Charles Reznikoff Research Articles

Dark Poetry and the Anti-Elegiac: Approaching the Unspeakable

Abstract: Dark Tourism is a term associated with pilgrimages to places associated with the famous dead. "Dark Poetry" attempts to imagine, explore, or reanimate a dark event. Using Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust poetry and Mariko Nagai's collection, Irradiated Cities (2017) as examples, we discuss dark poetry's use of an anti-elegiac mode, which focuses on historical particularities in refashioning and problematizing dark events while employing numerous gaps and fragmentations. This poetry, often written by second-generation and non-survivor poets, approaches notions of the ineffable while providing an important bridge between incomprehensible events and the human imagination, and challenging language's capacity to comprehend the "unspeakable."

Going To and Fro and Walking Up and DownMeets “I Do This, I Do That”: Reconnecting Charles Reznikoff and Frank O’Hara

AbstractThe poems of Objectivist Charles Reznikoff and the New York School’s Frank O’Hara insist that marginalized experiences—both their own and others’—belong in America’s public spaces and discourse. Reznikoff records New York’s streets as the Jewish child of immigrants in collections including Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down (1941), while O’Hara records these streets from a queer experience in his famous “I do this, I do that” poems. There is limited scholarship connecting these poets, however, because the categorization of Objectivists as second-wave Imagists—and the resulting erasure of their Jewish heritage—has inhibited their inclusion in postmodern discourse. Repositioning Objectivists as postmodern forerunners reveals what’s concealed when poets are separated too insistently into different avant-garde “schools.” This article argues that the Judaism of Objectivist writers is a liminal lens through which to explore the New York School’s queerness and vice versa. This comparative examination of the walking poems of Reznikoff and O’Hara constructs new avenues for exploring the urban poetics of outsiders in experimental poetry by reading across and not just through minority experiences.

Corporate Persons, Collective Responsibility, and the Literary Imagination

This essay examines the contributions of Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2021) to our understanding of the historical development and philosophical underpinning of United States corporate law as well as to broader studies of law and literature. The first part of the essay considers Siraganian’s analysis of problems related to corporate agency, intention, and responsibility. The second part considers the book’s implications for other types of collective social entities. In particular, the essay reads Ida Fink’s The Table (1970) and Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975) through the lens of Siraganian’s study, examining their treatment of the challenges posed by the collective nature of the Nazi genocide. The essay suggests that Siraganian’s book not only offers strikingly new insights about modern literature, thought, and culture but also gives us the resources to think better about corporate accountability broadly conceived.

Charles Reznikoff's Testimony of the Dead

Charles Reznikoff assembles Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative from three decades of court witness reports. Stemming from his legal experience and his family history of loss, Reznikoff's methods of constructing Testimony, as archived in his notes, drafts, and correspondence, illuminate the work as his literary form of Kaddish, the mourner's prayer in Judaism. The poetic volumes express mourning for the lives he encounters in court documents: suppressed, recurring narratives, emblematic of the country's political and socioeconomic conditions. As the past resonates through Reznikoff's verse, the poetry's formal qualities stimulate grief in present audiences. Testimony takes readers through a process of mourning across time: listening to the lost voices of the dead, grieving the accumulated losses, and moving forward with a desire to remedy past injustices—bearing losses of the past to feel the urgency of a more just future.

A Source Which Is Also a Translation: Toward an Expanded- Yiddish Poetics, with Special Reference to Charles Bernstein

Abstract The present essay contextualizes the poet, scholar, editor, and translator Charles Bernstein (b. 1950), as an artist and practitioner working within a speculative translingual (language-crossing) field and tradition of expanded Yiddish. Reading Bernstein in relation to other expanded-Yiddish figures, such as his elders, Hannah Weiner (1928–77) and Jerome Rothenberg (b. 1931), and ancestor, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), among others, this essay makes a case for Bernstein as a writer who works from a position of antinomian Jewish translational originlessness, and a diasporic poetics of “need” (à la Charles Reznikoff), in which every source can be understood as a translation and every translation might be treated as a potential source. The coda of the essay addresses the stakes of Bernstein's praxes from the perspective of widespread modern and contemporary anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred and concludes with the first ever translation of Bernstein's poetry into Yiddish proper.

