1Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) is usually associated with Louis Zukofsky’s endeavours to launch an “Objectivist” group in the 1930s and by the same token, his work is often assumed to fall under the sphere of influence of Zukofsky’s mentor, Ezra Pound. It can be argued that Pound’s charting poetic space to include free verse initially fuels Reznikoff’s investigation of hybrid verse forms that interweave prose and poetry. However, the manner in which Reznikoff brings free verse to bear upon poetic rhythm demonstrates how he builds upon Pound’s example to arrive at a distinctive poetics of his own. Specifically, Pound’s vision of poetry of the future as a vast orchestration of verse will be shown to share resonances with Reznikoff’s compositional processes. This I will strive to show is tied in with Reznikoff’s subsequent exploration of the modern long poem in his major poetic work Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative.
- 1 The following abbreviation of the title of Reznikoff's major poetic work Testimony: The United Sta (...)
- 2 A brief overview of Testimony: Recitative's publication history provides a clear indication of Rez (...)
- 3 Also completed in the 1970s, Louis Zukofsky's "A" (1978) or works from younger poets such as Allen (...)
- 4 This is a reference to Pound's collection of essays, Impact. Essays on Ignorance and the Decline o (...)
2The methodological underpinnings of Testimony: Recitative1 originated in the 1930s when Reznikoff first started using court room proceedings as the material grounds upon which he builds his poetics.2 Over the next forty odd years, this would entail scrupulously drawing from thousands of pages of legal documents fragments of print recorded by judges from across the United States. Specifically, Reznikoff borrowed from the Reporter Series, a nationwide encyclopaedic reference for lawyers, which documents court decisions held up as cases of jurisprudence. By selecting from within the contents of these trials, including testimony from witnesses as well as judges’ decisions and lawyers’ pleas, Reznikoff displaces historical reality and invests it with poetic purpose. In this sense, his work falls within the scope of other twentieth-century Ameri-can long poems grappling with what Pound calls “National Culture” (in 1938).3 To borrow again from Pound’s vocabulary, Reznikoff’s work raises the follow-ing issue: what “impact”4do poetics have on the transmission of a historical past? How for instance does the poet account for “America” as a historical entity?
- 5 In "Pound, Whitman and the American EpicTransmission," Eric Mottram discusses models of epic poetr (...)
3Pound’s treatment of historical material in the Cantos, described byChristine Froula as the “struggle of transforming the traditional model of epic -authority, transcendent and absolute, into a human and historical one”‑(2), aid the groundwork for Reznikoff’s efforts to poetically reconstitute the past into the -present. Fundamentally, however, Reznikoff’s interest in Pound’s renewal of the epic is tied to what this “struggle” entailed at the very outset when Pound began questioning another mode of authority, the official verse form, the iambic pentameter. For if we view Pound’s reactions to epic and metric authority, the move towards a modern epic form can be seen as being largely dependent upon the disruption of traditional epic verse.5 In this respect, Pound’s involvement in the debate over free verse has farther reaching implications than what his legacy as a polemicist suggests. In fact, if we look beyond some of the more controversial statements that crop up in Pound’s critical writings or the oft quoted “Canto LXXXI,” “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” Pound’s plea for alternative systems of measuring verse can be read as part of his endeavour to write a modern long poem as he said, “including history” (“Date Line” MIN 19).
- 6 Respectively, I'm referring to Marjorie Perloff's collection of essays, Poetic License: Essays on (...)
- 7 Cf. Contact 1.2 (May 1932) 100-108 and 1.1 (Feb 1932) 14-34.
4In light of what formal innovations this gave rise to—fragmentation, paratac-tical juxtaposition, palimpest, ellipsis—that is to say if we look at the specifics, Reznikoff’s connection to the Pound tradition becomes more problematic. Critics Marjorie Perloff and Michael Bernstein6 point to Pound’s inclusion of social, political, historical and economic realities as one of his most -influential innovations for poetry. While Louis Zukofsky’s “A” or William Carlos Williams’ Paterson refer back to Pound’s use of collage for example, Reznikoff’s -recovery of these “realities” implies a more radical displacing of historical and tradition-ally unpoetic material. Reznikoff doesn’t merely borrow fragments from the Reporter Series, his verse is entirely imbued with the language of the court proceedings. Reznikoff makes this clear as early on as 1932 when initial prose versions foreshadowing the Testimony poems of the later years were published in the magazine Contact. To quote the foreword published in the February issue: “I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases—not a great many as law reports go—and found almost all that follows. I am indebted to the reporters and judges not only for the facts but for phrases and sentence.”7
- 8 "Editing and Glosses" was published in Charles Boni's 1929 publication: By the Waters of Manhattan (...)
