A Useful Art: Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design (Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writing) - Softcover

Zukofsky, Professor Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819566403 ISBN 13: 9780819566409

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2003

Synopsis

Writings on American craft and poetry.

A Useful Art is an invaluable chronicle of a major American poet's engagement with this country's indigenous tradition of design. In 1936, the Federal Arts Project (a division of the WPA) hired Louis Zukofsky, along with many others, to prepare a compendium of information on traditional American crafts. The Index of American Design aimed to define original U.S. culture at a time when interest in handicrafts had just begun to emerge. These previously unpublished essays and radio scripts are scrupulously researched investigations of various American handicrafts: the topics they cover include ironwork, tin ware, furniture maker Duncan Phyfe and friendship quilts. They also reflect Zukofsky's sense of the poem as a crafted object and his attempt to reconcile the labor theory of value with aesthetic production. This book, which can be seen in the context of kindred work by William Carlos William (In the American Grain) and Ezra Pound (Guide to Kulchur), will be of special interest to readers of 20th-century poetry, cultural critics, social historians, and scholars of design.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth Sherwood is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at the Permian Basin. John Taggart is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing at Shippensberg State University, and the author of When the Saints (2000).

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819566403
• ISBN 13: 9780819566409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Sherwood Kenneth