Charles Reznikoff - Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Reznikoff's book sets forth a stark panorama of late-19th- and early 20th-century America, the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, Black Sparrow Books, 2015.

A major work by an essential American poet, published in full for the first time.
Available again for the first time since 1978-and complete in one volume for the first time ever- Charles Reznikoff's Testimony is a lost masterpiece, a legendary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's "A" and William Carlos Williams's Paterson as a milestone of modern American poetry. Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Reznikoff's book sets forth a stark panorama of late-19th- and early 20th-century America - the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease-in a radically stripped-down language of almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff 's prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger.
"[Testimony] is perhaps Reznikoff 's most important achievement as a poet. A quietly astonishing work . . . at once a kaleidoscope vision of American life and the ultimate test of Reznikoff's poetic principles . . ." - Paul Auster
"Reznikoff 's astonishingly engaging and quietly powerful work has been steadily gaining a passionate following. . . . Testimony is a chronicle of industrial accidents, domestic violence, racism. It tells the story of America's forgotten, those who suffer without redress, without name, without hope; yet the soul of these States is found in books like this; the acknowledgment of these peripheral stories turns a waste land into holy ground." - Charles Bernstein


Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust, Black Sparrow Books, 2007.

Black Sparrow is proud to restore to print one of the great long poems of the late 20th century, Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust, originally published in 1975.
Reznikoff's subject is one people's suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government's record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff's own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust themselves. He lets the terrible history unfold -- in history's own words. Reznikoff's technique, says David Lehman, "contradicts the very faculty of understanding. He lets reality speak for itself, lets it state the externals of the thing or event, and leaves unspoken (or edits out) the emotions, which the reader may be counted on to provide for himself." Few readers will forget the emotions they bring to Holocaust.



Charles Reznikoff, The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, Black Sparrow Books, 2005

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) was born in Brooklyn, the son of Russian immigrants. He was an original, a blood-and-bone New Yorker who walked the city's waterfronts and breathed the life of the Jewish tenements into a lifetime of remarkable poetry. Black Sparrow Books is proud to publish his complete shorter poems - all of his poetry except the book-length works Testimony and Holocaust - scrupulously edited, with notes, by Seamus Cooney. 

[Reznikoff's] Jewish street wisdom, his keen eye for the New York City detail, his appetite for the telling narrative arc, all of these gifts are to be treasured. . . He also gives poets an opportunity to write clearly and deeply about what they have seen and experienced by providing models for how to do it in poem after poem. —Bill Zavatsky



Charles Reznikoff, By the Waters of Manhattan, Black Sparow Books, 2009. 


By the Waters of Manhattan was Charles Reznikoff's first novel, published in 1930 by Charles Boni in New York. Part family saga, part bildungsroman, and part unrequited love story, the novel follows the lives of a Jewish family at the turn of the century from Elizavetgrad, Russia to Brownsville, Brooklyn, birthplace of the novel's protagonist, Ezekiel, a young poet in search of ways to feed his stomach and his soul. Like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Henry Roth, Reznikoff's subject is as much the great island of Manhattan, as it is its inhabitants.

"The title By the Water of Manhattan identifies Reznikoff just as the title Leaves of Grass (which remained the same over the years while the contents of the book grew and changed) identifies Walt Whitman. Both Whitman and Reznikoff are singers and chroniclers of the American island, the name of which derives from the language (Manna-hatta) of its aboriginal inhabitants. Reznikoff's title also includes an allusion to the waters of Babylon beside which the prophet sat down and wept. The American Jew, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1894 and whose parents had emigrated from Czarist Russia some years before that date, evidently felt, like the hero of one of the novels of George Gissing, that he had been 'born in exile'. But the reader should not, on this account, be expecting a tearful immigrant narrative, for if Reznikoff was a student of the Bible he was also a student of another student of the Bible, the philosopher Spinoza. From this stoic master, he had learned neither to laugh nor cry but to try to understand."—Milton Hindus, "Charles Reznikoff's First Novel: By the Waters of Manhattan"
from Essays: Personal and Impersonal (BSB)
Happily, Black Sparrow has reprinted this remarkable novel, which could be read as a one sitting page-turner, or as the text for a semester-long course on the immigrant experience . . . Readers familiar with Reznikoff 's poetry will recognize his alter ego's struggles with the world of publishing; readers curious about the immigrant experience will add this classic to their shelves alongside Yezierska's novels and other great chronicles of the making of America.—Jewish Book World

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) writes prose like a poet, indeed he is one, with his rock-hard choice of words styled into deceptively simple sentences. Deceptive because when juxtaposed, each sentence accelerating into the next, they relay condensed lives, jammed with emotion, kin, and striving. Lopate's tender and eloquent introduction sets the record straight for this under-acknowledged literary master: '...the shocks of fortune laid out and the aftershocks allowed to register in the reader's mind, with no attempt to milk emotion.—Betsy Sussler

I am thrilled with it. This book has so much in it that marks Reznikoff as a first-rate artist.
—William Carlos Williams

Mr. Reznikoff's work is remarkable and original in American literature. . . . He has written the first story of the Jewish immigrant that is not false.—Lionel Trilling

Emerson remarked that the best writers often have the shortest biographies. The genius “draws up the ladder after him,” and the world, which had consigned him to obscurity during his lifetime, “sees the works and asks in vain for a history.”
Whatever judgment may ultimately be passed upon him, not much more than his works is ever likely to be known of Charles Reznikoff. He left no fervent disciples. The record he wished to preserve is the one he made himself, but it is quite detailed, and will surely have to do for those readers who, treasuring his memory, might like to know more.
Reznikoff was born on 31 August 1894 in—as he himself called it—the Jewish ghetto of Brownsville, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, who are depicted in Family Chronicle (1963), were Sarah Yetta Wolvovsky Reznikoff and Nathan Reznikoff, both immigrant Jews who had recently come to the United States seeking refuge from the czarist pogroms of the 1880s.
The poet was named Ezekiel to honor his maternal grandfather, Ezekiel Wolvovsky, who had died sometime in the 1870s. As he told Reinhold Schiffer in 1974, his mother’s English was very limited, and her doctor, who attended his birth, was “a Jew, but an anarchist,” and had “no use for Jewish affairs, as anarchists wouldn’t.... At every great fast day, he gave a feast.” So when the poet’s mother told him she wanted to name him after her father, he said, “‘Well, what’s your father’s name?’ She said ‘Yehazqel,’ which in English is Ezekiel, the prophet. So he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘call him Charlie. He’ll be grateful to you.’ So all that is on my birth certificate and everywhere is Charles.” In Inscriptions he comments on the meaning of his names, in English and in Hebrew:

Because, the first born, I was not redeemed,

I belong to my Lord, not to myself or you:

by my name, in English, I am of His house,

one of the carles—a Charles, a churl;

and by my name in Hebrew which is Ezekiel

(whom God strengthened)

my strength, such as it is, is His.

