Charles Reznikoff

• Born: August 31, 1894
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: January 22, 1976
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other literary forms

In addition to poetry, Charles Reznikoff (REHZ-nih-kahf) wrote fiction and verse drama and was active as a translator, historian, and editor. His novels include By the Waters of Manhattan (1930), a title Reznikoff also used for a later collection of his poetry, and The Manner “Music” (1977). The novels, as well as his historical work such as Early History of a Sewing Machine Operator (1936), are, like his poetry, sharply observed but detached, nearly autobiographical accounts and impressions of family and working life. Although thematically much of his fiction may be compared with the “proletarian” literature of the 1930’s, its spareness and restraint give it a highly individual stamp. Reznikoff also wrote a historical novel, The Lionhearted (1944), which portrays the fate of English Jewry during the reign of Richard the Lionhearted.

Reznikoff’s verse plays, such as Uriel Accosta: A Play and a Fourth Group of Verse (1921) and “Chatterton,” “The Black Death,” and “Meriwether Lewis”: Three Plays (1922), extend his interest in the individual in history along dramatic lines. The plays make use of choruslike recitations both to convey offstage occurrence and to develop character much in the manner of the classical theater.

Reznikoff was the editor of the collected papers of Louis Marshall and a translator of two volumes of Yiddish stories and history. Much of his work in law was in writing and editing for the legal encyclopedia Corpus Juris. His few prose comments on the art of writing poetry are contained in a slim volume of prose titled First, There Is the Need (1977).

Achievements

A rubric for Charles Reznikoff’s career might well read: early, nearly precocious development; late recognition. Reznikoff, without ever seeking to be unique, was one of the twentieth century’s most original writers, virtually with the publication of his first work. His abandonment, as early as 1918, of the verse conventions of late nineteenth century poetry and his utilization of proselike rhythms anticipate a kind of American plainsong that is to be found in the work of the most diverse poets writing today. Reznikoff, in reinventing the image as an element of realist rather than symbolic notation, also made a significant contribution to the notion of imagery as the cornerstone of the modern poem.

His highly unconventional and imaginative use of historical materials sets him off from the vogues of confessional and psychological poetry, but only in his later years did literary critics begin to appreciate the unprecedented and original manner in which Reznikoff brought history, both contemporary and biblical, alive. In 1971, he was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Biography

Born in a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn and ultimately to live most of his life in New York City, Charles Reznikoff drew, for all his writing, on the very circumstances and surroundings of his life. Like his near-contemporary, William Carlos Williams, the “local” was to be the source of all that was universal in his work. Reznikoff sought out his poems not only in the lives of those around him, in the newly immigrant populations seething in the New York streets, but also in the European and biblical histories and even the customs that these immigrant groups had brought with them to the New World.

Graduating from a high school in Brooklyn, Reznikoff spent a year at the new School of Journalism of the University of Missouri but returned to New York to enter the New York University Law School, a decisive move for both his livelihood and his poetry. The influence of his legal training and his work in law were to affect his notions of poetry profoundly; his love of “the daylight meaning of words,” as he put it in one of his autobiographical poems, stemmed from this education, and it was this sense of language that, from the beginning, Reznikoff developed into one of the most unusual and moving bodies of contemporary poetry. Reznikoff actually practiced law only briefly; he worked a number of years for Corpus Juris, the legal encyclopedia, however, and maintained his interest in the law throughout his entire career.

Except for short sojourns elsewhere, Reznikoff lived and worked in New York City. One three-year period, however, was spent in Hollywood working for a film producer; this visit was the source of some of Reznikoff’s wittiest verse and furnished the background for his novel The Manner “Music.” On his return to New York from Hollywood, Reznikoff took up freelance writing, editing, and translating.

Reznikoff was one of the city’s great walkers; late in his life, he would still stroll for miles on foot through the city’s parks and streets. In this regard, he was close to the boulevardiers and flâneurs of nineteenth century Paris so aptly described by Walter Benjamin. Like them, he was attracted to the anonymity of the solitary walker, to the possibility of a simultaneous distance and engagement. Out of such walks, Reznikoff fashioned an extraordinary body of poetry, one which only now after his death is receiving adequate critical attention. From younger poets and from those poets around him, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams, attention had been there from the beginning. Reznikoff had early discovered something new and of major importance in the writing of poetry and stayed with it, despite neglect, throughout his long and fruitful life.

