Louis Zukofsky called his twenty-four-section long poem "A" "a poem of a life / ?and a time."1 "A," a forty-five year project of constructivist genres and formalist poetic _mastery, is the crown among works both singular and unique?including a midrashic gloss on Shakespeare that is at once literary criticism, philosophy, and poetics; many shorter poems of "density, compression, and musicality" (398); projects composing procedural/formalist works of experimental panache; bravura inventions of an abstracting, homophonic translation strategy; some rather mannered fiction; and essays both hermetic and importantly generative. A slightly altered phrase from this little note to "A" becomes the suggestive title of Mark Scroggins's expert biography The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, which precisely emphasizes the work over a somewhat uneventful though intensely literary life, thus creating "the life story of Zukofsky's writings" (xi).