According to family tradition, his grandfather Ezekiel had also been a poet who composed his songs while traveling around the Russian countryside with his wagon in search of a living. At his death, the manuscript of his work came into the hands of his widow, Hannah Wolvovsky, who was fearful that the writing might contain nihilistic and hence subversive sentiments dangerous to her family. She destroyed it. The destruction of his grandfather’s lifetime literary output haunted Charles Reznikoff, and he took it as a sign that he himself must see to it that his own work was printed even if there was neither public nor market for it, and that he must be sure not to leave any of it to the care of his family, friends, or executors. It is ironic, therefore, that as much as he published during his long life, he should have left perhaps his most interesting prose work, the novel which he mysteriously called The Manner “Music” (1977), neatly typed among his papers at his death, where it was discovered when these papers came into the hands of his last publisher, John Martin, of Black Sparrow Press.
While Reznikoff was still a boy, his paternal grandparents and other relatives, who had remained behind in Russia when his parents immigrated to America, came to live near them in New York. Reznikoff’s “Early History of a Writer,” in volume two of The Complete Poems (1977), emphasizes the frequency of his family’s moves around the city of New York, and its encounters with the ugly anti-Semitism in non-Jewish neighborhoods. These experiences contributed much to his feelings of insecurity and to his self-consciousness as a Jew. From Brownsville the family moved to Harlem, then to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and, by the time he was twelve years old, back to Brooklyn, but this time more than a mile away from the concentration of Jews in Brownsville. This neighborhood, as he wrote in “Early History of a Writer,” was “mainly laborers and clerks,” mostly cold-water flats without heat. “Among their children,” he wrote, “the hatred for Israel smoldered,” and any Jew unlucky enough for whatever reason (including following his business) to “blunder” into the neighborhood would, “likely as not, have a clod of mud or a couple of stones whizzing at his head.” The poet’s grandparents were, in that neighborhood, “the only Jews for blocks.” Here, the young Reznikoff would scurry home from high school so as to miss the other children getting out of grade school. Reading on the stoop or playing in the street, he was nevertheless the target of flung stones or garbage. Long afterward he remembered an undersized, red-faced Irish child of six or seven years passing back and forth in front of the house where Charles was sitting on the stoop.

and chanting at me with a tireless anger that surprised me

“Yid! Yid!”

The child’s sister, sixteen or so and home from her

job just then

egged him on.

hatred in her thin pallid face

and in the eyes that were too bright,

as if I were somehow to blame for her unhappiness.

There were more violent and traumatic incidents involving his grandfather and an uncle, and from them Reznikoff created vignettes that have the kind of salience that Wordsworth gave to some of his early experiences in The Prelude, which he subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind. In “Early History of a Writer” Reznikoff remembers walking with his grandfather through a public park on the East Side when two hooligans (“two strapping Germans—or were they Russians?”) decide to have some fun with the sickly looking undersized Jew “with a short grayish brown beard/ruffled by the cold wind.” Despite his grandfather’s attempts to avoid the confrontation, these fellows will not let him pass but playfully knock him down (showing off, they are “larking with a girl”); they send him “rolling on the pavement until the iron railing along the path stopped him.” His grandson helps him to his feet:

I asked my grandfather if he was hurt

and wanted to brush his coat with my palms,

for it was dirty;

but my grandfather would not stop,

and did not say a word

to those who had hurt him or to me.

Another experience which ended even worse took place at the conclusion of the evening prayers on the Day of Atonement, when his grandfather and his uncle were unexpectedly late in returning from the synagogue in Brownsville to which they had walked. Charles was worried and went out to meet them. He saw his grandfather coming down the street alone, tears streaming down his face, unable to answer “where’s uncle?” And his uncle appeared “without his new hat and the blood running down his face.” As they were passing a bar a little boy, encouraged by a gang of young ruffians, had brandished a stick at them. The uncle had taken the stick away, and some of the gang jumped the old man and sent him sprawling in the gutter. Charles blamed his uncle for going down that particular street; his father blamed him for taking the stick; and the uncle, trying to warm himself next to the stove, said not a word.

My grandmother was muttering that this country

was no better than Russia, after all;

and my parents and I felt ashamed,

as if somehow we were to blame,

and we tried to explain that what had happened was

unusual,

that only the neighborhood we lived in was like that,

and what a wonderful country this was—

that all our love for it and our praise

was not unmerited.

Such was the background which prepared him to write not only his long sequential poem Testimony: The United States, 1885-1915 (1934-1979), a bare and powerful record of human suffering and injustice, but also—during the last years of his life—his major poem Holocaust (1975). There can be no doubt that his direct and indirect observation of violence (and his sense of its perpetual immediacy) as a Jewish child in a hostile urban neighborhood lies behind the lifelong concern in much of his work with the continual possibility, potential, and actuality of violence between human beings. In that and indeed in much else—he embodies his time, and he voices the Jewish experience.
In his early years, Reznikoff was a precocious student. He finished grammar school at the age of eleven, three years ahead of the rest of his class, began writing verse when he was 13 or 14 years old, and graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn in 1909, when he was 15. He had looked forward to going to this intellectually demanding school as something of a relief from the society of his hostile neighborhood, but, as he recorded in “Early History of a Writer,” he was disappointed in his expectations:

It had seemed to me when I first saw the building

that I should be happy there.

The dislike of Jews, however, that was in certain

streets of Brooklyn,

was in the classroom, too;

and sometimes, when Jewish pupils forgot about it

or mistook some careless geniality for friendliness,

they suddenly found, like people who live over a geological fault,

how uncertain the ground was. 

In 1910, a year after his graduation from high school, Reznikoff left New York for the first extended period in his life, going to the newly established School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. His ambition had already been fixed upon becoming a writer. As he says in “Early History of a Writer,” in New York he had two friends—whom he calls Eugene and Gabriel—who had also decided to become writers. They would discuss poetry together,

especially the poetry of the new men—new to us—

Francis Thompson, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson.

This was not in our English course,

and Eugene and I felt superior because we read them,

and were proud of ourselves because we, too, were

writing verse,

and trying our hands at sonnets

and the French confectionery Austin Dobson—for

one—was good at.

