SOURCE: “Objectivists: Zukofsky and Oppen, a Memoir,” in Paideuma, Vol. 7, No. 3, Winter, 1978, pp. 429-45.

In the following memoir, Tomlinson recalls his relation to Oppen and Louis Zukovsky, and describes their relationship to each other.

‘It pays to see even only a little of a man of genius.’ Thus Henry James, of Flaubert. I saw Louis Zukofsky four times, corresponded with him—on and off—for seven years and edited in 1964 what was, I suppose, one of the earliest Zukofsky numbers of an English review for Agenda: I was by no means the first islander to discover Zukofsky—Ian Hamilton Finlay had brought out over here 16 Once Published in 1962 and that had given one something to think about. Indeed, those sixteen poems promised a way in, whereas the translations from Catullus and the sections of “A” I had already seen in Origin had left me more puzzled than enlightened...