Objectivists

Works Discussed in This Essay

• "A"-14 by Louis Zukofsky
• Briggflatts by Basil Bunting
• "Five Poems" by Lorine Niedecker
• "And Their Winter and Night in Disguise" by George Oppen
• "Winter Sketches" by Charles Reznikoff

The objectivists were a group of poets whose work prized the poem as object and sincerity in language. The group was formally named in the 1930s in an introductory essay that Louis Zukofsky wrote for the Poetry magazine issue that he guest-edited at the urging of renowned poet and writer Ezra Pound. Charles Reznikoff later said of the group's name,

We picked the name "Objectivist" because we had all read Poetry [magazine] of Chicago and we agreed completely with all that Pound was saying. We didn't really discuss the term itself; it seemed all right-pregnant. It could have meant any number of things. But the mere fact that we didn't discuss its meaning doesn't deprive it of its validity. . . . I think we all agreed that the term "objectivism," as we understood Pound's use of it, corresponded to the way we felt poetry should be written. (qtd. in Wagstaff)

The most prominent writers in this movement included Zukofsky, Reznikoff, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker. Many were published in the now-famous February 1931 issue of Poetry. Another publication, An "Objectivists" Anthology, was published in 1932 by TO Publishers, a small press founded by Zukofsky, Reznikoff, and Oppen and his wife, Mary; the press's name stood for "The Objectivists." The collection featured many of the same names as the issue of Poetry, as well as some other poets. Niedecker is the single poet from the core group whose work was not found in either; she read the issue of Poetry at her local library and struck up a correspondence with Zukofsky, with whom she would develop a lifelong literary relationship.

More loosely connected than the poets of other twentieth-century literary movements, the objectivist poets were interested in the details of everyday life and in capturing those moments with simple, lyrical language. They took part of their inspiration from the British literary movement called imagism, which existed from 1909 to 1913. The movement had at its helm Pound, who was the foreign editor of Poetry, where he published many of his imagist pieces in addition to essays about the movement by other writers. The first avant-garde collective of its kind in twentieth-century English-language poetry, imagism offered a point of inspiration and organization for American poets to follow. Zukofsky published several poems with Pound, and the two later began a correspondence that would prove to be one of the more important turns for poetry at the time. It was Pound who became the connecting figure of the objectivist group.

The objectivists found themselves at the center of the political and economic crisis of the 1930s and became heavily involved in politics and activism as a result. Many of the members of the group were interested in communist ideals, with Zukofsky frequently describing himself as a communist and eventually studying Marxism, and Oppen and his wife moving to Mexico at one point to escape political persecution because of their own communist beliefs. The work reflects these beliefs, as the Poetry Foundation explains:

The short poems that Zukofsky wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, ultimately gathered in the opening two sections of All, bring together in various complex ways three currents: a Pound-like faith that truth can be achieved through a poetry which stays with the movement of "the particulars"; a neo-formalist concern with the poem as a shaped object; and a Marxist concern with social oppression and class struggle. ("Louis Zukofsky")

As a result of increased activism and political concern, the group did not remain active long, as many stopped writing poetry to focus on pursuing political causes. In fact, they went silent for decades until experiencing a resurgence in the 1960s when publishers became interested in the group's activities again. Following that phase, the objectivists continued to publish until the end of their lives.

English poet Basil Bunting embodied the objectivist ideals in his work and approach. He urged readers to enjoy his poetry for its auditory value, prioritizing word combinations and sounds over form or sentiment. As a result, his work is lyrical and often focuses on the smaller moments of life. Jailed as a conscientious objector during World War I, Bunting roamed the world after being released from prison, going first to Italy, then Paris, the Canary Islands, and the United States. His passion for culture and literature led to a unique body of work. Donald Hall wrote, in a review for the New York Times, "The wily Bunting, questioned about his own poems, reduces them to themes and variations, possibly because they are too intimate a matter for public discussion."

Briggflatts is a long poem written about Cumbria, England. The name comes from the Brigflatts Meeting House, a Quaker meeting house near the town of Sedbergh in Cumbria, where Bunting spent a summer as a child. Briggflatts does more to capture the atmosphere of the place than it does to provide a narrative. Told in short, quick, lyrical lines, the poem begins simply:

Brag, sweet tenor bull,

descant on Rawthey's madrigal,

each pebble its part

for the fells' late spring.

Dance tiptoe, bull,

black against may.

Ridiculous and lovely

chase hurdling shadows

morning into noon. (lines 1–9)

Using alliteration and short, common words, Bunting weaves a spell with his language that allows images like a mason and his mallet and the waking of villagers to shine through the prose. The reader is transported to the world Bunting has created with his language, rather than being pulled away by distracting language.

