Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language and Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary

Abstract

Chapter 1 focuses on Louis Zukofsky’s 1928 Thanks to the Dictionary, which retells the Biblical story of King David through language drawn primarily from a single dictionary page. Previous critics have been unable to locate the particular editions of the two dictionaries used by Zukofsky, but with those source texts read in tandem with Zukofsky’s poem, we are able to determine his method of composition and to dispel the notion that his work is the result of aleatory chance. Moreover, a close comparison of his source texts reveals telling deviations from the putative one-page rule, including an elided reference to Karl Marx, underscoring the political resonance of David in the era of Stalin, and a buried reference to Ricky Chambers which transforms the genre of Zukofsky’s poem into an elegy.