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Black Sparrow Press / David R. Godine
Publishers
$21.95 / 445 pp / paper / isbn 1-57423-203-7
http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com/
Review by Daniel Bouchard
The Work was the Thing
With the republication of Charles Reznikoff’s collected
poems, readers are assured another chance to make their own
discovery of something wonderful. Reznikoff himself seemed
always to doubt the longevity of his poetry as a material
fact. His family legacy included a grandfather who wrote
poetry in czarist Russia. Upon his death his widow burned
all of the poems, fearing they would be a liability to the
family’s survival. This lesson is at the root of Reznikoff’s
publishing life, noted in his poem “Early History of
a Writer”: “I would leave no writing of mine,
/ if I could help it, / to the mercy of those who loved me.” That
covers one angle well enough; the rest is up to the interest
of others and maybe just luck. But about his intentions as
a poet he was always clear:
I would print
and, though I knew it was an unlikely
way to gain name or money
(not that I cared much for either),
I also knew a Chinese
proverb,
that one who can work ten years without recognition,
will
be known everywhere,
And he put in far more than ten years.
Charles Reznikoff is the great walking
poet of America, an essential New York poet and a consummate
flaneur. He was born in Brooklyn and lived all of his life
in New York City, except for a brief stint in California
during the late 1930s working for Paramount Pictures. Reznikoff
never left the United States. Like Thoreau, and perhaps
echoing him, he said to his wife he had not explored all
of Central Park yet. He walked twenty miles a day by his
wife’s accounting,
and felt sullen when his habit was crimped. What he saw and
heard on his walks fed his poetry. A kind of sight-catalogue
fills the epigrams of his second book Rhythms II (1919)
with mice, cockroaches, ships and milk bottles at dawn, horses
on a ferry or in the park, scrubwomen, shop workers, beggars
and shoemakers. Fifty years later he is still looking at
things and people and working them through his mind into
a series of verse he likened to “Doric music.” A
sampling from By the Well of Living and Seeing (1969)
culls birds, cats, insects, horses, flowers, a gay couple,
a lonely old woman, zoo animals, a beggar. This could all
have been Central Park, and likely was.
One significant difference in his approach
in the interval of half a century was that he learned not
to read the minds of people he saw; his presentation became
more refined. From that 1919 book: “She who worked patiently, / her children
grown, / lies in her grave patiently.” How one lies
in a grave is material for the imagination. After a half-century,
Reznikoff presents the waitress in Mrs. Smith’s Cafeteria,
possibly the daughter of the long-dead patient woman: “she
must surely have been seventy— / hair white as the
chinaware, / small and hunchbacked with age, / and alone.”
Reznikoff was drawn to people such as
lonely and sad blue-collar women and men. The aged and
alone, broken and abandoned, despairing and suffering from
small and large humiliations appear in his poems again
and again. From his first book a dead man lies in the street
with rain sprinkling the blood around his head. This Reznikoff
probably saw, but he imagined the rest: “His wife now at her window, / the supper
done, the table set, / waits for his coming out of the wet.” Implied
is the worrying, the not knowing why her husband is delayed
and thus the tragedy: he’s not coming back. His poetry
is the great empathy he felt for people. He makes it in thick
serialized stacks; vignettes that fire at a rapid clip throughout
one of his groups of verse.
Consider a series of sections from his third book, Poems,
published in 1920 when Reznikoff was 26. In the first a patriarch
feels lonely and “useless, like an old pot”.
In the next a sad woman is about to meet a man through a
matchmaker, ready to marry “whatever he was”,
no reason given. In the next section a man burns the love
letters and bridal veil and dried flowers of his dead wife; “the
next day the others would move in.” And in the next
a bed-ridden woman awaits her deceased son, presumably shipped
by train, “through fields and cities cold and white
with snow.” Not much if any explanation is ever offered,
only profound sorrow is evoked, and powerfully. The following
section, two lines long, marks a shift in attention: “The
twigs tinge the winter sky / brown.”
Despite their power, the faults of Reznikoff’s poems
before the age of thirty are betrayed by romance and melodrama.
It’s a grim notion of the Romantic, but Romantic just
the same, and he would outgrow it as an artist though his
technique for writing would not change much, only deepen
in resiliency and skill for compressing a great amount of
material and emotion in a little space. He had little to
theorize about his practice. Once asked to talk about Objectivism,
he characteristically referred to something he had read to
define it. Quoting an 11th century Chinese poet, he said
poetry presents things—the things that hold one’s
attention—in order to convey emotion: “it should
be precise about the thing and reticent about the emotion.” George
Oppen’s famous admiration of an instance of this at
work is often cited (though Oppen himself misquoted it): “Among
the heaps of brick and plaster lies / a girder, still itself
among the rubbish.” Here is another, also from Jerusalem
the Golden (1934): “Feast, you who cross the bridge
/ this cold twilight / on these honeycombs of light, the
buildings of Manhattan.”
There are really only a few modes of poetry
writing in which Reznikoff worked. (In addition to poetry
he wrote histories, prose memoirs, translations, and fiction,
including a historical novel). The poetry modes are apparent
in the subtitles of his books: “editing,” “glosses,” “inscriptions,” “autobiography.” In
his “editingpoems” Reznikoff worked from sourcebooks,
arranging and condensing material for his purposes and fleshing
out areas that represent his personal reading of the text.
This is a “gloss” from “A Short History
of Israel,” found in Going to and Fro and Walking
Up and Down (1941):
Moses, who left a cool palace and pleasant walks
in a garden beside the Nile
to become a shepherd in the desert,
thought it, no doubt,
a small matter
that his people leave their drudgery
the commands of princes
and blows of the masters,
for the wilderness—
just to be free.
In addition to the Bible, Reznikoff made use of oral histories,
early American history, and articles from magazines and newspapers.
The poems anticipate (though some came after) two of his
greatest achievements as a writer, Testimony and Holocaust,
made up in the first instance from law cases collected from
libraries around the country and in the second from the transcripts
of the Nuremburg trials. Neither collection, unfortunately,
is included here.
This Godine edition of Reznikoff’s poems,
rather than just being a reprint of the older Black Sparrow
one, has some improvements as well as new material. Edited
again by Seamus Cooney, Godine reset and repaginated the
entire volume. Cooney notes how the numeric sequences in
Reznikoff’s
individual books was in the process of revision at the poet’s
death, from Roman to Arabic numerals, as well as changing
capital letters of each new line in a poem to lowercase.
Cooney completes this process here. A lengthy andinformative
chronology of Reznikoff’s life is printed as an appendix,
as well as an essay on his poetics, titled “Obiter
Dicta,” a concise and illuminating statement.
He was associated with The Objectivist Poets,
a grouping that none of its members seem to give much legitimacy.
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