Lorine Niedecker, a native of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, spent much of her life isolated in the wilderness of her home state, and those pristine, rugged surroundings had a marked influence on her body of work. Niedecker was so private about her work that many of her relatives and neighbors were not aware that she was a published poet. The Poetry Foundation notes that "Niedecker's verse is praised for its stark, vivid imagery, subtle rhythms, and spare language," and that multiple critics have compared her work to that of Chinese and Japanese poets because of its "delicate yet concrete verse" ("Lorine Niedecker"). Though she did publish several works early in her career, Niedecker did not receive much notice until late in life. Her reputation has continued to grow since her death in 1970, and at least four volumes of her work were published posthumously.

Five of Niedecker's poems appeared in the August 1965 issue of Poetry, grouped together under the heading "Five Poems." These five short pieces make wide reference to the natural world, a life spent in simplicity, and the cycle of the seasons, with much of the writing feeling like intimate, dashed-off thoughts. For example, Niedecker begins the first in the cycle, "To my pres- / sure pump," with the lines

I've been free

with less

and clean

I plumbed for principles (1–4)

before lamenting, perhaps ironically, her newfound reliance on a faucet shower and "heater valve / ring seal service" (7–8). By considering the space between these juxtaposed ideas, the reader is allowed a moment's glimpse into Niedecker's quiet, rural life. The third poem of the cycle, titled "March," states simply,

Bird feeder's

snow-cap

sliding

off. (1–4)

Her work is highly visual, and nearly sonic because of her simple descriptions.

George Oppen was one of the most prominent members of the objectivist movement, and also one of its most political. The American poet traveled the country with his wife, Mary, before moving to France in his early twenties. It was there that he began work on the press TO Publications with Louis Zukofsky. The press became one of the most important outlets for the movement. By the time the Great Depression hit, however, Oppen had begun to focus more intensely on his political work. He and his wife were devout communists and were eventually investigated by the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), after which they moved to Mexico City, where they stayed for nearly a decade. Oppen wrote no poetry during this period, and only began writing again upon returning to the United States in 1958. He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Of Being Numerous (1968), and continued to produce poetry for the remainder of his life.

Dick Allen stated for the Antioch Review that as an objectivist, Oppen's work explores the question, "How can the poet communicate a realization of the concrete object as object without drawing the reader's attention to the way in which he communicates?" (qtd. in "George Oppen"). Oppen strove for clarity above all in his work, and as a result produced "lean and precise" poems, and those close to him claimed that a "distrust of language" caused him to use words carefully ("George Oppen"). His poem "And Their Winter and Night in Disguise" veers from the immediate—a description of a scene in front of the narrator—to the distant—a soldier dying in battle. The simplicity of the first lines and last echo each other across a wild exploration of the world. "The sea and a crescent strip of beach / Show between the service station and a deserted shack" (1–2), Oppen begins, in a literal mode. The final lines are a bit more abstract—"Our minds are split / To seek the danger out // From among the miserable soldiers" (38–40)—and one can nearly infer trench warfare, and those broken minds returning from the war. The haunting, sparse landscape described at the poem's start echoes the hollow, terrifying landscape of war, with men seeing only strips of land peeking out from their lookouts in the trench. Oppen does not have to explicitly say any of these things because of the power of his words and work, and the tone and simplicity of language allows the reader to pay attention to the imagery, and channel Oppen's thoughts.

Charles Reznikoff was a prominent member of the objectivists. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants who sought refuge from the czarist pogroms in the late 1800s, Reznikoff was the grandson of a poet who had traveled around Russia singing the songs he composed, and he frequently drew from his own life in his poetry. Much of Reznikoff's life can be surmised from his work, which deals with academic disappointments, family tragedies, and the anti-Semitism he experienced living in Brooklyn. Reznikoff attended the Missouri School of Journalism for one year following high school, but he soon learned that his vision of writing was quite dissimilar to that of the journalism students around him: they were interested primarily in facts, while he was interested in writing and language. It was a formative experience that carried him through his return to Brooklyn soon after, where he attended law school. His time in law school served his poetry well; he became a close reader of language and style and was able to apply this critical analysis to his work and others. He was a compulsive creator and continued to write poetry until his death, leaving behind a vast body of work that tells the story of one man's life.

"Winter Sketches" first appeared in the January 1933 issue of Poetry. The poem consists of five short sketches, with descriptions of subjects ranging from winter to the thunder of subway tracks to a sense of longing for the buildings of Manhattan. The first sketch ends with the lines

Upon this wooded hillside,

pied with snow, I hear

only the melting snow

drop from the twigs. (1.10–13)

followed by the second sketch, titled "Subway," which ends with, "Coming up the subway stairs, I thought the moon / only another street-light— / a little crooked" (2.11–13). The startling contrast of a peaceful winter scene with a man so entrenched in city life that he has mistaken the moon for a streetlight offers each scene the chance to make a bigger impact on the reader and adds density to the scenes the poet is describing. Through his carefully descriptive language, Reznikoff is able to convey an intimacy with both scenes.

