[The beginning of Zukofsky's A is] richly assertive of the poem's "subject": aurality and its relation to measure. Aurality, where words seen literally as the dynamics of the poem are in kinetic relation between their occasions as sounded "meanings" (speech) and as configured sounds (music); measure, the abstract law from which aurality is suspended (mathematics). And so A begins in motion, with words "playing" the finite fugal structures of Bach, with words "played" against the measure (the isolated "A" subtly dislocating the iambic tetrameter line with an unfamiliar downbeat)…. What is unique about the work is not that is is about music or that it is "musical" or that it was intended for musical setting (though it is often all these), but that it is a poetry reaching out toward a system of measure which, in this sublunary world, is best exemplified by music, and best of all...