On weekends, these three friends would explore the secondhand-book stalls and antiquarian bookshops on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan, seeking fresh discoveries modeled on the literary adventures and history they had read about: “for of course we knew that Rossetti or Swinburne had found the Rubaiyat/in just such a pile.” Sometimes, he and his friend Gabriel would attempt to meet certain literary challenges or to solve specific problems (such as writing a sonnet on a given theme in a limited period of time) which had become part of romantic history. “We knew that Keats and Leigh Hunt used to do that. / I had Gabriel choose the theme, / for this was to be a test of my skill in writing verse / as against his.” Even in those early days, Reznikoff was slow, thorough, perhaps in the eyes of others overscrupulous; overcareful. By the time he finished his sonnet (long after Gabriel, and long after the time had expired) it was twilight, “but there was still light enough to see what we had written./Gabriel’s sonnet was something fantastic,/which I did not care for; but he said that he liked mine/And, indeed, I liked it very much.”
The Missouri School of Journalism was not what Reznikoff had expected. Journalists, he discovered, were interested primarily in news and not in writing, while he himself was indifferent to what is generally called news and thought it unimportant compared to what could be made of it in writing. In the language of the man he never met but was soon to choose as his first literary instructor and model, Ezra Pound, Reznikoff’s real interest lay in “the news that stays news.” He would distinguish between journalism and literature by citing the familiar story of the old-fashioned newspaper editor instructing the fledgling reporter in how to find printable news by telling him that if a dog bites a man it is not news while if a man bites a dog it most emphatically is. Journalism is interested above all else in the unusual, the sensational, the improbable, the melodramatic. Literature, while it might include such things, can create something out of nothing through its style, its wit, its intelligence. Selection, unity, patient attention to detail, communication of feeling rather than mere facts were everything in literature. It must be devoid of pointless exaggeration or sentimentality as well. The same man might be both a working journalist and a literary artist, but these were different roles, and there was a world of difference between the results achieved.
Reznikoff returned to New York from the University of Missouri after one year and, after working for a year in his parents’ hat-manufacturing business, he entered the Law School of New York University in the fall of 1912. He had considered, for a time, taking a PhD in history and embarking on a life of scholarship and teaching, but, as he told Janet Sternburg and Alan Ziegler in 1973, “one day passing N.Y.U. Law School I remembered that Heine had studied law and Goethe had studied law, so that seemed to be fine. They only had two hours a day of studying and the rest of the day I’d be free. So I applied and was admitted. I was just 18 then.” Of course he became immersed in his studies: the two-hours-a-day of “case-book” instruction demanded six hours of preparation, and by the time he entered his third year he wanted to quit and get back to his writing: “But my folks wouldn’t hear of it—they said correctly that you’ve only got another year to finish.” In 1915 he earned his LLB degree, graduating second in his class; for the next year he took a few postgraduate courses in Law at Columbia University (and perhaps did some work in the family business), and in 1916 he was called to the Bar of the State of New York. He was 22 years old. He practiced law very briefly indeed: “I thought that a young lawyer would get little business, if any,” he told World Authors 1970-1975, “and if I did not work for another lawyer and just rented desk room I would have plenty of time for my own writing and, indeed, was soon at work at my verse at a desk.” When the United States entered World War I in 1917 he joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Columbia University, but the war was over before he got any training. The war may, however, have been the reason why he printed, on the press which he had installed in the basement of his parents’ home in Brooklyn,a small selection of his poems, which he called Rhythms. This little book appeared in 1918, and among the verses was “On One Whom the Germans Shot,” lines inspired by Ezra Pound’s memorial to his gifted friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, killed in battle in France in 1915:

How shall we mourn you who are spilled and wasted,

Gaudier-Brzeska,

sure that you would not die with your work unended,

as if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower?

When he reprinted the poem in 1920 he dropped the title, and in 1927 he dropped Gaudier-Brzeska name, but the remaining lines (which Zukofsky praised in the February 1931 “Objectivists’ Issue” of Poetry) are evidence of the thoughts of death which were haunting so many young men like Reznikoff during the war. His work, too, might be “unended,” Reznikoff felt, but he was determined that, unlike his maternal grandfather’s verse, it would not be unprinted. The book also contained the brilliant short poem beginning “I step into the fishy pool”—in 1918 titled “The Suicide”; in its pacing and sharp clarity of image, in its use of line breaks, it is characteristic of his most mature work. (In all later printings, that is from 1920 on, he wisely dropped the title, and indeed as a general rule from 1927 on Reznikoff left his poems untitled.) Reznikoff lived long enough to see this book of 23 poems, like others of his early works, bring high prices from rare-book dealers.
The training in law marked a decisive turn in his career. By his own account, he had learned to apply the methods of close reading of case books and judicial decisions he had acquired in law school to his own work and to the work of others. Under the sobering influence of the law, he learned to deflate his own romantic rhetoric and, in general, to become much more critical of both himself and others. In this way he acquired the habit, well worth his investment in his law education, of

prying sentences open to look at the exact meaning:

weighing words to choose only those that had meat

for my purpose

and throwing the rest away as empty shells.

He lost what literary self-complacency might have come with Harriet Monroe’s acceptance of two of his poems in her prestigious Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, published in Chicago, when his work was criticized by a friend “Al” (Al Lewin) who was studying Shakespeare with Kittredge at Harvard: “most, if not all, that had seemed good to me/now had the dead sound of a counterfeit coin/on his marble good sense.” In his newfound self-critical frame of mind he revised the poems, but Harriet Monroe rejected his revisions and offered some revisions of her own, which Reznikoff strongly disliked. In the end, he withdrew his poems from Poetry: “for the judgment of the editor ... /I had, by this time,/little respect,” and he determined on private publication, the form he would come to like best. What he learned from law and from Al Lewin, he wrote more than 50 years later in “Early History of a Writer,” was that

I, too, could scrutinize every word and phrase

as if in a document or the opinion of a judge

and listen, as well, for tones and overtones,

leaving only the pithy, the necessary, the clear and plain.

The law did more than chasten his style; it also appealed to his imagination as he reflected upon the contrast afforded between his quiet classroom and study and the noisy bustle of the street below, and the worry and noise of his parents’ shop; what he found was the abstract depersonalization of the language in law, and he was caught up in the play of reason underlying the anguish, the temper, the fear, anxiety, and pleasure of human endeavor:

all the blood—the heartache and the heartening—

gone out of the words

and only, as a pattern for thinking,

the cool bones of the judge’s reasoning.

