The Poetry of Charles Reznikoff

We know now that the classic statuary of Greece and Rome was not seen in its time as unadorned stone. Rather, these statues were painted in color. When we look at old black and white photos, these too have a “classic” look, even though the truth of what is depicted in them came in color. Our relationship between the “classical” and the actual is complex. In the Wim Wenders film  “The State of Things” (1982),  the director Samuel Fuller, playing Jo the cameraman, struggles to explain his preference for black and white to a young assistant. He finally tells him, "Life is in colour, but black and white is more realistic."  Louis Zukofsky was getting at something similar in his 1931 article for Poetry Magazine, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.” 

As I mentioned previously, over the summer we hope to offer a series of classes on Jewish poets. While Rabbis Rosenfeld and Golden will concentrate on Hebrew and Yiddish poets, respectively, I have my eye on a group of American Jewish poets who wrote in English: Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi. I have written about Oppen already. Although these four poets were identified as Objectivists, their poetry was not similar enough to be treated seriously as a “school” or movement. Nevertheless, the point that Louis Zukofsky made in his article was that they were examples of a modernist attitude towards poetics. He distinguished their attitude from Ezra Pound’s “imagists,” although he recognized a sympathy between some of the writing of the imagists, like Pound himself, and the objectivists.

Of the four, Zukofsky was the first to be in contact with Pound. Pound connected the others with Zukofsky as they came to his attention and he was instrumental, through his encouragement, in getting Harriet Monroe to publish some of their work along with Zukofsky’s article about Objective poetry (Objectivism as understood by Zukofsky has no relation to the vile philosophy of Ayn Rand.)

Zukofsky places Reznikoff at the head of the Avant Garde of modernism: 

“In I9I8, Reznikoff published twelve lines (vide XII, Five Groups of Verse) containing in their elements the atmosphere of Eliot's Waste Land and Hollow Men. The poem included the line, 

Smooth and white with loss of leaves and bark

and since Eliot's Poems were first published in America in I920, there can hardly be a question of the influence of method in a discussion of the line's value.”

This reference of Zukofsky is a bit opaque. The full poem reads:

Wringing, wringing his pierced hands,
he walks in a wood where once a flood
washed the ground into loose white sand;
and the trees stand each a twisted cross,
smooth and white with loss of leaves and bark,
together like warped yards and masts
of a fleet at anchored centuries.
No blasts come to the hollow of these dead;
long since the water has gone from the stony bed.
No fields and streets for him, his pathway runs
among these skeletons, through these white sands,
wringing, wringing his pierced hands. 

As opposed to “The Waste Land,” which deals with post-war disillusionment with a display of many modernist poetic elements, Reznikoff’s untitled poem strips away older poetic elements like metaphor and the pathetic (a storm in nature coincides with the stormy feelings of the poet). Even here in this poem, where the crucial word that creates metaphor, “like,” appears, it describes a situation where the natural way of seeing the thing  itself is to see it as another tangible thing. The evocation of the secondary image is an objective part of the seeing of the thing itself. 

In the line that Zukofsky cited, we have an image that is striking in its similarity to the paint-stripped marbles that we have known in classical statuary until recent revised understandings: “Smooth and white with loss of leaves and bark.” The objective, which is sincere (though the converse is not as a rule), strips away the masks of artifice. “Just the facts ma’am.”  As Zukofsky insists, “In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form. 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.” In summarizing Zukofsky’s definition of Objectivism, an anonymous editor on Wikipedia wrote that it was “to treat the poem as an object and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world.”

Beyond the facts of a poet's birth, there may be little gravity to attract a label that indicates their race, religion, or ethnicity. Reznikoff, solid in his modernism and reasonably attached to the adjective “objectivist,’’ is very much a Jewish poet. He concerns himself with Jewish texts and history beyond his own and he lived very much within the Jewish world. That said, Jewishness is neither a sentimental nor a chauvinistic expression is his work. If there is a Jewish apologetic in his writing, it is expressed through an objective depiction of Jewish life. There are too many examples of this in his career to make the bother of cataloging them silly. I will make more of that when I teach about him.

Uriel Acosta and a Fourth Group of Verse, 1921. Poem 20

It had long been dark, though still an hour before supper-time.
The boy stood at the window behind the curtain.
The street under the black sky was bluish white with snow.
Across the street, where the lot sloped to the pavement,
boys and girls were going down on sleds.
The boys were after him because he was a Jew.

At last his father and mother slept. He got up and dressed.
In the hall he took his sled and went out on tiptoe.
No one was in the street. The slide was worn smooth and 
    slippery - just right.
He laid himself on the sled and shot away. He went down only
    twice. 
He stood knee-deep in snow;
no one was in the street, the windows were darkened;
those near the street-lamps were ashine, but the rooms inside
    were dark;
on the street were long shadows of clods of snow.
He took his sled and went back into the house.