I READ "A" as a graduate student; more precisely, I read it in that rather long four-year stretch when I was not taking classes or prepping for exams but writing my dissertation. Whatever reading I did in that long stretch was always part scavenger hunt, as I was always reading with half a mind on what the writer was trying to do and half a mind on what I could glean, if anything, for my dissertation. This left me with the feeling, circa 1980, that I had not really done "A" justice (I barely looked at the parts written after WW II) and that I really ought to read it again when I had the time.
I retired a little over a year ago and thought, okay...now's the time to get back to "A". I've been re-reading it for about a year now--not continuously, obviously (even "A" doesn't take that long if you stick to it)--and I'm ready to record some impressions.
My dissertation was on Yeats's late-career politics, which have certain regions of congruence with his friend Ezra Pound's interwar politics (e.g., fascism), so "A", a book-length poem by a friend and disciple of Pound (as Zukofsky was) seemed worth examining. The poetry was interesting, but struck me at the time as junior varsity Cantos, and the politics were well to the left of Pound's and Yeats's, as just about every reasonable person's politics were in the 1930s, so as far as my dissertation went, "A" was a dry hole.
The drilling was not entirely in vain, though, as Zukofsky remained in my consciousness as a strong example of how one could be firmly committed to poetic modernism (as represented by Pound) and at the same time be firmly a person of the left.
Mark Scroggins's lucid and graceful 2007 biography was helpful on this point. Zukofsky never actually joined the Communist Party, but in the 1920s was taken to a few cell meetings by none other than Whittaker Chambers--that right, Mr. Pumpkin Papers, a friend of Zukofsky at Columbia--and did in the 1930s join the League of American Writers, a group affiliated with a counterpart association in the USSR. Rather than pull a Coleridgean revolutionary-to-reactionary switcheroo, Zukofsky remained a leftist right through the turbulence on the 1960s. He read deeply in Marx; Marx has a role in "A" like that Major C. H. Douglas has in the Cantos--much to the advantage of "A", I'd say, as Douglas was a crank at best.
"A" may have the advantage of the Cantos in a few other ways, too. "A" is more generous in its glimpses of the poet's life. I am one of the readers grateful that Pound came down from the austere heights and wrote of his own circumstances in the Pisan cantos. Zukofsky does so occasionally throughout his poem, but especially in the latter half. His love for his family, wife Celia and son Paul, is affirmed several places, sincerely but not fulsomely.
It also has more stylistic variety, which helps. The collage-like effect of the Cantos, the juxtaposition of apparently heterogeneous elements whose implied underlying unity is left to be intuited by the reader--there's a lot of that. But the poem also has several intriguing forays into closed forms, such as the sonnets of section 7 and the canzone of section 9--complete with the internal rhymes, and dealing with the ideas of Marx and Spinoza, no less.
The most remarkable formal device in the poem may be its Zukofskian translations--a topic that will need a post of its own.
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