Abjuring the deliquescent sentiments and soft, imprecise, impressionistic verbiage characteristic of much of the work of the mauve decade, which had once appealed to him and which he had tried to imitate, he now appreciated

the plain sunlight of the cases,

the sharp prose,

the forthright speech of the judges.

His great pleasure—he calls it “delightful” in “Early History of a Writer”—was in discovering how to puzzle through a judge’s reasoning and “drag the meaning out of the shell of words”: its great appeal was the appeal of “the clear waters of reason” and of using words for their clarity, not for their connotative value. So central did the bare statement of fact become, indeed, that he felt “no regret for the glittering words I had played with,”

and only pleasure to be working with ideas—

of rights and wrongs and their elements

and of justice between men in their intricate affairs.

His delight in the law, indeed, was a delight in the ideal he found it embodied, of rights for individuals, of redress for suffering, of sympathy and practical help for the oppressed and the wronged, all couched in an objective, impersonal, dispassionate, uncluttered and clear language, expressing clear principles. It is intimately (and intricately, perhaps) connected with his poetry. At the same time, his devotion to scholarship (and to the study of law, which he impatiently lost interest in because his impulse to write was so strong) indirectly reconnected him to his Jewish heritage which he, and his brother, had rejected as teenagers. Marie Syrkin, whom he married in 1930, has said that he saw his own position as poet and scholar in the light of “a long Jewish tradition according to which a true scholar might spend his days in pious study,” and that he “viewed his poetic avocation as a sacred study.” The idealization of the law can be seen in the eloquent conclusion of Rashi (first published in 1925 and collected in 1927), his little play about a medieval scholar and commentator on the Bible:

Jacob is like the stars

Which rise to their station,

Which the winds cannot blow away

Nor clouds extinguish.

But we become names upon gravestones and upon

books,

Our desire for the law an inheritance

Among our grandsons.

It was good to labor, and after labor

It was good to rest.

From 1918 on, he continued to write, and for a period he worked as a salesman for his parents’ hat-manufacturing business. By and large, however, his life was quiet and uneventful, for he was determined to dedicate his life to his writing. Living in New York almost without interruption, he worked as a free-lance writer, editor, and translator only enough to meet his modest needs and walked the streets and bridges of New York (in his early years as much as 20 miles a day, in his later years six). In his first novel, By the Waters of Manhattan (1930), he called walking “that sober dance which despite all the dances man knows, he dances most”; on his walks he always carried his small notebook to jot down lines that occurred to him, things that he saw.
In 1919 he printed on his press another selection of his poems, Rhythms II. It is not clear how much, if any, public attention these poems brought him; certainly neither of them was reviewed. That they caught at least one pair of eyes, however, is indicated by the fact that, in 1920, a volume of his poems appeared under modest but commercial auspices. The publisher was Samuel Roth, a bookseller who owned The Poetry Book Shop in Greenwich Village. In his 1930 memoir, Roth indicated that,despite his own admiration for Reznikoff’s poetry, the book’s sales were insignificant. Roth’s enthusiasm was expressed in hyperbolic terms: “I have for a long time been under the impression that in his way [Reznikoff] was doing the only fruitful literary work in America.... Indeed, he forms today, in my vision, a solitary lagoon on the vast empty sea of American literary enterprise....” Reviews were mixed. The Sunday Call, looking forward to a more substantial later collection, called the work “promising shavings”; Elias Lieberman, in the American Hebrew, called himself “a friendly critic” and the book “sordid, with the emphasis on the sore”; nevertheless, he said, “there is a wealth of memorable phrases and images in this volume”; the Dial gave it a brief but favorable mention, and all the reviews stressed the fragmentary nature of the book. Malcolm Cowley, in the New York Evening Post, attacked Reznikoff as “astigmatic. He is unable to focus, and lines of splendid verse are lost to sight among low heaps of rubbish,” but he also asserted that Reznikoff “has seen vision, and ... this, and not the ability to write perfect iambs, is the essence of a poet.” As the 1920s progressed, Reznikoff was increasingly able to publish his work in magazines such as the Menorah Journal, and New Palestine: in the early 1930s he would also be publishing in Contempo and Poetry.
The publication of Uriel Accosta: A Play, and a Fourth Group of Verse in 1921 was followed in 1922 by a collection of playlets, Chatterton, The Black Death, and Meriweather Lewis. The form of these, according to Reznikoff, was inspired by the example of the contemporary German expressionist drama being produced in the Weimar Republic, but especially the work of Georg Kaiser. In 1923 he published Coral, and Captive Israel: Two Plays, and in 1927, when he met Marie Syrkin, a struggling writer and editor who taught in a New York high school (she was a traditional poet), he was living on a regular allowance of $25 a week for his past labors for the family business, and was writing full-time. That year he published Nine Plays which collected the previously published plays and added three others (Abram in Egypt, Rashi, and Genests), in an edition of 400 copies. The plays, with such heroes as Chatterton, Uriel Accosta, Meriweather Lewis, and Rashi, fill only 113 pages of verse: one friend described them as “dramas with all the interesting parts left out”: all of his subjects are historical, and, as Tom Sharp has observed, explore “the difficulties of being true to oneself, one’s God, one’s family, one’s art, one’s country, and one’s fellow man.”
The year 1927 was fruitful for Reznikoff: in that year he also published Five Groups of Verse and By the Waters of Manhattan: An Annual, a book which he hoped would be the first of a yearly series. It is almost unclassifiable, for it contains a family memoir in prose which purports to be by his mother, but is in fact by Reznikoff, and a series of verse reworkings of Old Testament sources which he called “Editing and Glosses.” The book was seminal for Reznikoff, for in the prose he began a work which, after much revision and transformation, would become Family Chronicle (1963), and in the verse, he began an activity—the exploration and reworking of his Jewish and biblical heritage—which would occupy much of his later life (these are the works he called “Glosses”). In the Boston Evening Transcript for 3 July 1927 W.R.B. (perhaps William Rose Benét) commented that in Five Groups of Verse Reznikoff accurately portrays that “seared and disillusioned humanity which, rightly or not, we associate with the ghetto” and complained that all too frequently the poems lack development: “Most poets do not know when to leave off; by contrast, Mr. Reznikoff does not know when to go on!” Reviewers ignored By the Waters of Manhattan: An Annual.
In 1930 he married Marie Syrkin, who was supporting herself and her three-year-old son by teaching high school, a job she detested. Since her income, as she put it in her memoir of Charles, “just about covered my annual expenses” they agreed “lightheartedly that since he had enough income to meet his share—the $25 a week—we would set up housekeeping.” They were helped considerably in their plans to marry by Charles Boni’s publication of Reznikoff’s novel By the Waters of Manhattan (1930), with an introduction by the prominent anthologist and critic Louis Untermeyer. Reznikoff received $1,000 from Boni, but shortly after their marriage, in the Depression following the Wall Street crash, the Reznikoff family business failed, and Charles lost his $25-a-week allowance. Reznikoff was thus obliged, after his fruitful years as a full-time writer, to find a job, and he went to work for the publishing firm that produced Corpus Juris, which he described as “an encyclopedia of law for lawyers.” His job was to analyze law cases and summarize their essentials in a prescribed form. Although he used his legal training in this job, he seems at first to have found it as dispiriting as being a hat salesman (an experience he incorporated into his novel The Manner “Music” ), but eventually he found in this literary hackwork the materials he needed for Testimony. The challenge of combining his vocation with his avocation (to paraphrase Robert Frost) is described in these lines, which he wrote around that time:

After I had worked all day at what I earn my living.