- 9 According to Barry Ahearn, the editor of Pound/Zukofsky—Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Z (...)
- 10 An "Objectivists"Anthology, edited by Louis Zukofsky and published by To Publishers in 1932 includ (...)
5Reznikoff’s reluctance to engage on this level with literary conventions, in conjunction with his abandonment of collage structures relevant in other modernist long poems, helps explain what led the poet and critic Charles Bernstein to write: “Pound’s disinterest in Reznikoff is foundational” (9). Indeed, there is reason to believe that Pound considered Reznikoff a minor poet. In a letter of November 22, 1929, Zukofsky had sent Pound a selection of Reznikoff’s work, including three plays, poems from Editing and Glosses (1929), Five Groups of Verse (1927) and an extract which Reznikoff had translated and adapted from his mother’s memoirs, “Early History of a Seamstress.”8Pound’s response in a letter of December 9, 1929 shows little real enthousiasm: “The Reznikoff prose very good as far as I’ve got at breakfast” (26). In a similarly lukewarm vein, Pound’s advice to Zukosky while he was preparing the February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine was to edit his essay on Reznikoff, “Sincerity and Objecti-fication with Special Reference to Charles Reznikoff,” arguing that it was “too long and wd. overbalance the whole number and chuck it out of proportion.” (28 October 1930, 55). As it turned out, it was Pound who proofread and was largely responsible for the paring down of the essay Zukofsky adjoined to his “Program ‘Objectivist’ 1931.” Two years later, when Pound was compiling work for his Active Anthology, he ruled out including Reznikoff’s poetry on the grounds that it was reminiscent of his own early work. In fact, two letters addressed to Zukofsky at this time leave no doubt as to Pound’s dismissal of Reznikoff. For instance, in February 1933 he writes a caustic response to Zukofsky’s -prodding: “Basil Bunting seems to think that Reznikof is some good??? any piece d’évi-dence?” (February 1933, 143). Later in the same year, Pound is more explicitly critical, relegating Reznikoff to the rank of an unworthy disciple who is unable to improve on the model Pound believes his early work represents: “The Rezni-koff will appear to the Brit. reader a mere imitation of me, and they will howl that I am merely printin my followers. It is I think just as good as parts of Lustra, neither better nor worse. Very cleanly done but no advance in methodology. (in most of it.)” (April 1933, 144).9 Thanks to Zukofsky however, Reznikoff and Pound eventually became involved in a group project in which the latter’s censorship of the younger poet had little bearing.10 In fact, when Zukofsky’s plans to set up a writer’s syndicate began to receive support in 1933 from George and Mary Oppen, Zukofsky urged Pound to get involved in the project as a partner along with William Carlos Williams and Reznikoff. Pound accepted and shortly after, “Writers Extant,” the original name of the syndicate, was changed to “The Objectivist Press.” It is interesting to note that in 1934, aside from Pound’s ABC of Reading, the Press released three works by Reznikoff: Jerusalem the Golden, In Memoriam: 1933 and the prose volume Testimony.
6Despite the disparities—particularly in terms of how each poet contrives to build narrative patternings in the modernist long poem—over the course of his life, Reznikoff repeatedly acknowledged a debt to Ezra Pound. His avowed admiration for Pound is less puzzling if we consider that he is more interested in Pound’s poetics than in his poetry. For example, the 1997 publication of Reznikoff’s Selected Letters by Black Sparrow Press reveals what he thought of the Cantos. In 1933 he wrote in a letter to his friend Albert Lewin: “As for Pound, I read the cantos with care, and found the first, a translation of a Latin transla-tion of the Greek, excellent, the second, a translation from Ovid, I believe, good, and the rest more or less a failure, except for a small part from the Cid” (200).