Louis Zukofsky was the unofficial founder of the objectivist movement, and his connection to Pound allowed for the growth of a new kind of poetry following the overly sentimental works of poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the late 1800s. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Zukofsky was born in Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1904. He credited his gift with poetry and interest in becoming a poet to Cabalistic Judaism because of its focus on the transformative power of language and its exclusiveness when dealing with mass groups of people; a small group of initiates were separate from a large swath of ignorant outsiders. Upon entering Columbia University at sixteen, Zukofsky became enamored with the literary avant-garde, particularly the works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. The editor of both TO Publications with Oppen and the famed issue of Poetry magazine that sparked the objectivist movement, Zukofsky remained an important literary figure throughout his life.

The first seven sections of Zukofsky's "A" were written between 1928 and 1930, before he abandoned the project for half a decade. Often composed in collage form, the various sections of the poem are representative of when they were written. Interweaving paraphrases of Henry Adams and Karl Marx, musical texts, and extended meditations, the work chronicles history as only poetry could. Section, or movement, 10 ("A"-10) finds the poet "lament[ing] the Nazi violation of Europe" ("Louis Zukofsky") and asking the public to fight back. Movement 14 ("A"-14), written in 1965 and published in the October issue of Poetry, finds the poet experimenting with language and form. At the time of its creation, Zukofsky was sixty years old and had been working on "A" for over thirty-five years, and the style of poetry was considered to be classic late-career Zukofsky, consisting entirely of one-, two-, and three-word lines. In his commentary on "A"-14, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas wrote, "The movement might convince readers that the complexities of the textual surface are not, finally, a matter of obscurity but the pleasures of formal inventiveness. Yet, there is no lack of thematic content" (1). Single words make up each line of the first few stanzas before the movement breaks into two-word lines, after which the stanzas consist primarily of two-word lines with occasional lines of just one, until later three-word lines emerge. The stark beginning of "A"-14 leads the reader to suspect that this work is as much about momentum and simplicity as it is subject and mood:

An

orange

our

sun

fire

pulp

whets

us

(everyday)

for

us

eat

it

its

fire's

unconsumed (14.1–16)

The beginning text is based on notes that Zukofsky jotted in a small notebook about the news, things he saw on the street, conversations he heard, and other mundanities. The rapid-fire composition of the verses demonstrates a complete rethinking of the traditional approach to language and observations in long poems. During this period, Zukofsky also found his most welcoming audience, as avant-garde composers rose in rank and public reception changed dramatically. The final section of "A"-14 is inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead and finds the poet including long lists of single words once again, many of which suggest references to hieroglyphics, and the section as a whole offers a brief narrative for the reader: a poet is in possession of a text, reads and is inspired by it, and then writes a poem about it.

Bibliography

Bartter, Katherine. "The Objectivist Takeover: Zukofsky's Edition of Poetry Magazine." Modern Poetry—The MOD Blog, College of Charleston, 13 Mar. 2014, blogs.cofc.edu/modernism/2014/03/13/an-objectivist-takeover-zukofskys-edition-of-poetry-magazine. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Bunting, Basil. Briggflatts. Complete Poems, edited by Richard Caddell, Bloodaxe Books, 2000, pp. 57–79. Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, . Accessed 30 June 2017.

"George Oppen." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/george-oppen. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Hall, Donald. "A Gorgeous Sound." Review of Collected Poems, by Basil Bunting. The New York Times, 2 July 1978, www.nytimes.com/1978/07/02/archives/a-gorgeous-sound-ille-mi-par-esse-deo-videtur.html. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

"Lorine Niedecker." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lorine-niedecker. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

"Louis Zukofsky." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louis-zukofsky. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Niedecker, Lorine. "Five Poems." Poetry, Aug. 1965, pp. 341–44, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=30136. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Oppen, George. New Collected Poems. 2002. Edited by Michael Davidson, New Directions, 2008.

Reznikoff, Charles. "Winter Sketches." Poetry, Jan. 1933, pp. 192–93, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=19936. Accessed 30 June 2017.

Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. "'Chorál out / of Random Input': 'A'-14." Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky, 28 Jan. 2017, www.z-site.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/A-14.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2017.

Wagstaff, Steel. "The Lives." The Objectivists, 4 Nov. 2014, theobjectivists.org/the-lives. Accessed 22 May 2017.

Zukofsky, Louis. "A." Rev. ed., New Directions, 2011.