Reading the new selected Zukofsky. Never read Zukofsky before. Was always intimidated. Now I’m trying to think of what Zukofsky was trying to get poems to do. Was he trying to see the world without him in it, to see the world via language, to see the words without the inflections of people saying them, and therefore to see something not through the lens of a human consciousness? Or is that oversimplifying? Certainly, he was trying to admit more of the world than, say, Eliot, who was really projecting his own consciousness onto myriad things and ideas. Zukofsky doesn’t want himself muddying the ideas. He wants to see the ideas as themselves, even if all the ideas he sees are his.