7The paucity of the above appraisal is in keeping with one prevailing feature of Reznikoff’s corpus, namely the scarcity of critical writings and comment with regards to his contemporaries’ work. Similarly, the matter of Ezra Pound’s legacy is only briefly addressed in the latter half of his life. In fact, for the most part, any comments Reznikoff made pertaining to his craft were recorded in a handful of interviews he gave near the end of his life. It is noteworthy that in all of these interviews Reznikoff speaks of Pound’s influence. In the first interview, dating back to 1969, Reznikoff simply refers to Pound as the -mentor he had discovered through Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine: “We picked the name ‘Objectivist’ because we had all read Poetry of Chicago and we agreed completely with all that Pound was saying. […] I think we all agreed that the term “objectivism,” as we understood Pound’s use of it, corresponded to the way we felt poetry should be written” (“A Talk with L.S. Dembo” Hindus 101). In the 1970s, however, we come closer to understanding how Pound’s involvement in the debate over free verse enlarges upon, from Reznikoff’s perspective, problems pertaining to the poet’s freedom to interpret rhythm outside the constraints of a set metric structure. For instance, in a 1974 interview, Reznikoff alludes to the makings of a hybrid style of writing, which for him, meant -testing the boundaries between prose and poetry. He calls it “free verse” at this time and pays homage to the role Ezra Pound played as a promoter of free verse:
When I began to write, rather seriously, I wrote in prose. I was dissatisfied with prose: it didn’t have the emphatic music that I wanted, which I found in free verse. Now, if we reverse it, and say “reverse” (I don’t mean that as a pun!), but if we reverse it, people would say, “Yes, and he’s still writing prose!” And maybe they don’t feel the rhythm, the stops. You stop, you break it up, you reverse it in the middle, as I said, comparing it to the turn in the dance, instead of walking straight on. Anyway, I found it more effective. That’s why I think that one should be so grateful, I am anyway, to Pound, and what he achieved. (“The Poet in His Milieu, Charles Reznikoff and Reinhold Schiffer” Hindus 115)
8In a 1973 interview, Reznikoff identifies what he believed to be Pound’s -greatest achievement, namely his recovery of past traditions of verse without meter:
- 11 This interview was videotaped in 1973 and originally published in the summer of 1976 in the journa (...)
I think that what influenced Pound particularly were the French writers of free verse at that time. Of course free verse in a sense goes all the way back to the Anglo-Saxons, who had no meter whatever. It goes back, too, I’ve read, to the King James version of the Songs, which also have no meter. Pound simply came to what other people had concluded perhaps thousands of years before he did. (“A Conversation With Charles Reznikoff, Janet Sternburg and Alan Ziegler” Hindus 131)11
- 12 Over the years poets and critics have undertaken to underline how erroneous this analogy is. I am (...)
9With these interviews in mind, it seems that Reznikoff believed that Pound’s involvement in the debate over free verse had provided impetus to the development of his own poetics. These comments are of course retrospective if we consider that he is referring to issues which Pound raised in his early critical writings. In particular, Reznikoff appears to be receptive to Pound’s likening musical structure to rhythmical structure in poetry.12 For example, Pound’s 1913 essay “The Serious Artist,” demonstrates how the move away from -single systems belonging to individual languages and cultures is construed as a means to arrive at communicating emotion:
- 13 "The Serious Artist" was published in the Egoist in 1913.
You begin with the yeowl and the bark, and you develop into the dance and into the music, and into music with words, and finally into words with music, and finally into words with a vague adumbration of music, words suggestive of music, words measured, or words in a rhythm that preserves some accurate trait of the emotive impression, or of the sheer character of the fostering or parental emotion.13 (195)
- 14 The full quotation from ABC of Reading (1934) reads as follows: "The author's conviction on this d (...)
10In this sense, “music,” as perceived in the rhythm of the poetry is thought to be a gauge of the poet’s freedom. This analogy, which Pound sustains throughout his early criticism, clearly had a lasting influence on Reznikoff. In First, There is the Need, a manuscript of critical notes found after Reznikoff’s death, the poet refers to arguments which Pound had made nearly forty years earlier. Quoting from ABC of Reading,14 Reznikoff explains for instance that “music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance, and poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from the music” (6). What is striking is how “music,” as Pound portrays it, comes to encompass and stand for the qualities for which the modern poet is expected to strive. Freedom from a set metric structure is seen as enabling the poet to run the gambit of his emotions and contrive to engender words “suggestive of music.”
