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The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975
by Charles Reznikoff
Subject and Object
In February 1931, Harriet Monroe, then the editor of Poetry magazine, made the latest in a long series of surrenders to the judgment of Ezra Pound. Pound, who in the 1910s had prevailed on Monroe to print T.S. Eliot against her better judgment, now convinced her to hand over that month's issue of Poetry to Louis Zukofsky, a twenty-six-year-old poet who had become one of Pound's favorite protégés. Zukofsky, having learned from Pound both the poetics of modernism and the value of a brand name, declared this the "Objectivist Issue," thereby fusing into a movement a disparate group of young poets, including himself, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, and above all Charles Reznikoff. The essay in which Zukofsky set out the principles of the putative movement was titled "Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff." This manifesto left readers no doubt that the Objectivists were up to something important, though exactly what was by no means clear. "In sincerity," Zukofsky wrote, "writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness.... This rested totality may be called objectification -- the apprehension satisfied completely as to the appearance of the art form as an object." This high-handed, intellectually mediocre pronouncement sounded authoritative enough to earn "Objectivism" a permanent place in twentieth-century literary history. Forty years later, when Charles Reznikoff was asked to submit an entry for a reference work on contemporary poets, he led with his ace: "'Objectivist,' images clear but the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details and the music of the verse; words pithy and plain; without the artifice of regular meters; themes, chiefly Jewish, American, urban." By putting the label in quotes, however, Reznikoff manages to claim it and to disclaim it at once. The way he goes on to describe his technique -- "the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details" -- is not just infinitely more lucid than Zukofsky's formulas. It is also a good summary of the essence of modern verse regardless of "ism," equally applicable to Frost as to Pound. And it makes clear that Objectivism was really just a re-statement of Pound's Imagism, whose own, much pithier credo had appeared in Poetry back in 1913: "An 'image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Reznikoff had read Pound's Imagist manifesto when it first appeared. In the fragmentary essay "Obiter Dicta," found among Reznikoff's papers when he died in 1976 and included as an appendix to this new edition of his poetry, he quotes the famous strictures of Pound's essay "A Few Don'ts": "to use ... no word that does not contribute to the presentation ... as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome." Reznikoff acknowledges that "I have always thought of these rules [of free verse] in connection with Pound -- who certainly publicized them." Again, however, Reznikoff carefully signals the limits of his endorsement. The aesthetic that Pound "publicized" he neither invented nor owned. The distaste for Victorian rhetoric, the longing for a harder and more concrete style, the openness to urban life were everywhere in the American poetry of the 1910s. And the poems that Reznikoff wrote over his sixty-year career are significantly unlike Pound's. To read them as contributions to an avant-garde formalist movement, as they have always been read, is to miss their true pathos and their deep appeal. Above all, reading Reznikoff as a post- or sub-Poundian Objectivist makes it impossible to understand his work's constant, multi-faceted concern with Jewishness. This is not just because of the obvious incongruity between Pound's insane anti-Semitism and Reznikoff's deliberate, at times over-earnest cultivation of Jewishness in his verse, though that irony is stark enough. More significant is the fact that Objectivism, like the high Modernism from which it springs, values the impersonal and the fragmentary, while Reznikoff is so often concerned with family and national history. This tension is reflected in his lifelong alternation between very different modes: Imagist observation, memoir, and didactic glosses on the Bible and Jewish history. The seeming incompatibility between these styles is only heightened by Reznikoff's refusal to acknowledge it. When he published his first selected poems, By the Waters of Manhattan, in 1962, Reznikoff retroactively turned his individual collections into sequences, replacing titles with consecutive numbers. Seamus Cooney, Reznikoff's editor at Black Sparrow Press in the 1970s, continues the same practice in this new edition, numbering each sequence with informal arabic numerals and printing several short poems on a page. This strategy, natural and effective when it means welding many short poems into a substantial whole, also results in some awkwardness, when poems of very different kinds are run together. In the volume Inscriptions: 1944-1956 (1959), for instance, poem 1 is a biblically cadenced lament for the Holocaust that fills three pages, while poem 2 is a casual jotting of eight short lines. Did Reznikoff really make no categorical distinction between these very different poems? And even if he did not, should we?
