Charles Reznikoff died ten years ago in New York on January 22nd, 1976. Since then Black Sparrow have issued the complete poetry: Complete Poems 1918-75 (2 vols), Testimony: The United States 1885-1915 (2 vols), and Holocaust. It seems clear to me, looking at this work, that Reznikoff is one of the very great writers of this century. Why more people don’t share this opinion, I’m not sure. Maybe they haven’t read him. Maybe this article might encourage them at least to give him a try.
His work manages to convey a deep sense of the existential, of the solitariness of the here-and-now (where “only the narrow present is alive”) with a deep sense of history, and his place and responsibility as a human being in history. For most writers a genuine sense of one—the existential or the historic—is purchased at the expense of the other. But in Reznikoff the imagist (of the moment of existence) and the narrative (of the timespan) co-exist; they co-exist through collocation, collocation of fragments in numbered sequences that make artistic wholes. These sequences Reznikoff usually printed and published himself, from 1918 until 1969—when he was 73 years of age.
A good basic comparison for his technique, as for so much of American poetry from Imagism through William Carlos Williams, “objectivism”, beyond Robert Creeley and Black Mountain, can be found in painting. While the poetic line was seen as the key to diction—pause at the end of each line, a point still not grasped by many a True Brit—it could also be seen as the basic “plane” as in cubism, to provide as it were ways of “angling the meanings” against one another in a poem. This involved a disruption of conventional syntax; one need go no further than Williams’s Pictures from Brueghel (starting with the title sequence) to study this. But Reznikoff does not collocate “angles of meaning” from line to line. To that extent, albeit he uses the line as a unit of rhythmic diction, he still does not disrupt traditional syntax. His collocation, juxtaposition of different senses of a whole is from section to section within an overall sequence: these sections, be they of one line or of three hundred, are on the one hand self-sufficient, in their plain phrase or narrative, but in an important way they are all, in every sequence and without exception, fragmentary.
I think I can best explain what I mean by saying that the image I have of Reznikoff’s work as a whole is like that of a great cubist hologram. The angles, or planes of this cubist hologram are made up of hundreds of sections of his major sequences. These angles or planes can be seen as representing different aspects of consciousness and behaviour: moments of consciousness of an isolated individual, walking the streets of New York; incidents and moments of consciousness of sundry urban Americans; ditto (in a manner recalling Joyce’s Dubliners ) of sundry specifically Jewish individuals in an American ghetto of the past; incidents of significance to the Jewish people as a whole, from scripture to the Russian pogroms of 1905; incidents from post-war trial records of the Nazi attempt to destroy the whole Jewish race; incidents from legal records—especially with relation to crime and industrial accidents—pertaining to Americans nation-wide between 1885 and 1915. There are, in all, 1.087 verse sections making up the sequences that are Reznikoff’s poetry: Testimony has 460 sections, Holocaust has 54, and the Complete Poems 1918-75 has 573. While reading them I took brief notes to remind me of their contents: what follows is a selection from my notebooks, make whilst reading the books in the order mentioned in the last sentence. The words in italics, note, are mine, not Reznikoff’s. I have interspersed quotes from the poems themselves.
*
Husband beats baby to death with belt because it won’t stop crying when he’s home for lunch.
Man kills neighbour over son going out with16-year-old daughter.
Negro crushed to death loading boiler has funeral paid for on understanding no claim against company.
Immigrant shouted at by foreman puts hand into cotton machine where knives are just a blur.
Woman has eye put out by bunch of drunk boys annoying train passengers.
Orphan 12-year-old girl whipped and burnt by foster-mother for not doing ironing.
15-year-old told to hold 40-45lb belt for machine up ladder. Falls, arm torn off at lbow.
The shaft was running at full speed
as he put the ends of the belt over it
and dropped them down
and he was starting back when the machinist called up,
“Go back and hold that belt!”
He did and was holding the belt up from the shaft in a loop
for about ten minutes
when the machinist called up again,
“Wait! I am going to get some lacing.”
The boy became tired and moved his feet a little
the plank turned—
and he fell on the shaft:
his right arm was caught between the belt and the shaft
and torn off at the elbow.
Accident with horse and buggy at bridge, goes over side into stream.
Girl accused by other of theft attacks latter with razor, cuts finger off, cuts shoulders, arms, face.
Pauper has amputation work after railway accident. Work badly done.