I was tired. Now my work has lost another day

I thought, but began slowly,

and slowly my strength came back to me.

Surely the tide comes in twice a day.

The job took up so much of his energy and time that it was 1934 before he published any more books. It is, then, perhaps fortunate that the job failed, for he was too scrupulous in his work. Marie Syrkin records that one well-disposed supervisor admonished him that “when I hire a carpenter I don’t want a cabinet-maker,” and after a couple of years he was fired because he would not write up the cases fast enough or in proper legal jargon. By this time, however, his parents had settled their financial difficulties, and Charles could make enough money to meet his own needs in occasional free-lance work.
With the 1930 publication of his novel By the Waters of Manhattan he acquired something of a reputation as a writer, but once again, Reznikoff’s work failed to make a commercial impact (the great success that year, which made use in more sensational fashion of similar immigrant experience, was Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money), but it did score something of a succès d’estime. Leonard Ehrlich (the author of God’s Angry Man, a novel about John Brown) reviewed it favorably in the Saturday Review of Literature, and Lionel Trilling wrote in the Menorah Journal “Mr. Reznikoff’s work is remarkable and original in American literature,” and described his prose style as “of the greatest delicacy and distinction.”
By 1928, according to Mary Oppen’s Meaning: A Life (1978), Reznikoff had met fellow-poets Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, and by 1931 they had become known, with Carl Rakosi, as the principal members of the Objectivist group of poets. February 1931 saw the appearance of the well-known “Objectivist Issue” of Poetry, guest-edited by Louis Zukofsky at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. Zukofsky not only included poems by Reznikoff (his first appearance in Poetry) but made him the principal subject of his lengthy essay on “Sincerity and Objectification,” which set forth in somewhat cloudy language what Zukofsky saw as the theory of the new movement, and which singled out Reznikoff’s work for special praise. (Reznikoff himself suggested that the most accurate description of the group’s aims was the simple “writers publishing their own work.”) The so-called Objectivist Issue of Poetry (it was never officially or formally so titled) was followed up by Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932), which was published in France by George and Mary Oppen’s To, Publishers, a new venture which they hoped would be the vehicle not only for books by members of the group but also of major work by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, both members of the group’s “advisory board.” The Oppen’s venture failed, however (it did publish a book by Williams and a book by Pound, as well as Zukofsky’s anthology), and Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikoff (principally bank-rolled by Williams and with Zukofsky as treasurer and secretary and with the interested but geographically distant help of Carl Rakosi) set up the Objectivist Press, which was to be Reznikoff’s principal publisher for a brief but important period. In 1934 the Objectivist Press published three titles by Reznikoff: Testimony (a prose work), Jerusalem the Golden, and In Memoriam: 1933, and in 1936 it published his selection of poems, Separate Way. The year 1936 also saw Reznikoff print, on the press which was now in the basement of his sister’s house, the prose memoir Early History of a Sewing-Machine Operator, on which he collaborated closely with his father, Nathan. His sister’s basement, incidentally, became the warehouse for the books published by the Oppens in France. 
Testimony is a collection of sparse, brief prose narratives, drawn from law records; in his introduction to the book Kenneth Burke said that “in a direct style that frequently helps us to realize what Stendhal had in mind when expressing his enthusiasm for the Code Napoleon as a way of statement, he can contrive by a few hundred ‘factual’ words to stir our feelings and memories.” But the book got a mixed reception, as did Jerusalem the Golden. T.C. Wilson, in Poetry (September 1934), compared Reznikoff to Williams and found his poetry to be “essentially insignificant” because “what he sees he presents clearly and concisely. But he does not see enough”; Kenneth Alling, in Commonweal, said that Testimony offers “an inner revealment, ... something incisive and profound,” while Jerusalem the Golden has “in addition to ... clarity, also a mystical, clairvoyant quality.” Like other reviewers before them, both Wilson and Alling noted Reznikoff’s selectivity, arrangement of details, and extreme understatement, qualities which are characteristic of Reznikoff’s work throughout his career and which are particularly evident in his late and major works, based in part on what he learned in writing Testimony the two-volume Testimony: The United States, 1885-1915: Recitative and Holocaust.
In the years after he left Corpus Juris Reznikoff had worked as a free-lance editor, translator, and writer, producing an occasional article in order to get enough money to scrape by. On 12 February 1937 his mother died of cancer at the age of 68, and Reznikoff memorialized her in one of his most moving sequences, the eleven poems of “Kaddish,” dedicated “to the memory of Sarah Yetta Reznikoff” and published in Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down (1941). Some time shortly after her death (the date is not exactly clear) Reznikoff’s friend Al Lewin, a producer at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, employed Reznikoff as his personal assistant at a salary of $75 a week. Separated from Marie (who stayed behind in New York) he wrote to her frequently, sending her the poems he wrote while away. Some of these are collected in the sequence “Autobiography: Hollywood,” published in Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down. This, with his posthumously published novel The Manner “Music,” which he seems to have written during the 1950s, gives a vivid and poignant depiction of his West Coast experience. He stayed in Hollywood for a little less than three years (Marie spent two summers with him) and then returned to New York, where he went back to his life of free-lance writing.
Reznikoff would not publish another book of verse until 1959. In 1944 the Jewish Publication Society of America published his historical novel about medieval England’s expulsion of its Jewish population. The Lionhearted. The 1940s were not a happy period for the Reznikoffs—Marie and Charles slowly growing estranged, but neither wanting a divorce. The domestic dilemma was solved in 1950 when she got a job in the English department at the newly established Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Charles agreed to maintain the $60-a-month flat on 18th Street in Manhattan. They would henceforth spend most weekends and all holidays together in New York. Charles took on a number of projects that provided him with a living; the results of these activities include The Jews of Charleston: A History of an American Jewish Community (1950), on which he collaborated with Uriah Z. Engelman; his translation from the German of I.J. Benjamin’s account Three Years in America, 1859-1862 (1956); and an edition of the public papers of Louis Marshall (1957).
By the time the Louis Marshall papers were published, Marie Syrkin was editor of the Jewish Frontier, which she describes as “a Labor Zionist monthly with much ideology and little money.” As she put it in her brief memoir of Charles, “fortuitously, the only paid employee, the managing editor who ran the magazine in New York, left for richer pastures. My comrades agreed that ... Charles could be entrusted with the post just vacated. Fear of nepotism made me slash the original stipend radically, but eventually the $100 a week ... was restored.” Though he ated the work (he despised journalism), he was meticulous in its execution and in addition undertook to write the history of the Jewish community in Cleveland: while continually fretting over the time it took and the distraction it was from his poetry, Reznikoff nevertheless labored over this abortive project, eventually turning out, instead of the sociological and historical prose the project’s sponsors expected, disparate bits of more-or-less anecdotal information “in neat strips pasted in horizontal and vertical rows.”
In 1959 Reznikoff printed a book of poems called Inscriptions: 1944-1956, a collection of 59 poems arranged in seven untitled groups. The poem later titled “Te Deum” is thoroughly characteristic not simply of his mature lyrical work, but even of his earliest work at its best:

