"I NOW SEE THE MUSIC OF THE ENSEMBLE IN MY HEAD" Seven letters from Louis Zukofsky to Lorine Niedecker (1933-1959)

Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker' maintained their friendship and poetic companionship mainly through letters, from 1931 until her death in 1970. At the end of the 1940s, by mutual agreement, they decided to weed out their voluminous correspondence, presumably to eliminate the most personal elements. At the same time, Niedecker set about selecting and compiling passages from Zukofsky's letters that she considered to be of the greatest poetic interest. Although he initially agreed to the project, Zukofsky eventually decided against it, for reasons that are not entirely clear. In any case, since Niedecker cut out extracts from Zukofsky's letters and pasted them onto sheets, we are now faced with a mass of fragments that are often difficult to date. Although considerably reduced in size, this epistolary collection still represents more than a thousand pages, mainly fragments. The letters have been transcribed and annotated by Barry Ahearn, who is currently preparing a revised and considerably expanded edition of Zukofsky's Selected Letters, which will include a significant number of letters to Niedecker.