It is Reznikoff's Imagist or Objectivist verse for which he is best known, and these poems remain his indispensable literary achievement. In his very first volume, Rhythms, self-published in 1918, the twenty-four-year-old poet has already gone a long way toward inventing this style, though he is still hampered by vestigial rhyme and adolescent sentimentality: The stars are hidden, This is poor enough, but it already shows Reznikoff in what will be the characteristic posture of his best poetry: the solitary walker in an urban landscape. It also shows traces of the concision and concreteness that are his badges of modernity. His first poetic enthusiasms, as he writes in a late, memoiristic poem, were Nineties Symbolists ("the new men -- new to us -- /Francis Thompson, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson"), and he describes his first efforts in verse as "sonnets/and ... French confectionery." Already in Rhythms, he has largely emancipated himself from these influences, replacing them with the sharp vignettes of Pound: "I met in a merchant's place/ Diana:/lithe body and flowerlike face." And by the next year, when Reznikoff produced his second small collection, Rhythms II, he had become still more confident in his Imagism, venturing to conjure a whole story or place in three lines or less. Sometimes these poems sound like haikus, as though Reznikoff were trying to reproduce a familiar Japanese melancholy: "It rains./The elms curve into clouds of twigs./The lawns are empty." But he is also beginning to find his own novel use for the imagist fragment, turning it into a chronicler of his own time and place. The poem titled "Epidemic" describes an afflicted turn-of-the-century neighborhood in one glimpse: "Streamers of crepe idling before doors." Another condenses an immigrant mother's passivity and ambition into three lines: "She who worked patiently,/her children grown,/lies in her grave patiently."
In other words, Reznikoff's Objectivism was, from the beginning, never purely perceptual or linguistic, after the manner of Pound's famous "In a Station of the Metro." It was emphatically situated in the poet's urban, lower-middle-class, Jewish milieu, serving to document that world as it appeared to one of its ambivalent inhabitants. Reznikoff's own personality, too, is never entirely absent from even his most condensed poems: his images are austere, but not with that kind of high-modernist austerity. Rather, the pieces of the world that Reznikoff sees function as objective correlatives of his temperament -- melancholic, sensitive, unassuming, yet with flashes of anger and resentment. The reader comes to know Reznikoff's personality quite as distinctly in his poems as, say, Philip Larkin's; indeed, the two are more similar than might be expected from their very different backgrounds and techniques. Reznikoff, too, often writes about the difficulty of safeguarding the inner life from the world of work: Still much to read, but too late. Even when he is not writing explicitly about himself, Reznikoff's poetry is quietly expressive; he is not and does not want to be a camera or a transparent eyeball. As he wrote in "Obiter Dicta," "Effective writing in verse is always an expression of the writer's feelings, but it may be direct or indirect"; and Reznikoff is more effective indirectly than most poets are directly.
The real measure of Reznikoff's skill is the way he can sift and assemble the most seemingly "Objectivist" details in order to create a kind of self-portrait. Every time Reznikoff sees something -- a cityscape, an effect of light on water, snowfall or nightfall -- he tacitly allows us to see him seeing it. Starting in adolescence, Cooney notes, he would regularly walk as many as twenty miles a day; if Alfred Kazin had not already claimed the title, Reznikoff's collected poems could easily have been called "A Walker in the City." Reading through the Poems leaves a strong impression of the poet on his expeditions through New York, restless activity cloaking his acute passiveness. The plunder of these poetic expeditions can be as brief as a line or two: The cold wind and black fog and As that last example shows, Reznikoff conceives his search for natural beauty in New York City as a salvage operation. Making do with the limited, tarnished splendors available in the city is rather like learning to enjoy the flavor of ersatz butter during wartime rationing, and Reznikoff's poetry is designed to help us acquire that sweet-sour taste: "The sun shining on the little waves of the bay, the little leaves of the hedge -- /with these I school myself to be content." Standing in the way of a fuller, more beautiful life is not just the city and its poverty, and not just the necessity of working for a living, which Reznikoff always sees as a kind of indignity: "In the morning my mind had been like a spool of cotton;/now all the thread had been stitched away at my job/and only the wooden spool was left." Above all, Reznikoff's vision is shadowed by his natural suspicion and deep pessimism. This temperamental inclination is reinforced by the humanity that Reznikoff sees all around him, and by his study of history, especially Jewish history. The title of his 1941 collection, Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down, slyly compares his own observations of mankind to those of Satan in the book of Job: "And the Lord said unto Satan, 'Whence comest thou?' Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, 'From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.'" Reznikoff spent his early years in Jewish slum neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and his writing -- like the writing of all those who knew them firsthand -- is totally disinclined to romanticize them. His ironic praise of Brownsville, in the late sequence "Early History of a Writer," is simply that, unlike in Gentile slums, he doesn't have to be afraid of getting beaten up for being Jewish: In Brownsville I felt completely safe. If the most obvious menace in Reznikoff's Jewish city comes from outsiders, however, that is not to say that all is cozy at home. Rather, like Kazin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, and other chroniclers of the first-generation Jewish-American experience, Reznikoff insists on the anxiety and poverty of immigrant lives, and on the parents' punishing ambitions for their children. Starting with Uriel Acosta: A Play %amp% A Fourth Group of Verse (1921), and frequently thereafter, Reznikoff turns away from Objectivism to provide a series of anecdotes on these themes: Once a friend had turned a poem of The hero of any Saul Bellow novel would recognize that unforgiving father. And if Reznikoff's most significant work is his short, concrete verse, one of the large pleasures of reading this new volume is owed to his looser, quasi-fictional, quasi-memoiristic writing. Especially toward the end of his life -- as in By the Well of Living and Seeing (1969) -- Reznikoff's long free verse lines verge on prose, and he is more interested in telling stories than in creating objective correlatives. But they are good stories, worth hearing, and they offer a sharp sense of Reznikoff's New York: stories about bad mothers, angry husbands, dissatisfied employees, lonely immigrants, all playing out their little dramas in public.