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.

The rhythms of these lines (which flow together naturally with their sense and are not determined mechanically by a metronome, in Pound’s phrase), the cunningly devised rhyme scheme (victories/breeze; sing/spring; none/done; able/table), the assonance of day’s and dais,and perhaps above all the rocklike democratic faith (shared with Whitman and Dickinson) that its human center is to be found everywhere and its circumference nowhere—all of these elements combine to make a poem memorable as an affirmation of the essential significance and importance of every single human life. It is this unshakable faith that Whitman called “the antiseptic of the soul,” and it is certainly the faith of Reznikoff: it informs and sweetens even his most seemingly bitter works.
In 1962 New Directions and the San Francisco Review jointly published a selection of Reznikoff’s previously published poetry under the by-then-familiar title By the Waters of Manhattan. Reviewing this volume for the Nation, Hayden Carruth, “captivated, enthralled, swept away.... Delighted, awed, roused,” said that “I cannot exaggerate the degree of my enthusiasm for this book” and commended it for the depth of its knowledge of New York and for the depth of its Jewishness. “When you buy this book,” he advised the Nation’s readers, “tear out the three pages of introduction by C.P. Snow.” For this book Reznikoff was awarded the Harry and Florence Kovner Memorial Award for poetry in English by the Jewish Book Council of America in 1963. In that year, too, he privately published Family Chronicle, which was republished in 1969 in England and in 1971 in New York with an introduction by Harry Golden. Family Chronicle, a memoir purportedly by Sarah Reznikoff (“Early History of a Seamstress”), Nathan Reznikoff (“Early History of a Sewing-Machine Operator”), and Reznikoff himself (“Needle Trade,” first published in part in Commentary in 1951), and heavily revised by Reznikoff after his parents’ death, is (in the words of Eric Homberger) “among the most vivid of memoirs from the lower East Side.” Along with The Manner “Music” and many of his poems, it testifies to the strong autobiographical impulse in Reznikoff and at the same time is an important document in the history of that generation of Jewish immigrants who entered the United States after 1880.
In 1965 New Directions published Testimony: The United States, 1885-1890: Recitative. Geoffrey Wolff in the Washington Post (9 November 1965) was impressed with the “muscularity of verbs” and Reznikoff’s “lyric sadness.” He called Testimony “as inevitable as the tale Cassandra foretold, and as moving, too,” but what other reviews there were were generally unfavorable. While calling the poem “unique in the history of American literature,” James Schevill judged in the San Francisco Chronicle that it is “dramatically too bare. The language becomes more sparse than illuminating.” William Dickey accused the book of “a very simplistic kind of moral perspective indeed,” and Hayden Carruth said that the “cold, neutral language” makes Testimony “uninteresting” and “lifeless.” New Directions as a result dropped its options on the sequel volumes and indeed on any of Reznikoff’s future works; he was thus driven to publish the second volume of Testimony: The United States, 1891-1900: Recitative himself, in 1968. The final installments, covering the period 1901-1915, did not appear until the posthumous publication of the complete edition in 1978-1979. Yet Testimony is, with Holocaust (1975), Reznikoff’s major work. Drawing on legal records of the various sections of the United States between the years 1885 and 1915 (Reznikoff said he had read “thousands” of such cases), the poem dispassionately, in a minimum of words, generally with all names and hence personality and individuality removed, records accident, injustice, disaster: Reznikoff’s great concern for man’s inhumanity to man, and for sheer ill-fortune, makes Testimony both a painful book to read and at the same time a profoundly moving assertion of human worth, dignity, nobility, and promise. With the exception of Holocaust, it has no parallel in American writing. As Elaine Feinstein wrote in the English journal PN Review “his training as a lawyer taught him there was a continuity in human suffering, and a terribly arbitrary quality in it.... Suffering is not only a question of violence; for Reznikoff it is often most deeply a matter of waste.”
In 1966 Marie Syrkin retired from Brandeis as Emeritus Professor, and the couple moved into the luxury of a 24th-floor apartment in Lincoln Towers in Manhattan: “we had a marvelous view of the Hudson,” she recalls, “air-conditioning, and a multitude of doormen.” Ironically enough, on an early morning walk along Riverside Drive soon after the move, he was attacked by two youths who blackjacked him unconsciousness: he lost his wallet, containing about a dollar, but his glasses were unbroken. After the stitches were removed and he resumed his habit of walking in the city, a major problem was where he could safely go: such diminution of his lifelong habit was an impoverishment he resented.
In 1969 he printed two collections of poetry which he published in one volume: By the Well of Living and Seeing, and The Fifth Book of the Maccabees and in 1971 Reznikoff received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1974 the Black Sparrow Press brought out his By the Well of Living & Seeing: New & Selected Poems, 1918-1973, and the following year Black Sparrow published Holocaust, a book which in some sense he had been preparing for all his career, though it was written at his wife’s urging. Adopting the techniques he had used so successfully in Testimony , Reznikoff mined the Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann Trial for a bare and appalling narrative of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. Though he had previously written frequently and movingly about Jewish history, in this book he would permit himself no subjective outcry: the record must speak for itself. As Daniel Lehman commented in Poetry (April 1976), “Reznikoff opens the mouth of suffering, and makes it quiver with the voice of survival, a voice capable of the real and tough affirmation implicit in the struggle not at all to sweeten up the story while making it ‘literature.’”
Holocaust was to be Reznikoff’s final stand as a moral witness, for, following a heart seizure at the apartment where he had dwelt with Marie for ten years, he died at St. Vincent’s hospital shortly before dawn the next morning, 22 January 1976. He was buried in the Old Mount Carmel Cemetery in Brooklyn, and a line from the opening section of “Heart and Clock” (1936) was incised on his tombstone: “... and the day’s brightness dwindles into stars.” The poem from which it is taken is especially apt as a memorial for a poet whose sense of his calling made him always conscious of the passage of time.

