Case for the Burial of Ancestors by Paul Zelevansky

The large foldout map within is, on the one hand, an old testament map, suggesting the passage at least from Goshen to the promised land, complete with wilderness, revelation, and the division of land among the tribes. In keeping with Z, let’s start with the contents of the envelope, stamped “Jericho Map,” and glued to the inside of the book’s back cover. The book, published in 1976 by Zartscorp, Inc (which I imagine to be a Zelevansky endeavor), explicitly presents the apparatus for its encounter far more effectively than I can, but nevertheless I’ll attempt a brief explanation to whet your interest. Either way, The Book of Takes is one of the most formally ambitious and demanding books of poetry I’ve ever had the privilege of consuming and fetishizing (that is to say: reading).

Perhaps I once searched explicitly for Paul Zelevansky’s The Book of Takes (I seem to recall remembering it by its Z in one of those invaluable and innumerable Kostelanetz lists of 70s avant-gardists), or perhaps, hanging out at the end of the alphabet like-you-do, I picked it out a number of times and, still lacking the linguistic combination for its arrival, returned it promptly to the shelf. That the letters X, Y, and Z come right at the end of the alphabet (and let’s be honest here, I’m really thinking of X & Z), and that they seem so much less employed than any of their fellow letters in this English language (I haven’t yet verified this impression by a survey or anything)… but (resisting the expectation of my syntax) my point is there’s something marginal about those letters, they feel somehow both within and outside of that always recombinatory organism, the alphabet, and when I’m abstracting my way through the stacks of the library, or any other spatially dispersed manifestation of the alphabet, I feel some sense of promise (the promise of the margin) when I find myself shaped in the space of X or Z.Īnd so it is the greatest pleasure when a book found under such a sign fulfills this promise, a promise whose expectations can only be fulfilled by being exceeded.

Case for the Burial of Ancestors by Paul Zelevansky