Botched abortion lands woman dying in hospital. Abortionist complains of her not keeping secret.
Man leaves wife, does not contact her despite her putting baby’s shoe, with love-note, in trunk.
Then he asked the nurse to pack his trunk,
and when the expressman came
his wife asked the man where he was going to take it
but the man would not tell her.
Just before the trunk was closed
she put in a shoe—
a little shoe, the first their baby had worn—
and put it on the tray of the trunk
and under the shoe a note:
“I married you for love;
and I would have clung to you for ever for love”;
signed it, “Your wife,”
and addressed the note, “My husband.”
Then the nurse locked the trunk
and the expressman took it away.
But she did not hear from her husband.
Stevedore falls 20 feet into hold of badly-lit coalship lacking lamp at usual spot.
Man asks for a draw of a cigarette outside a dance; conflict, eventual stabbing to death.
Horses drowned when they bolt on iced lake being cut for ice-blocks.
Man leaving town hoping to kill “some son of a bitch”.
His companion told him to put up his pistol:
he might hurt somebody;
and he replied that he knew how to handle a gun as well as any man,
and was not going to hurt anybody right there;
but he added that he wanted to kill “some son of a bitch”;
and did the man he was talking to ever feel that way?
Father (with son’s help) murders 15-year-old daughter he had sex with, buries her in swamp.
New miner killed by cage; others didn’t warn him of the dangerous area he’d entered.
Drunk white shoots negro for refusing to put coal on railway waiting-room fire.
Conscientious man put to new job in slaughterhouse where platform not stationary. Falls in vat of boiling water.
60-year-old deaf seamstress going home by night along railroad track sucked under train.
Girl about 15 raped on way home from work at 10 pm; police arrest janitor whose shoes fit snowprints.
Beating of mare.
Several of the citizens came around,
but he told them it was his horse
and he would whip it as long as he pleased.
Every time he hit the mare, she grunted;
but she would not rear up
except when he struck her on the head.
When he stopped beating her
she had ridges on her
and the blood ran from her nostrils.
*
Jew at Jewish office told to clean steps—with acid. Chief Rabbi likewise. SS laugh.
8 lines about Jews forced to drink sea-water desperately sucking dirty water from mops and rags.
Description of the sealed-off Warsaw ghetto, with starving people, corpses lying in streets “gnawed at by rats”.
50 Jews pulled from bunker, beaten. Lined up to be shot, order rescinded as they are to be sent away “for soap”.
SS man shoots woman then rips her baby apart before her eyes. Then gives lump of sugar to dog.
Woman picked up from line undressed to be shot, told to go. As she walks away, shot in the back.
She took that step
and then he said: “What a pity
to bury such beauty in the earth.
Go!
But don’t look backwards.
There is the street to the boulevard.
Follow that.”
She hesitated
and then began to walk as told.
The other women looked at her—
some no doubt with envy—
as she walked slowly, step by step.
And the officer took out his revolver
and shot her in the back.
Widows in Germany might be sent “Feeling well” postcard or request for 31/2 marks for urn with ashes.
Children thrown from balconies and 2nd-floor hospitals onto trucks where sick adults lay.
Children locked up in hundreds, on way to death camps, 8-year-old keeping half a biscuit for his mother.
Dog trained to attack at word “Jew”; another called “Man” to attack Jewish “dog”.
SS man not so harsh. Moved within a month.
Jews made to stand in barrel till frozen to death. Orchestra—reached 60—to play whenever Jews shot.
Trucks arriving at mass graves: clothes, footwear sorted in piies: down steps to stand on bodies: father
consoling son.
The SS man at the pit,
shouted to his comrade
and he counted off twenty, now completely naked,
and told them to go down the steps cut in the clay wall of the pit:
here they were to climb over the heads of the dead
to where the soldier pointed.
Hasidim led to hill to pray and raise hands for God’s help. Kerosene poured on them.
Man ordered to sort out bodies. Comes on his wife and children. Wants to commit suicide, but escapes.
Burning of the mass graves. Grinding machine, to grind the bones. Sieved for gold fillings.
Description of gas chamber. Bodies ripped for swallowed jewels, hair cut for mats, “nothing to be wasted!”.
When the rear doors were opened,
those inside were standing like statues:
there had been no room to fall
or even bend.
Among the dead, families were to be seen,
holding each other by the hand,
hands tightly clasped
so that those who threw out the dead
had trouble parting them.