Now the sky begins to turn upon its hub—

the sun; each leaf revolves upon its stem;

now the plague of watches and of clocks nicks away

the day—

ten thousand steps

tread upon the dawn;

ten thousand wheels

cross and criss-cross the day

and leave their ruts across its brightness

the clocks

drip

in every room—

our lives are leaking from the places,

and the day’s brightness dwindles into stars.

Poems, 1918-1936, volume 1 of The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, in the press at the time of his death, was published later that year, and the next year Black Sparrow Press brought out Poems, 1937-1975, volume 2 of The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff and his novel The Manner “Music.” In 1978 and 1979 the complete version of Testimony: The United States, 1885-1915 was at last published, and only his plays remain uncollected.
Among Reznikoff’s papers at his death was found a 30 March 1948 letter from William Carlos Williams, who wrote: “A confession and an acknowledgement! In all the years that I have owned a book of yours, nineteen years! a book you gave me in 1929, I never so much as opened it—except to look at it cursorily. And now, during an illness, I have read it and I am thrilled with it and in this Flossie, who has read it also, gladly joins me. You know, of course, that it is By the Waters of Manhattan of which I am speaking. Why have you not gone on writing? Why do you not start again now? This book has so much in it that marks you as a first rate artist that it is shameful of you not to have persisted. It is not by any means too late.... I’m ashamed never to have read your book! It took an illness at that even now to make me do it. Such has been my life and I find that I was the loser for it not you—as too often happens when we are neglectful of others, we are the sufferers, not they....”
Of course, Reznikoff never did stop writing as Williams feared he had. Even when the world seemed completely unmindful of him, he went about the work which he had come to do. After Reznikoff’s death in 1976, the poet Robert Creeley could still write sensitively in a tone that is reminiscent of Williams’s: “One had not known, sadly, that Charles Reznikoff wrote novels. That a man should have such quiet and singular genius so modestly put aside (by himself) is regrettable. So much does shout at us, belligerently claiming attention for its style or its intelligence or its newness....” These words are from Creeley’s introduction to Reznikoff’s posthumously published novel The Manner “Music,” the tragic and triumphant tale of a composer to whose music, no one—not even his wife or his closest friend—had learned really to listen. It is a parable to end all others about the fate of modern art and modern literature. Oliver St. John Gogarty noted that the typical modern writer was doomed to go on talking to himself but that it was left for James Joyce to go one step further and to talk to himself in his sleep in Finnegans Wake. It is this problematical situation which concerns Reznikoff in his last fiction, written in prose embedded with striking imagist and objectivist poetry.
On the death of Yeats in 1939, Auden wrote that, when he dies, the poet becomes his admirers. That is what has now happened to Reznikoff. He is no longer driven by the compulsion to create. It is not up to him now; it is up to those who are left behind and who think that they may have deciphered something of the meaning which he strove faithfully to create. The magnitude of the response to Reznikoff’s death by at least one admiring reader may perhaps be indicated by the coupling of names which occurs in the title of a set of Allen Ginsberg’s verses in his Plutonium Ode. He calls them “After Whitman and Reznikoff.” - [Biography by Milton Hindus]           

The Poem as Documentary

Reznikoff is perhaps best known for his documentary work, especially his Testimony: The United States 1885-1890 which makes use of late 19th century legal cases to create a record of that particular period in American history. This kind of material often attracts criticism and rejection because it isn't poetic enough and it isn't original. I take the opposite view and I'll try to show why. Firstly, the current malaise that besets the Poem is in part due to the fact that the current output and poetry-related debates are far too poetic in that they are too full of verbal and technical devices to reach a wider audience than the privileged but introspective cogniscenti.

The other charge about originality demonstrates that our (readers, writers, poets, teachers) world is still stuck somewhere between Baudelaire and Auden with the tired and flabby image of the poet as some kind of magus awaiting inspiration in order to put some stunning truths down on the page. I am aware that this is part of the conceptual argument but I don't hold with most of that kind of material and I'm not claiming Reznikoff to be a forerunner of that particular tribe. I would also suggest that memroialisation, in all its forms is one of the things that poetry does well and that this aspect of Reznikoff's work does this very well indeed:

Blunt and his wife lived on a farm

six or so miles from town.

The quarrel was over a note that was due:

he did not have the money to pay it.

and asked her to sell her cows.

He asked her a couple of times,

and she said that if he asked again

she would hit him with the ax.

They were in the yard,

and he hit her with the water bucket.

He then went to the stable and watered the stock.

Coming back, he saw her lying by the well

and hit her again with the bucket.

The well was filled with snow - nearly to the top,

and there was blood in the snow.

The boys took a couple of shovels

and digging down

found clothing, shoes, and a pair of spectacles.

Then they saw the form of a foot,

and one of the boys reached down and felt it:

that was Mrs Blunt with her stockings on.

I need to confess that I occasionally produce documentary work based on evidence statements but I couldn't produce work of this quality. The selection of material, the absence of adjectives conveys the sense that a surprising amount of murders occur without pre-meditation and are usually about not very much. The last three lines, without any poetic conjuring, are poignant and create a lasting impression on this reader at least.

In a 1969 interview Reznikoff talked about this aspect of his work:

Still the facts have a function of their own--psychological, sociological, and perhaps even poetical. In Testimony the speakers whose words I use are all giving testimony about what they actually lived through. The testimony is that of a witness in court--not a statement of what he felt, but of what he saw or heard. What I wanted to do was to create by selection, arrangement, and the rhythm of the words used as a mood or feeling.

and:

It's not a complete picture of the United States at any time, by any means. It's only a part of what happened, a reality that I felt as a reader and could not portray adequately in any other way.

In another interview he said that he selcted material based on what moved him.

