Critical Essay | Interview by Louis Zukofsky with L. S. Dembo

Interview by Louis Zukofsky with L. S. Dembo

SOURCE: An interview in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring, 1969, pp. 203-19.

Dembo is an American educator and critic who is the author of Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (1966), as well as book-length studies on the poets Hart Crane and Ezra Pound. In the following interview, Zukofsky explains his views on poetry.

[Dembo]: I know that "objectivism" was short-lived as a movement, if it ever existed at all, but your essay in the February 1931 issue of Poetry does seem to suggest a particular way of looking at reality. In fact, you actually use the term nominalism in connection with André Salmon. Wouldn't you say that your own poems from the beginning attempted to get away from normal generalization and theme to present an experience of the object or of nature directly?

[Zukofsky]: Well, I don't want to get involved in philosophy. I might as...
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