SOURCE: "Dismantling 'Mantis': Reification and Objectivist Poetics," in American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 521-41.

Davidson is an American poet, educator, and the author of The San Francisco Renaissance and Postmodern Poetics (1983). In the following essay, he assesses the signif icance of "Mantis," Zukofsky's "most graphic example of formalism in dialogue with modern materialism"; Davidson notes that the amalgamation of poetic form and materialism is also a prominent aspect of "A."

"… thinking with the things as they exist. I come into a room and I see a table. Obviously, I can't make it eat grass."

Louis Zukofsky, Interview

Despite Louis Zukofsky's claim that he can't make a table eat grass, at various points in his poetry he appears to have attempted just that. In "A"-7, for example, he turns wooden sawhorses into horses: "For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood, / For their stomachs...