Analysis

Of all the poets loosely gathered under the Objectivist label coined by Zukofsky for Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine in 1931, none seems to have been quite as “objective” as Charles Reznikoff. In him, legal training and the moral imperative of the Jew as a historical witness combine with the Objectivist and Imagist principles, which guided such writers as Williams and Zukofsky, to produce a body of poetry distinguished by its clarity, judgment, and tact. This notion of witness or bystander, of someone who is at the scene of events but not of the events themselves, is implicit in all of Reznikoff’s work. Such titles as By the Waters of Manhattan: Selected Verse, Testimony, Separate Ways, Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down, and By the Well of Living and Seeing are indicative of a poetic stance that was to be, as Reznikoff once put it, “content at the periphery of such wonder.” This wonder was to embrace both the urban experience, in particular its relation to the life of newly immigrant Jews, but also to range across such topics as early Jewish history, legal proceedings in nineteenth and twentieth century America, and the Holocaust.

The urban environment

Reznikoff’s stance is not so much concerned with a conventional sense of poetic distance or with irony per se as with precision of realization. The modern city, the source of much of Reznikoff’s most memorable work, is for him a place one continually passes through, a locus of large anonymous forces encountered tangentially yet which overshadow and overwhelm the experience of the city inhabitant. The truths of the city are multiple, highly individualized, and—in Reznikoff—caught not as part of some grand design but as minor resistance to its forces. Victories and defeats occur not in the towers and offices of government but in street corner and kitchen tableaux in which individual fate is registered. Thus, in his work, the urban environment and the lives caught up in the vast workings of the city and of history tend to remain resolutely what they are, to resist being read analogically or symbolically. The poems hover on the edge of factual materiality with few gestures toward the literary; yet their construction has a cleanliness and freshness found in few other contemporaries. One goes to Reznikoff’s work not only for its poetic beauty and its surety of language but also for its historical testimony.

Imagism vs. image

Reznikoff began to publish his work in 1918, when the traditionalist devices of fixed meter and rhyme were already under attack from the modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. However, Reznikoff was not to traffic in the obviously unconventional or extreme writing of the early twentieth century avant-grade. Even the Imagist movement, which certainly influenced Reznikoff and to which he pays homage, was refined and transmuted by him into something that would not be particularly recognizable to the founders of the movement. The “image” of the Imagists was something decidedly literary, something used for its allusive or symbolic effect, whereas in Reznikoff it becomes a construction, made out of observation and precise detail, concerned primarily to render a datum.

This “nonliterary” use of the image characterizes all of Reznikoff’s work. His poems strike the reader almost as a kind of low-key reportage, making use of proselike speech rhythms and barely discernible shifts in discourse from statement to simile or metaphor, as in this early example: “Suddenly we noticed we were in darkness/ So we went into the house and lit the lamp/ And sat around, dark spaces about a sun.” This shorn-down language inhabits a number of linguistic realms at once; the datum and its meaning for the poet are so inextricably linked that the usual suspension of belief or accounting for poetic license no longer applies. The poetry has about it a “documentary” effect, one that is both tactful and powerful by virtue of its being stripped, it would seem, of any attempt by the poet to persuade.

Reznikoff’s poetry can be likened to the photograph, something profoundly and intimately linked to the visible world, and yet, by virtue of the camera angle or constraint of the frame, necessarily and profoundly something selected. Like photographs, in which what is beyond the frame may be hinted at by that which is included, Reznikoff’s poems, while framing actual particularities and occasions, resonate with a life of associations far beyond the frame of the image which the language constructs. This image, less metaphoric than informative, becomes a possibility for emotional response but not an occasion for dictating it. If through Reznikoff one sees or knows a certain life intimately, a history, custom or usage, it is because in his work the lyricist and the chronicler are joined with minimal rhetorical flourish.