In terms of content, other critics have pointed out how, in many of the events, there is a massive gap between the relatively trivial argument and the outburst of extreme violence that follows. From my professional experience I can only report that this does tally with reality, even today. Most people do not intend to commit murder which usually occurs because an apparently random set of factors come together and the killing is done in immediate response to those, rather than from a planned attack. Most of these factors are usually, as in the case above, mundane and relatively trivial but the debt, the request to sell the cattle and the threat with the axe turn a brief series of events into a violent attack. What I'm trying to say is that most serious crimes are quite ordinary and are committed on impulse. Reznikoff is only mirrorring the norm.

Testimony doesn't just include violent incidents but also tackles racism, domestic problems and property disputes. This is the first poem in the Domestic Scenes sequence:

Van Nicely with his warmest smile -

bringing presents for the children -

said: "I have just come from Trenton";

unwrapped a bottle of whisky for Mr Jones

and gave Mrs Jones twenty-five dollars for Christmas;

after shaking hands with her and saying politely,

"How do you do?"

as if they had not seen each of for days

and the two of them

had not spent the afternoon together in New York.

So, an event without violence but with transgression just the same, Reznikoff takes the actions of the unfortunately named but dastardly Van Nicely to say something about complicity and deception. We are left to wonder whether the gift to Mr Brown is an attempt to buy his compliance or to allay any suspicions that he may have although the presents for the children would suggest the latter. Either way it's a particular slice of life that has run through millenia.

The Walk in the Park. The Mekas Touch

In 1990 the great documentary film maker Jonas Mekas made Walk a fifty-eight minute film of him walking around New York and commenting on the things he sees and passes by. The only competitor, in any art from, is Reznikoff who gets to the essence of that particular urbanic in an equally compelling way. By The Well of Living and Seeing starts with a walk in the park:

8

The pigeon saunters along the path-

towards me.

Will it turn aside?

Of course.

Not only Athena's owl

knows the history of man.

and:

11

You must not suppose

that all who live on Fifth Avenue

are happy: I have heard the gulls screaming

from the reservoir in Central Park.

So, these aren't violent or dramatic events, not the words, phrases of others but the mundane, the quotidian rendered as poetry. This has me cheering from the sidelines, this is what gives me some degree of hope for the future of the Poem precisely because it focuses on the things that make up our world, the things that we often miss in our rush to get by. Reznikoff uses the everyday to make serious, rather than profound, points as with the wisdom of less exalted beings than the owl and the assumptions we make about those with serious money. The walk continues:

20

The face of the old woman

sitting alone on a park bench

is suddenly flushed

and she begins to curse and scream.

I can understand the horns of the automobiles

screaming at each other

as they stream out of the park

into the crowded street;

but, sitting alone on a park bench,

at whom is she screaming?

My late teens were spent occasionally wandering the streets of London where the above was not an uncommon event, it's relatively rare now because in these enlightened times such people, esepcially in New York with its Zero Tolerance moronity, are taken into police custody, if they make a fuss about this they are heading for prison, if not then some time in hospital or residential care. This has got me to thinking that leaving such people alone was perhaps the better option rather than what's laughably referred to as care in the community- I speak as an ex-regulator of this kind of 'care'.

The question at the end of the above is ambiguous, it's both rhetorical and pointed, the first response is that she's screaming at nothing and no-one, the second might be that she's screaming at the (to her) very real demons in her head and, by extension, at the world at large. I'll readily admit that I have some interest in her screams as I'm also a mad (bipolar) person but nevertheless it's still an astute piece of compressed precision.

I now what to digress briefly into matters theoretical because it strikes me that this might be the sort of thing that Henri Lefebvre was talking about in his work on urban space and the everyday and what's currently described as 'psychogeography'. I'm not by any means suggesting that Reznikoff was aware of Lefebvre's work, although By the Well wasn't published until 1969, but some of the affinities are quite striking. This may, of course be wishful thinking on my part.

Part II of By the Well contains mostly longer poems, these are two of my favourites:

6

The beggar was making his rounds:

a sturdy fellow in his thirties;

blond hair, carefully combed,

blue eyes in a square German or Slave face;

but the sooty look of people who cannot wash regularly.

I never gave him anything

and always looked at him coldly,

and pretty soon he stopped asking me.

One afternoon crossing a driveway

leading into the park - the green light with me -

an automobile shot out of the traffic

Past my face.

I looked after it startled and angry -

and kept on walking.

Suddenly I heard a voice, just behind me, saying sharply,

"Stop!"

I stood stock-still

and another car whizzed past:

I might have been killed

if I had not stopped.

I turned to see who had spoken

out of a common humanity:

it was the beggar,

and he walked on before I could even thank him.

The two things that this triggers off is something Rorty said about a wrong being not doing someone a good turn when this would cost you very little and what Levinas said about evil being our personal 'self-interest'. In this particular case, the beggar goes out of his way to do something good that costs him nothing and the poet is the one whose 'cold look' belies self-interest. I'm now aware that I always walk past the Big Issue seller outside the local supermatket but I like to think that, for today at least, this negligence is balanced by getting something from a shelf that the shop assistant needed but couldn't quite reach.

This is a bit less dramatic:

29

In the street, nine stories below, the horn of an automobile out of order

began sounding its loudest

steadily - without having to stop for breath.

We tried to keep on talking

in spite of that unceasing scream;

raised our voices somewhat, no longer calm and serene.

Our civilization was somewhat out of order, it seemed.

But, just as we began to knit our brows,

tighten our jaws, twist our lips,

the noise stopped;

and we dipped our heads,

like ducks on a stream, into the cool silence,

and talked again quietly, smiling at each other.

Lyrical, intelligent and refreshingly ordinary and human. At first glance it's a trivial moment until you realise that silence in our modern conurbations are always overwhelmed by the droning shout of traffic. It's one of those universal urban incursions to our senses that is ignored as a small price to pay for the convenience of the car. A car alarm feels like a violation into my world, as if I can't do or think anything until that blaring has come to a halt. I could rant on about this from many different angles for a long time but Renzikoff makes the same point much more effectively in thirteen seemingly innocuous lines- the image of the ducks cooling themselves in the stream is exceptionally effective.

A provisional conclusion.

I hope I've shown in this initial overview that Reznikoff is an important poet who deserves much more readerly attention than he currently gets. I also hope I've dealt with some of the more outlandish snobberies about the documentary poem and shown how this kind of work is essential to the future of the Poem. Next time I'm going to deal with Reznikoff's autobiographical work and his material based on the Old Testament.

http://www.arduity.com/poets/reznikoff/index.html