Sawako Nakayasu Eats Sagawa Chika: Translation, Poetry, and (Post)Modernism

ABSTRACT This article examines the works of modernist poet Sagawa Chika (1911–1936) and her translator Sawako Nakayasu (b.1975), analyzing how they both intersect translation and creation, problematizing issues of gender. Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats color (2011) is a collection mixing English, Japanese, French, and Spanish ‘translations, anti-translations, and originals’, which have as a starting point Sagawa Chika’s poems. I first discuss Sagawa’s work translating writers such as James Joyce, Charles Reznikoff, and others, focusing on the way in which she develops a unique poetic vocabulary through translation, setting her apart within the (male-centered) modernist movement. Next, I analyze the way Nakayasu approaches Sagawa’s texts when rendering them into English, making the translation process visible and positioning some of the results as nijisōsaku (spin-offs), or ‘transcreations’. My analysis of the above-mentioned texts will shed light on translation, self-translation, and anti-translation as methods through which the woman poet-translator explores unique ways of being and writing in the world. Special attention will be paid to translation as anthropophagy from the margins, that is, as a process of consuming and metabolizing central discourses, sometimes beyond recognition.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian

<i>Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons</i> by Lisa Siraganian

Chants of Indictment

Chants of Indictment David M. Katz (bio) Felon Reginald Dwayne Betts W. W. Norton & Company https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393652147 112pages; Cloth, $26.95 The fourth line of “Ghazal,” the opening poem in Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts’s powerful yet nuanced new volume, contains an ars poetica in miniature for the book: “redaction is a dialect after prison.” In the four “redaction poems,” which represent a major advance for both the poet himself and for the use of public documents in contemporary American poetry overall, Betts crosses out lengthy chunks of legal filings with thick black lines — lines, it has been said, that appropriately resemble prison bars. Along with the visual impact of the redactions, the remaining words and phrases deliver a rhythmically charged case against the criminal justice system for the onerous bail it often demands from poor people. Unlike the redactions in the Mueller report, for example, Betts’s redactions don’t use his omissions to hide telling facts. Instead, they seek to reveal “the tragedy, drama, and injustice of a system that makes people simply a reflection of their bank accounts,” he writes in an explanatory note. Carving these poems out of legal documents filed by the Civil Rights Corps, a criminal-justice advocacy group, Betts follows in the tradition of Testimony (1965) and Holocaust (1975), Charles Reznikoff’s sweeping poetic investigations of the dark side of twentieth-century history. Although the work of both poets reveals injustice, their approaches to the use of documents differ sharply. Working from nineteenth-century legal cases and records of the Nuremburg trials, Reznikoff strips out the turgid rhetoric to yield a spare, Objectivist poetry that lays bare social ills without commenting on them. For his part, Betts excerpts and reshapes the legal phrases, turning them into chants of indictment against what he observes to be injustices of the prison system. While these poems don’t refer to Betts’s own experience, their impetus is clearly personal. In 1996, at the age of sixteen, Betts, a high school honors student, took the fatal step that continues to resound through all his writings. In a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, he tapped the window of a car with a pistol, awakening the sleeping driver and, along with a fifteen-year-old friend, stole the vehicle. Tried as an adult — as was often the case in those years, when black juveniles tended to be regarded as “super predators” by prosecutors — he ended up serving eight years and four months in various prisons, including two six-month-long stretches in solitary. While in prison, Betts intensively read and wrote poetry and began studying law from books available to him. Incredibly, he was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 2017, two decades after serving his last day in prison. Much of his experience behind bars through the age of twenty-four is recounted in his trenchant 2009 memoir, A Question of Freedom, while Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015), a previous volume of verse, riffs on the historical roots of the increase in crimes like his and of the rise in mass imprisonment. How that experience and history will play out after prison is the territory Felon explores. In the masterly “Ghazal,” Betts supplies a map for navigating what will follow. “Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison,” he writes, adding “you’re still a suspect after prison.” The “song” named is the ode-like form of the ghazal itself. Typically expressive of longing, ghazals proceed in self-contained couplets that can sometimes be considered poems in themselves. Like prisoners in adjoining cells, Betts’s couplets call out to each other in a “dialect” they share that’s suggested by the word “prison,” the word he has chosen to end every other line. Fittingly, the form replicates the speaker’s endlessly returning obsession with all that the word means to him. By the final, richly allusive couplet, however, he discovers and invokes the means of his liberation: “You have come so far, Beloved, & for what, another song? / Then sing. Shahid you’re loved, not shipwrecked, after prison.” Like the Arabic and Persian poets who originated the form, Betts addresses...

