had impacted poets from many diverse backgrounds:
The Jewish objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning The,” written in the 1920s, adapts Eliot’s techniques of extensive quotation, collage, fragmentation, difficulty, and self-referentiality, playfully incorporating Jewish folk song and translations from Yiddish poetry, alongside high-cultural references, while responding optimistically to the recent Russian revolution.
I had never heard of Zukofsky, but I located a bookseller who had an 826-page book of his poetry for sale: Emilio DeGrazia, Professor Emeritus English, who taught at Winona State University from 1969-2002. The Zukofsky book is simply titled “A” and is a single poem broken into 24 chapters.
Reviewing the book in 1976 in The New York Times, Hugh Kenner wrote that “A” was “the most hermetic poem in English, which they will still be elucidating in the 22nd century.” I found it hermetic in the sense that I was not able to penetrate it.
But along with the book and the bill, DeGrazia send me, gratis, a lovely poem of his own, titled “What Leaves Know” (2020) -- which was worth the price of the book:
WHAT LEAVES KNOW
The power of place,
Their role
In the dazzling outcome of roots.
The art of living within view
Of the two fragrances of life,
Sun and shade.
The politics of free passage
For air allied to no state.
The turn the other cheek tactic
For storms gone wild.
How to brew the air we crave.
How to orchestrate
The incomparable music
Composed by anonymous winds.
Leaves know how to sway
And dance,
How to put their colors on,
Blaze away, be
Outward and visible signs
Of a big beautiful thing
Wonderfully in the way.
On foggy still nights
They know the atonement of sleep,
The moment to let go.
The poem is from, in the words of Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate, "DeGrazia's marvelous new collection of poems, What Trees Know, ... they certainly picked the right poet to speak for them."
She writes that "DeGrazia is, at heart, a teacher, one whose very nature is to lead others in an ever-expanding quest for knowledge, and as in all great quests, he ends up where he began -- with family, nature and wisdom that comes from the heart."
It reminds one of the last stanza in Eliot's poem "Little Gidding" in Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."
Here is a video of Dr. Emilio DeGrazia: "Emilio DeGrazia: Professor Emeritus English" by Retiree Center, Winona State University