11Anyone familiar with Testimony: Recitative might wonder what poems recounting episodes of social crime and injustice at the turn of the twentieth century have to do with music. However, an analogy provided by Pounds sheds light on how Reznikoff’s understanding of music lends itself to a poetic telling of violence and suffering. In an early essay entitled “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1912), Pound’s metaphorical casting of the poet of the future as a “composer” applies very well to the role Reznikoff assumed as he recovered American jurisprudence: “English is made up of Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon, and it is probable that all these systems concern us. It is not beyond the pales of possibility that English verse of the future will be a sort of orchestration taking account of all these systems” (SP 33). In light of what Reznikoff accomplished in the volumes of Testimony, it can be argued that his poetics oversteps Pound’s vision of the future of poetry as a combination of heterogeneous systems. For what Reznikoff “orchestrates” is a vast array of language having no grounding whatsoever in any literary culture. Instead, Reznikoff’s orchestration involves a mapping out of documents which record testimony heard throughout the country, from east to west, and north to south. In other words, “The United States (1885-1915)” takes shape as a gathering or grouping of anonymous voices recovered from its past. Therefore, the interpretative -ability of the poet, which Pound speaks of in “A Retrospect,” means availing of the freedom to displace the language of the courts to the poem, to recast the language recorded in the American judicial system.
12In the comparison which follows, between the Reporter Series and Testimony: Recitative, I take as my example a poem that reveals marginalized detail as it is conveyed through a mingling of voices, a combination of provisional identities ordered by the poet:
13The case recorded as “State v. Madison” in the Reporter Series tells the circumstances of the murder of Peter Suader, one of four African-American coalminers. The crime as related in the court proceedings is representative of the unequivocal grisly violence of many of the episodes taken by Reznikoff from America’s collective past. However, besides the actual slaying of the victim, what the poet chooses to foreground are the outward signs of identity as expressed through legal discourse, including testimony from the individual witnesses. From the outset, for Reznikoff, this implies the dismantling of the legal archive as he displaces fragments of language. Part of the synthesis outlin-ing the context of the crime, which is written by the judge appointed to the trial, is fragmented and carried over to the first line of the poem: “Four colored coal miners roomed in a shanty together,—the prisoner, the deceased, and Charles and Joe Jordan.” In lines 7-10, first person testimony, as distinct from the third person voice of the overruling authority, the judge, is transferred to the poem. Similarly, the contents of a letter written by one of the protagonists is reiterated in lines 18-19 and again in line 21. On the other hand, Reznikoff also plays with different forms of enunciation, as, for example, when he represents the reported speech of the judge taken from the legal document as direct speech in the poem (l.‑6): “I am feeding the bread to the hogs.” Finally, the discrepancies between the final lines of the legal extract and those of the poem display how Reznikoff is disrupting, undoing the third person account provided by the court. Specifically, the poet removes the language reflecting the moral stance of the judge (“helpless,” “darkness”) and which is used to underline the guilt of the accused. Accordingly, the poem pares down the language of the court just as it releases the protagonists from the third person summary of their deeds. What remains is a spare account of the crime that urges us to focus on the disclosure of testimony—the fragments of voice retrieved from the document. From the mass of the legal archive, Reznikoff extricates a provisional sounding of identity, both individual and historical.
- 15 "A Retrospect" reprints "Credo," which was first published with "Prologomena" in Poetry Review I 2 (...)
14In 1912, Pound claimed that a “man’s rhythm must be interpretative,” judging that “it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounter-feitable” (LE 9).15 Reznikoff’s Testimony: Recitative appears to demonstrate how completely a poet may act as an interpreter. For by recovering voice and the rhythms they carry, Reznikoff arrives at an orchestration of language which is his own rendering of the past as he had read it and given to others to hear. Reznikoff’s testament, the poetry of recitative, enacts the retelling of voice bound to a historical and a judicial context. This interweaving of voice and multiple discourse is perhaps the “piece d’évidence” that Pound was looking for in 1933.
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