Recitative

This poetic technique, which Reznikoff called “recitative,” stresses the evidential or communicative aspect of language over the figurative; it unites all of Reznikoff’s work, from the early Rhythms published in 1918 up to and through the late volumes Testimony and Holocaust. This minimal use of poetic devices such as rhyme, metaphor, or exaggerated imagery results in a restrained tone that balances irony, sarcasm, and humor with emotional distance. It is particularly apt for the short two- or three-line poem (one of Reznikoff’s trademarks) that combines a wise knowingness and bleak hilarity, as in: “Permit me to warn you/ against this automobile rushing to embrace you/ with outstretched fender.” It also attains a meditative strength, as in: “Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies/ a girder, still itself among the rubbish.” Here, the double reading of “still itself” transforms the poem from mere description to enigmatic philosophy.

Such surety of technique makes Reznikoff’s poems radiate with both completeness of finish and mystery, as though their author, while knowing much, says little. Indeed, they sustain an aphoristic or epigrammatic tone, even in poems of great length and over a wide variety of subject matter.

In Reznikoff, this reticence has little to do with modesty. Rather, understatement becomes a device for achieving accurate registration, for giving subjects their due in the reader’s mind by not imposing attitudes or judgments on experience. It is, in its way, a form of humility, a desire, as Reznikoff noted, that “we, whose lives are only a few words” meet in the thing seen not in the personality of the viewer.

Solitude of the moral witness

At the very center of Reznikoff’s writing, concomitant with the objectivity of his technique, is the aloneness of the moral witness, of a deep and abiding solitude that moved C. P. Snow, in commenting on Reznikoff’s work, to regard him as a lonely writer. In Reznikoff, this isolation is less a product of experience than of fundamental choice. As he says of his life in the poem “Autobiography: New York”: “I am alone—and glad to be alone . . . I like the sound of the street—but I, apart and alone,/ beside an open window/ and behind a closed door.” This desire for isolation, for witnessing as from a distance, can be traced back to the traditions embedded in Jewish religious and philosophical works which influenced him. In the Kabbalistic tradition that informs Reznikoff’s work, language, as Gershom Scholem notes, “reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world.” The Kabbalists, Scholem points out, “revel in objective description.” This sacred attitude toward language is manifest in Reznikoff. As he says in one of his poems, “I have learned the Hebrew blessing before eating bread./ Is there no blessing before reading Hebrew?”

Coupled with this respect for language is the influence of Reznikoff’s early legal training on his poetic style. As he relates of his law school days: “I found it delightful . . ./ to use words for their daylight meaning/ and not as prisms/ playing with the rainbows of connotation.” Like Williams, Reznikoff seems to have thoroughly refused the artifice of high style in favor of the “daylight meaning” of words, to produce a style which is at once humane and communicative.

As Reznikoff’s few prose comments on his poetry make clear, craft and technique stem for him from communicative and ethical concerns as opposed to literary ones, and it is this urge to communicate which is his primary motive. One finds in his work that nearly lost sense of the poet as teller of tales as tribal historian. The poet, according to Reznikoff (perhaps in particular the Jewish poet of the People of the Book) stands always with history at his back. For such a poet, the work is not one of self-expression but of a desire to be an agency for those voices lost or denied in time, for individuals caught up in historical forces beyond their control.

Jews in Babylonia

This urge to reclaim in Reznikoff has deeper implications, however, as demonstrated in one of Reznikoff’s longer historical poems, Jews in Babylonia, where a collagist technique initially yokes natural phenomena—the passing of seasons, growth of plants, and the behavior of animals—with simple actions of the biblical tradesmen: “Plane the wood into boards; chisel the stone.” The rhythms here are stately and the imagery peaceful. As the poem continues, however, the harmony begins to come apart. Now there is “A beast with its load/ and a bit in its mouth” and “the horn gores/ the hoof kicks/ the teeth bite.” The shift in tone becomes even more “unnatural”: “The bread has become moldy/ and the dates blown down by the wind . . . the dead woman has forgotten her comb.” The lines become a litany of ruin and decay which has both historical and metaphysical implications: “But where are the dead of the Flood . . . the dead of Nebuchadnezzar?” until finally the images express a kind of visionary chaos where “the hyena will turn into a bat/ and a bat will turn into a thorn,” where what is seen is “the blood of his wounds/ and the tears of her eyes” and “the Angel of Death in time of war/ does not distinguish/ between the righteous and the wicked.”