Charles Reznikoff and the Rhetoric of Witnessing through Silence

The article considers the poetry of Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff as informed by the frequent use of rhetoric of silence. The analysis is two-fold: first, it explains the two theoretical key terms, sincerity and objectification, as distinct features of the Objectivist verse, which are crucial in the thematic framework of the analysis, and, second, it gives examples of the practical use thereof by Reznikoff, who is viewed as the poet-witness.

“Talking Hebrew in every language under the sun”: Emma Lazarus, Charles Reznikoff, and the Origins of Documentary Poetics

“Talking Hebrew in every language under the sun”: Emma Lazarus, Charles Reznikoff, and the Origins of Documentary Poetics

Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein

Reviewed by: Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein Daniel Morris (bio) Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination By Norman Finkelstein. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2019. 275 pp. I'd like to get away from earth awhileAnd then come back to it and begin over.May no fate willfully misunderstand meAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me awayNot to return. Earth's the right place for love:I don't know where it's likely to go better.I'd like to go by climbing a birch treeAnd climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,But dipped its top and set me down again.That would be good both going and coming back.One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. —"Birches" (1914) by Robert Frost Beginning a Shofar review on Jewish poet and literary scholar Norman Finkelstein's Like A Dark Rabbi with "Birches," Robert Frost's chestnut about a boy swinging on a branch in the woods? Really? Can a goyish pastoral pass as Jewish poetry? After reading Finkelstein, who argues Jewish poetry represents ambivalence toward the realms of earth and sky, I now think Frost, the New Hampshire woodsman who depicted purportedly un-Jewish tasks like chopping wood, mowing hay, and picking apples, may don the Dark Rabbi mantel. Think of "Mending Wall" as Frost's crypto-cabbalistic take on tikkun olam. Align "Acquainted with the Night" with Finkelstein's reading of Hugh Seidman and Michael Heller, Dark [End Page 319] Rabbis who, like Frost, convey uncertainty, rupture, and loss. With its representation of a boy swinging "towards heaven," but wanting to land because Earth is the "right place for love," Frost's "Birches" prefigures the work of Jewish-born authors like Chana Bloch's "Furniture," which, Finkelstein writes, "intertwines the divine and the domestic, the cosmic and the ordinary: the thunder in heaven is like moving furniture" (144). Finkelstein attends to poets who signify Jewishness when they embrace liminality. Heller, paradoxically, regards "between" as "foundational" and diaspora as a "new kind of homeland" (114). (An exception would be Allen Grossman, who defined holiness as contingent on acts of separation; Heller sees holiness as "revealed at the heart of the secular" [108].) Describing Heller's "Ode to the Sky on the Esplanade of the New" as a "Buddhist Ode to the West Wind," Finkelstein notes how Heller modulates from "transcendental heights to a poetics grounded in history" (123). Jewish ritual, quotidian action, and an appreciation of language as a crucial form of mediation between persons and realms of experience inform Heller's poetry to the point "no one can safely say where the sacred leaves off [and] where the profane begins" (123). The phrase "Like a Dark Rabbi," from the Pennsylvania Dutch-bred modernist Wallace Stevens's "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" (1918), by itself indicates Finkelstein's open mind about who can write a Jewish poem. Like other philosemites such as Robert Duncan and Joseph Donahue, whose poetry Finkelstein treats in his study, Stevens is not a Jew by birth, ethnicity, or religious practice. In fact, as biographer Paul Mariani writes, Stevens was xenophobic and antisemitic. Nonetheless, Stevens expresses a "fascination and strong affinity with Jewish spirituality and Jewish texts" (222). In "Auroras of Autumn," for example, he writes of "that crown and mystical cabala" (162). Finkelstein's interpretation of Stevens, Duncan, and Donahue as practitioners of a Jewish poetics turns on his definition of rabbi as an Emersonian scholar. Describing Stevens as a "seeker of occult wisdom" (226) who views "imagination as emanation" (231), Finkelstein places him "somewhere between, if not beyond, the religious and the secular" (226). Like Frost's speaker in "Birches," Stevens is a rabbi because he seeks extraterrestrial wisdom "for human purposes" (223). [End Page 320] Regarding "Auroras of Autumn" as imagining a "post-religious space of redemption," Finkelstein aligns Stevens with Jewish-born poets ranging from objectivists such as Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen to the contemporary formalist Henry Weinfield to Bloch, the Israeli anti-Zionist author and...