*
Poland: Anno 1700. Argument between Young Jew and Old Jew over value of nurturing historical sense of
pogroms.
Russia: Anno 1905. Address to America as goal of exiles. Debate by “A Young Jew” as to whether or not he’s
Russian.
Or better still,
there is no Russia;
there are no peoples, only man!
Derivation from Josephus. Pompey’s soldiers at Jerusalem. Lengthy description of gear.
Their leather coats, heavy with bands of iron or brass,
over sleeveless woolen shirts;
a greave of bronze on the right leg—
the forwards leg in battle—
and feet in heavy sandals;
a heavy square shield of wood plated with iron
hung at each man’s left. The badge of his cohort,
a bright wreath or a thunderbolt, perhaps, painted about the boss,
but now, on the march, under a leather cover.
Derivation from historical record of early colonialist’s delight at Virginia.
Ghetto sequence. Boy who wants to learn music rather than father’s business. Leaves home. Starving.
Man engaged to be married. “He sang a song to himself in which her name was the only word.” Mother
remonstrates about poor health in girl’s family background.
Shoemaker, finishing a shoe. Pot of fish on stove. Friend waits “in shoes newly cobbled and blacked” for meal
and walk.
Boy ostracised by anti-semitic neighbourhood. Waits till darkness for his sledging.
It had been long 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 out 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 down on his 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.
Mother telling son she wished she could have studied,.
Collapse of a family’s fortune after daughters die in childbirth.
Autobiographical. Grandfather, his arrival from Russia, his Hebrew words to R.’s father “I did not think to see your
face! and God has shown me your sons also.” Gives R. a Russian coin.
Schoolmates in Brooklyn. Two fellow poetry enthusiasts. Secondhand books.
R. and friend Gabriel set themselves sonnets on given theme, “We knew that Keats and Leigh Hunt used to do
that.” Years later sees Gabriel while waiting on subway. Gabriel looks, then looks away.
Reproof over denigration by R. of his father’s buckle.
I was wearing a belt buckle
with the family initial on it
in a cheap design. A friend noticed it
and I said apologetically:
“This was my father’s. He had no taste.”
“Perhaps,” my friend answered gently,
“he wore it because it was a gift.”
R’s spell at law school. Fondness for reading, even memorising law cases, “sifting the facts of each case until I
had only the hard essentials.”
Gets fed up with law.
Short imagist sequences. Mainly urban. Sky stars office blocks factory girls.
Old man eating apple.
Showing a torn sleeve, with stiff and shaking fingers the old man
pulls off a bit of the baked apple, shiny with sugar,
eating with reverence food, the great comforter.
Address to the subway rails. The road excavation. Metropolitan haiku. The automobile fender. The traffic light
jewel.
Permit me to warn you
against this automobile rushing to embrace you
with outstretched fender.
*
This smoky winter morning
do not despise the green jewel shining among the twigs
because it is a traffic light.
The girder “still itself among the rubbish”. The lone star dogging the moon.
“The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water”. The private ledger.
Put it down in your ledger
among the profits of this day:
the dark uncertain path of the wind
on the bright water;
snow on the yellow branches of the sycamore.
Prayers. Kaddish. Te Deum.
Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.
Not for victory
but for the day’s work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.
*
I’ve said that Reznikoff combines the here-and-now with the historic, the imagist with the narrative, and this by collocation of parts. It’s not a simple matter though: it would be wrong for instance to see Holocaust and Testimony purely as examples of the narrative, historic aspect of the work. In fact it’s important that each of these works is preceded by a prefatory note which states that all that follows is based on legal records. Reznikoff’s getting-to-the-essentials style thus presents them in some ways as a kind of series of cleaned-up linguistic found-objects, for you to make of as you will. Again, the short here-and-now urban images of the Complete Poems cumulatively build up a sense of an environment, and the personality of its recorder. In fact, for all his “objective” techniques and terse diction, Reznikoff is a highly personal poet, with a strong presence throughout the poems. The bravery of his formal technique doesn’t isolate him: he includes himself in the continuum that goes from the partial to the individual, to the group, to the community, to the people. He doesn’t get lost. The need for food, shelter, compassion: the understanding of a Yiddish tradition he compresses to six lines.
All day the pavement has been black
with rain, but in our warm brightly-lit
room, Praise God,
I kept saying to myself,
and not saying a word,
Amen, you answered.
