The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff: Vol. 1, 1918-1936

Charles Reznikoff Revisited

I learned of the poems of Charles Reznikoff (1894 -- 1976) through an article by Robert Alter titled "Poet of Exile" in the February 1977 issue of "Commentary." Alter described the life and work of this poet who never left the United States and with the exception of three years in Hollywood and one year's education in journalism seldom left New York City. Alter described the three matrices of Reznikoff's writing from beginning to end as "New York, the Jews, and America." Alter's article and Reznikoff fascinated me, and I purchased from an independent bookstore, still common at the time, the two volumes of Reznikoff's "Complete Poems" edited by Seamus Cooney (1933 -- 2023) and published by Black Sparrow Press. At the time, Black Sparrow Press was an independent California publisher noted for publishing the works of deserving writers who were largely ignored by the mainstream. The most famous Black Sparrow writer was Charles Bukowski. I read the Reznikoff Black Sparrow volumes at the time and still treasure them. Black Sparrow was eventually sold, and items from its catalogue are still published under its name.

Reznikoff was born to immigrant Jewish parents and lived when young in Brooklyn and Manhattan. He was a solitary young person who wrote poetry and studied journalism for one year in Missouri before attending law school in New York City. He never practiced law, but legal studies made an indelible imprint on his writing. After drifting and working as a salesman in his father's business, Reznikoff devoted himself to writing. He self-published many volumes of his short poetry, and printed many of these volumes himself.

Reznikoff's works include the short poems I am reviewing here, a two volume poem called "Testimony" and a late single volume poem "Holocaust". Reznikoff also wrote novels, including the autobiographical "By the Waters of Manhattan" and the posthumously published "The Manner Music" as well as other writings.

Reznikoff was part of the Objectivist school of 20th Century American poetry, together with Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, W.C. Williams, Carl Rakosi, and others. Louis Zukofsky saw the traits of objectivist poetry as treating the poem as an independent object, sincerity, and depiction of a particular aspect of the world. Reznikoff was his paradigm of an objectivist poet. The generalization still should be used with caution. Many of Reznikoff's poems are autobiographical. And there is a heavy sense of things left unsaid in many of his poems.

Reznikoff was throughout his life a walker in the streets, parks,subways, and buildings of New York City. He wrote many one or two line poems that capture a moment of observation, such as the following poem, much admired by the objectivist poet George Oppen.

"Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
a girder, still itself among the rubbish."

Reznikoff also wrote vignettes describing people he knew and people he met during his life of city walking. These are also largely New York City poems. Then, Reznikoff became increasingly attracted to Jewish themes and wrote many poems about Judaism, his religious search, and about Jewish history and Scripture. These poems tend to be longer. Robert Alter regards them as, on the whole, less successful than the shorter New York City poems. Reznikoff was a secular American who struggled with and who learned from his Judaism.

The first of the two Black Sparrow volumes includes nine short books Reznikoff self-published between 1918 --1936, including the evocatively named collection "Jerusalem the Golden" (1934), which includes the short poem quoted above. Here is another, somewhat atypical poem from the collection titled "Spinoza" that celebrates this great philosopher.

"He is the stars,
multitudinous as the drops of rain,
and the worm at our feet,
leaving only a blot on the stone;
except God there is nothing.

Go neither hates nor loves, has neither pleasure nor pain;
were God to hate or love, He would not be God;
He is not a hero to fight our enemies,
nor like a king to be angry or pleased at us,
nor even a father to give us our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses;
nothing is but as He wishes,
nothing was but as he willed it;
as He wills it, so it will be."

Volume two includes four collections of poems Reznikoff published between 1937 and 1975, together with an uncollected group of "Last Poems". The collection "By the Well of Living and Seeing" includes a lengthy autobiographical poem, "Early History of a Writer". The collection "Inscriptions" includes a section called "Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays". Here is the concluding stanza of the poem, "Day of Atonement".

"Now, as from the dead, I revisit the earth and delight
in the sky and hear again
the noise of the city and see
earth's marvelous creatures -men.
Out of nothing I became a being,
and from a being I shall be
nothing-- but until then
I rejoice, a mote in Your world,
a spark in Your seeing."

And here is a short selection from a poem in the 1941 collection "Going to and Fro and Walking Up and Down:"

"It is not to be bought for a penny
in the candy store, nor picked
from the bushes in the park. It may be found, perhaps,
in the ashes on the distant lots,
among the rusting cans and Jimpson weeds.
If you wish to eat fish freely,
cucumbers and melons,
you should have stayed in Egypt."

I have lived with and revisited Reznikoff's poetry many times since discovering his work in the 1970s. He is a writer who speaks immediately to me and who will, perhaps speak to others.. I was fortunate to read the "Complete Poems" again and to share thoughts with other readers.

Robin Friedman