The Process: Ann Hamilton in the Twenty-Teens

The Process:Ann Hamilton in the Twenty-Teens Ann Hamilton (bio) and Brian McHale (bio) What kind of artist is ann hamilton? For someone who first emerged as long ago as the 1980s, and who has had an international reputation since the 1990s, hamilton is surprisingly hard to profile. She is, or has been, a textile artist; a body-artist and performance-artist; an installation artist; a photographer and videographer; an architect, a set-designer, and an animal-wrangler; a maker of civic monuments and of intimate, handcrafted objects. Moreover, in some of her most complex and celebrated works, such as the event of a thread at the park avenue armory in manhattan (2012), she is all these things at once. A cliché of critical writing and catalog essays about Hamilton is to call her work poetic—which, if it means anything, probably gestures at the associative, magical-realist, sometimes oneiric quality of her work: a room strewn with horsehair where a woman seated at a table uses a burning tool to efface, line by line, the pages of a book (tropos, at the Dia Center for the Arts, 1993–1994); an immense ex-industrial space in which leaves of onion-skin paper are mechanically lifted and released from above, to float down and settle on the floor in drifts (corpus, at MassMOCA in North Adams, MA, Click for larger view View full resolution Ann Hamilton. Photo credit: Calista Lyon. [End Page 209] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Ann Hamilton, the event of a thread (2012). Photograph by Thibault Jeansen. Image courtesy of the artist. 2003–2004). More concretely, to call her poetic is also to acknowledge how frequently she incorporates language in her work. Her installations regularly feature the act of writing as performance, and book-objects as materials, sometimes (as in tropos) under erasure. They often incorporate the verbal art of others, usually poetry—by Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Charles Reznikoff, A. R. Ammons, Jorie Graham, and especially Susan Stewart, a frequent collaborator—but sometimes also lyrical prose by the likes of John Muir, Angela Carter, or Virginia Woolf. Her own catalog statements often take the form of verse: short-lined, spaced as stanzas, sometimes approximating sonnet length. Born and raised in Ohio, Hamilton has lived and worked in Columbus since 2001, where she teaches in the Ohio State University's Department of Art and shares a bustling studio with her husband, the artist Michael Mercil. I interviewed her at her studio on two occasions, just over a year apart, in June 2018 and July 2019; the text of this published interview is adapted from those conversations. Hamilton reflects here on a number of the works she has made over [End Page 210] the course of the past decade, particularly two pieces that I experienced myself firsthand: habitus (2016) at the Fabric Workshop and Museum and Municipal Pier 9 in Philadelphia, and the theater is a blank page, a collaboration with Anne Bogart and the SITI company, staged first at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (2015), and later at UCLA (2018). Apart from these completed works, she also reflects on a number of works just then in progress—works in the works. The first part of our interview took place as Hamilton was developing a complex installation/event in conjunction with a textile biennial in Guimarães, Portugal, and beginning to think about a pending project in Portland, Oregon that would incorporate elements of the habitus piece from Philadelphia. I interviewed her a second time in the wake of the Guimarães and Portland events, as she was beginning to develop new projects at the University of Chicago, the University of California at San Diego, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and, jointly with two other Ohio-born artists, Jenny Holzer and Maya Lin, a show at the Wexner Center at Ohio State (HERE, September 21 to December 29, 2019). In the interval between our two conversations, her public artwork CHORUS (2018) had been unveiled in the newly reopened Cortlandt Street subway station in Manhattan—a station that had been destroyed on September 11, 2001. Taken together...

Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein

Reviewed by: Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein Maeera Y. Shreiber (bio) Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination Norman Finkelstein Hebrew Union College Press, 2019. 275 pp. $35.95 paperback. In 1991, poet-critic Allen Grossman initiated a new chapter in the study of Jewish poetry when he declared that, according to Jewish thought, the sacred and the poetic are fundamentally at odds with one another. Norman Finkelstein was among the first to really consider Grossman's intentionally provocative claim in a thoroughgoing way: first in Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (2001); then in numerous essays probing the question of midrashic poetics, the tension and relation between the secular and the sacred in experimental verse; and, most recently, in a wonderful piece "On the Poetics of a Jewish God" (co-written with poet Michael Heller). This latter piece deftly negotiates Gershom Sholem, Israeli poet Chaim Bialik, and contemporary scholar of religious thought Steven Wasserstrom—to craft an account of a poetics animated by a dynamic relation to the sacred. This account is fully realized in Finkelstein's latest book, Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination. This gathering of essays, some of which are expanded versions of earlier pieces while others are wholly new pieces written expressly for this occasion, is, as the author puts it, "an expression of devotion"(xv)—a dedicated and learned disciple's account of a rich and multi-faceted aesthetic as well as a spiritually-inflected enterprise. Finkelstein sets up some of the terms informing these essays in the opening chapter, focusing upon the "Two Shapiros" (1)—Karl and Harvey, both of whose names are now all but lost to history. Indeed, one of the gifts Finkelstein offers is the opportunity to discover new or overlooked voices. I was happy to spend a bit of time with Harvey Shapiro, whose "brilliantly understated style…epitomizes the endlessly paradoxical questions and answers that secular Jewish life provokes" (14). After working through some of the ways secularity animates Jewish verse, Finkelstein turns to consider the status of authentically Jewish languages in the making of Jewish American poems. For a long while, Jewish poets writing in English were seen as distinctly disadvantaged, not having access to the cultural, conceptual and spiritual resources inherent in Yiddish or Hebrew. But drawing upon the work of scholars such as Sander Gilman, Finkelstein proposes another mode of approach, noting how Yiddish, for example, functions as a "ghost" (18) or "hidden" (18) language informing not only the work of poet Jerome Rothenberg but also Finkelstein's own "post vernacular" (19) lyrics. This [End Page 162] move is but one instance of what makes the book appealing, as Finkelstein brings both a scholarly investment to the subject and an ongoing creative sensibility. Like a Dark Rabbi should appeal to a range of readers. Experts in the field will appreciate Finkelstein's carefully argued and attentive close readings; his discussion of Allen Grossman's ambitious poem "The Piano Player Explains Himself," a stunning but difficult example of this poet's prophetic reach, is a beautiful instance of Finkelstein's skill. Other chapters—such as the lively account of Charles Reznikoff, an important figure in twentiethcentury Jewish American writing—are well-suited to the non-professional who wants to learn more about the important role poetry plays in a literary field that often overlooks the genre altogether. In addition to working with well-known figures, Finkelstein works hard to expand the canon of Jewish American poetry, calling attention to poets whose names do not typically come to mind when the subject is Jewish poetics. Even more importantly, Finkelstein makes a concerted effort to expand the list to include two women poets whose works are only now beginning to garner the attention they deserve. His discussion of Chana Bloch showcases a poet who is able to name her doubt quite frankly without redemptively claiming it as part of a diasporic identity—and without ever backing away from her conviction in the deep wisdom to be gleaned from Jewish texts. Counterbalancing Bloch's sharp-edged...