The effect of this technique is to create something that seems at once cinematic and apocalyptic, forcefully in keeping with the historical situation itself while at the same time suggesting both foreboding and prophecy. In this regard, Reznikoff’s work is no simple addition or nostalgic reminder of the past but, like the songs and poems of the biblical prophets, a potential guide to personal and social action. As he says of his grandfather’s lost poetry in “By the Well of Living and Seeing”: “All the verse he wrote was lost—except for what/ still speaks through me/ as mine.”

Testimony and Holocaust

It is in Reznikoff’s most difficult and controversial works, Testimony and Holocaust, that his sense of historical urgency and the need to testify culminate. In these works, Reznikoff may be said to have created a new poetic form (or as some critics have claimed, absence of form) which is meant to do justice to the full weight of humankind’s inhumanity to humans. In these two works, legal records—American courtroom proceedings in Testimony and the Nuremberg war crimes trials and the accounts of victims and witnesses in the case of Holocaust—are unsparingly worked into verse form, shorn of poetic devices. The author’s hand appears solely in the austere editing and lineation of the historical record. Here, the “poetic” by its very absence in the poetry seems to be both witness and prosecutor, a reminder to the reader not only of the events that have occurred but also the life, grace, and possibility denied by the events. The works curiously penetrate the reader’s consciousness since, by leaving all the individual interpretation, they undermine, in their account of devastating cruelty and horror, the reader’s conventional notions of civilization and culture.

Such penetration, accomplished in such a “hands off” manner, has the further effect of evoking and calling to account the reader’s humanity. It is this effect that gives Reznikoff’s “objectivity” such moral power. This wedding of artistic means and the procedures of the law courts gives Reznikoff’s work a unique contemporaneity, one that honors and respects the individual while in no way striving for egocentric novelty. This is a communitas at its most moving and profound. It can be said of Reznikoff that he is one of the few contemporary poets to have transformed literary artistry into a major historical vision.

Bibliography

Fredman, Stephen. A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. An analysis of the poetry of Reznikoff and objectivity in literature. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Gefin, Laszlo K. Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Gefin cites Reznikoff as one of the poets who use the synthetical or ideogrammatic method in their poetry. He sees this composition as an “aesthetic form extending from a postlogical and even posthumanist consciousness.” In the chapter titled “Sincerity and Objectification,” Gefin remarks on the influence of Chinese poetry on Reznikoff and, at the same time, calls him the “Giacometti of poetry,” because he pares down his words to bare essentials.

Heller, Michael. “Reznikoff’s Modernity.” American Book Review 2 (July/August, 1980): 3. Reviews a number of Reznikoff’s works in the light of modernism. States that this poet stands out in the continuity of his work rather than the more usual modernist discontinuity. Admires Reznikoff’s restraint and his ability to allow readers to come to their own conclusions.

Hindus, Milton. Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1984. A full-length study, initially conceived to correct the relative obscurity and neglect of Reznikoff. Half the volume is devoted to the author’s personal accounts of Reznikoff’s life; the latter half is a compilation of important critical essays on his poetry. Includes a section on his prose and concludes with a useful and thorough annotated bibliography of his works.

Omer-Sherman, Ranen. “Revisiting Charles Reznikoff’s Urban Poetics of Diaspora and Contingency.” In Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. An examination of the urban Jewish culture in Reznikoff’s poetry.

Reznikoff, Charles. Family Chronicle. New York: Markus Wiener, 1988. A fascinating background account of the Reznikoff family, from their origins in Russia to their immigration to the United States and establishment in New York. Contains three accounts of family members, including “Needle Trade,” an autobiographical piece by Reznikoff, and much useful information that illuminates the themes in his poetry.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917-1976. Edited by Milton Hindus. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1997. A collection of letters that reveal some of the poet, but much more of the man. Includes an essay by Hindus on Reznikoff’s life and work.

Vescia, Monique Claire. Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera-Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams. New York: Routledge, 2006. Examines photographic and linguistic images in three works—Reznikoff’s Testimony, Oppen’s Discrete Series (1934), and Williams’s Collected Poems, 1921-1931 (1934)—as well as camera work by Walker Evans, Lewis Hines, andAlfred Stieglitz to find what is shared between documentary photography and modern poetry.