Transcriptions of several pages from the notebooks kept by Louis Zukofsky used for his late sequence of poems 80 Flowers. The PDFs, along with some prefatory notes, are now hosted on Z-site.
"Heart us invisibly thyme time": so begins the epigraph to 80 Flowers, a sequence of poems by the American poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), best known for his long poem "A". In his later work, he made increasing use of notebooks to gather and condense material from which he would then make poems. The notebooks are held as part of the Zukofsky archive in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, in Austin. Those most relevant to the 80 Flowers project are the working notebook (in box 12, folder 2 of the archive) and the draft notebook (box 12, folder 3), following Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas's proposed naming convention. The main precedent I had in mind for the project was the facsimile and transcript of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published by Faber and Faber in 1971.
Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas provided the bibliography of sources, as well as giving a lot of help on proofreading and deciphering some of the less legible parts of the pages.
I'd be very happy if anybody felt like making a PR for any of the following:
- Standardisation — There's a balance to be struck between close representation of the source material and a standardised visual language. I think the transcriptions could afford to move further in the direction of the latter, especially in terms of crosses and ticks. This would in turn help with...
- Refactoring — Lots to be done here, including sharing across files, and possibly breaking up the pages into smaller and more readable arrangements of sections. Easy wins around standardising the way tikz pictures are used - I switched to defining commands part way through the process, which I think is preferable. There are some rough naming conventions observed, but they could be sharpened.
- Further pages — Take your pick! I think it would be especially nice to get more of the working notebook transcribed or to flesh out some of the pages at the start of the working draft.