Radical Research and the Scientific Method: Tracking a New Trajectory through Four Recent Poetry Collections

Radical Research and the Scientific Method: Tracking a New Trajectory through Four Recent Poetry Collections Kathryn Nuernberger (bio) Toward Antarctica, Elizabeth Bradfield. Boreal Books, 2019, 160 pp., $19.95, paper. Mitochondrial Night, Ed Bok Lee. Coffee House Press, 2019, 88 pp., $16.95, paper. Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm. Milkweed Editions, 2019, 96 pp., $16.00, paper. Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh. Milkweed Editions, 2019, 120 pp., $16.00, paper. When Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 classic The Book of the Dead was reissued in 2018, edited and with a new introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, it became clear that a major, though underdiscussed, Modernist innovation was docupoetics. While many readers struggle to understand how certain racist, anti-Semitic, and fascist writers could be considered so essential for so long, contemporary poets are finding influence in less canonized poets of the twentieth century whose docupoetic aesthetics are proving to be powerfully resonant for the present historical moment. The docupoetic tradition is typically defined as a poetic mode rooted in documentary techniques. A docupoetic poem draws upon fieldwork, interviews, oral histories, or archival research. Much of this work has also focused on questions of social justice, since complex geopolitical [End Page 177] questions benefit from meandering, collaged, often book-length forms that can hold multiple perspectives, a range of historical contexts, and rhetorical modes that move between the personal and political. In “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy,” his essay on docupoetics for the Poetry Foundation, Philip Metres identifies Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead as a cornerstone. Her work inquiring into the Hawks Nest Tunnel mining disaster draws on a range of research materials, including affidavits and personal letters, and on the deep knowledge of geology and human physiology necessary to understand the mining industry’s health and environmental impacts. In “Absalom,” one of the poems that established both a tone and formal approach for a range of docupoetic works that have followed, Rukeyser chronicles the testimony of a mother who had watched three sons die of various health complications from working in the mines: And two or three doctors said the same thing.The youngest boy did not get to go down there with me,he lay and said, “Mother, when I die,“I want you to have them open me up and“see if that dust killed me.“Try to get compensation,“you will not have any way of making your living“when we are gone,“and the rest are going too.” I have gained mastery over my heartI have gained mastery over my two handsI have gained mastery over the watersI have gained mastery over the river. The case of my son was the first of the line of lawsuits. Rukeyser, followed by writers such as Charles Reznikoff, Allen Ginsberg, and Ernesto Cardenal, established an aesthetic tradition that we have seen flourish in subsequent generations of poets, many of whom are now innovating from such roots. Though Rukeyser wrote about the human-ecological tragedies of resource extraction, the conventional terminology used by many literary critics suggests that the docupoetic mode is somehow distinct from poems whose research centers around [End Page 178] environmental justice. Poems with environmentalist themes are typically referred to as ecopoetics, which is characterized as a form of “nature writing.” However, poets have been engaging with scientific materials as part of docupoetics projects for as long as we can trace back the methodology, and younger docupoets are happily and productively blurring these lines. ________ Toward Antarctica Elizabeth Bradfield. Boreal Books, 2019, 160 pp., $19.95, paper Elizabeth Bradfield’s new collection, Toward Antarctica, is a perfect example of how the docupoetic tradition of collaging rhetorical registers and cross-disciplinary research with a bit of lyric glue is being applied to scientific subjects. This book is based on the author’s work as a naturalist on an ecotourism expedition ship in Antarctica. The speaker’s experience of travel and exploration is complicated by visiting an ecosystem where the effects of human-caused climate change can be seen clearly and with intense urgency. In “Straits of Magellan” she describes a stunning whale sighting: rostrum pillowing silk water beforebroken in arch, dive...