Reznikoff's bleakly comic sense of human nature found its fullest expression in the documentary poem Testimony (1965), a book-length work not included in the Poems. Even to call it a poem may be a mistake, raising expectations that it does not mean to satisfy. Reznikoff preferred to call it a "recitative," and his authorial contribution is simply to arrange his source materials in spare, well-paced free verse lines. The brilliance of Testimony comes entirely from Reznikoff's selection of those materials -- American court records from 1885 to 1915, which the poet first began to explore while working as an editor for a legal encyclopedia in the early 1930s. (Reznikoff graduated from New York University Law School in 1915, but practiced for less than a year.) From these dusty archives, Reznikoff extracted vignettes and anecdotes to create a wonderfully disillusioned portrait of the American character. William Carlos Williams, himself sometimes associated with the Objectivists, famously wrote that "the pure products of America go crazy." In Testimony, however, Reznikoff makes a strong case that the pure products of America are bullies, drunks, and clumsy fools. In choosing cases to recount, Reznikoff generally avoids real tragedies and tabloid-style murders, preferring to focus on the small change of the courts: brawls, accidents, domestic disputes. Take this story, wryly placed by Reznikoff in a section titled "Social Life": Mrs. Eller told her to take them Or this compact history of a marriage: She wanted as a medicine what was It is stories like these that set the tone for Testimony, so that even when Reznikoff deals with real disasters -- railway accidents, industrial injuries, murders -- they seem to be expressions of the same American contrariness, the same chuckling misanthropy. (The key to the "Extract of Lettuce" story is the wife's insistence that "she was much benefited," which makes her not just a victim but a sucker.) Testimony is too long -- it comprises two volumes in the Black Sparrow edition of 1978-1979 -- and loses some editorial focus as it goes on, but it deserves to be read. It really is like no other book; and it helps to define Reznikoff's emotional terrain, even if it does not greatly matter to his reputation as a poet.
All the strengths of Reznikoff's best work -- the resonant observations of the lyrics, the unsentimental honesty of the anecdotes, the black comedy of "Testimony" -- combine to make his most anomalous poems even more problematic. These are the poems on Jewish history, which, because they tend to be much longer and more discursive than his lyrics, take up a disproportionate amount of space in the Poems. While there can be no doubt of the good intentions behind these poems, they leave Reznikoff sounding official and hortatory in a way that a poet should never be. The volume In Memoriam: 1933 (1934) re-tells seven episodes from Jewish history, each showing the Jews stoically overcoming obstacles, and each drawing an obvious parallel with the situation of contemporary American Jewry. The exiles in wealthy Babylon, for instance, are clearly the Jews in twentieth-century America, tempted by assimilation: exiles by the quiet waters and willows The counter-force to this secular "suction," Reznikoff writes, is an ethical mission conceived in anodyne Reform Jewish terms: ... we must build in Babylon In Inscriptions (1959), his first book after World War II, which appeared after an eighteen-year hiatus from print, Reznikoff applies this same style to the events of the Holocaust, to which it is even less equal. By turning promptly and dutifully from the evil of the Holocaust to a renewed commitment to Jewish virtue ("out of the greatly wronged/a people teaching and doing justice"), Reznikoff's Holocaust litany seems terrified of actually coming to terms with what had just happened. Like most of his Jewish-history poems, it seems like an existential failure, written as though the poet himself were not implicated in the events he discusses, but merely pronouncing on them as a spokesman for Judaism. They are best considered, perhaps, as scripts for Hebrew-school pageants or radio propaganda plays, written dutifully to serve the community, but shunning the personal encounter between writer and subject that makes for a genuine poem. The presence of these poems in Reznikoff's Poems feels like a category mistake, though the mistake was the poet's: he numbers them sequentially with his lyrics, as though they were all part of the same enterprise. In fact, what makes Reznikoff a significant Jewish poet is the same thing that makes him a significant poet: his successful representation in verse of a sensibility shaped by a particular "Jewish, American, urban" milieu. For Reznikoff, as for all true poets, the route to the universal begins in the local, and the best symbol is the most concrete: Rooted among roofs, their smoke 
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