Engineering the ideal: applied modern poetics as applied modern science

ABSTRACTMany scholars have traced the influences of theoretical science in modernist poetry. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century western audiences were principally enamoured of the applied sciences (or engineering) and especially the ideal of efficiency. The principles and processes of engineering permeated modernism, including its poetry, and, accordingly, the ‘science’ of modernist poetry is often an applied science. Specifically, Imagist and Objectivist poets implemented processes of optimisation and systematisation, which dramatise the iterative improvements that characterised the contemporaneous Efficiency Movement. That movement’s exemplar, Frederick Winslow Taylor, is remembered for conforming factory labour and labourers to exacting empirical ideals, leading this study to question the social repercussions of perfectly ‘efficient’ poems. However, poets H.D. and Charles Reznikoff actually disperse this impracticable ideal through their process-oriented forms. Thus, the modernist poetry inspired by the applied sciences revolves around scientific ideals, but it ultimately emphasises their fiction.

Beyond Forensic Poetry: Lyric and Legal Languages in Contemporary Poems

In the field of Law and Literature studies, contributions on poetry are rare. This article focuses on a selection of contemporary poetic works: Cornelius Eady’s A Brutal Imagination (2001), Frédéric Boyer’s Le Goût du suicide lent (1999), Maurizio Cucchi’s Il disperso (1976) and Corrado Benigni’s Tribunale della mente (2012). Their lyrical shaping of law establishes a difference from the model of “forensic” poetry that can be found in Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1978–1979). Through them, this contribution shows how it is possible to challenge a reflection on the language of lyric poetry and that of law at the same time, if we interpret the lyric poetry as a non-narrative discourse.

Family Business: Charles Reznikoff in Text and Textile

ABSTRACTCharles Reznikoff, according to established scholarship, is an exemplar of disinheritance, an ideal representative for the modernist and modern Jewish self. But Reznikoff also inherits and finds in this an alternative to both urban capitalism and market-influenced modernist publishing. Manually setting type at a printing press in his parents’ basement, Reznikoff self-published many of his early books while also working in the family clothing business. Writing was a craft that continued, rather than broke from, his family trade. His production of texts, following his depiction of his parents’ textile-work in the rarely examined memoir Family Chronicle, takes part in what we can term a “fabriculture” that resists commodity valuation in modern industry and modernist publishing. In the 1930 novel By the Waters of Manhattan, Reznikoff’s protagonist uses the fabricultural lessons of material production to rescue the individuality of the self from the anonymity and interchangeability of the modern city. Reznikoff’s poetry and prose weave together his parents’ lives in textile with his own in text, establishing this inherited family trade as a metaphor for crafting a whole garment from the disparate elements of the modern Jewish self.

A Political Elegy

A Political Elegy Beth McDermott (bio) Bonfire of the Sodomites: A Documentary Jim Elledge Main Street Rag Publishing Co. www.mainstreetragbookstore.com/product 80 Pages; Print, $14.00 What does it mean when a poet labels a collection of poems “a documentary”? Within the definition of “documentary,” Merriam Webster has the words “factual” and “objective” in all caps. As descendants of Socrates and the Western canon, we are predisposed to see poetry as anti-fact and therefore ill-equipped to document anything. Yet, there’s an impulse to employ documentation in poetry that desires to be read as though it has a serious grasp of the truth, especially if what is true isn’t pleasurable to hear. Think of Charles Reznikoff’s work in both Testimony (1978–1979) and Holocaust (1975). The use of documentary evidence becomes the primary material for Reznikoff, who chooses not to transform brute reality into the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker. And yet few poetry collections announce their intention to be read as a documentary with such obviousness as Bonfire of the Sodomites by Jim Elledge. A collection of poems about the UpStairs Lounge catastrophe of 1973, Elledge’s poems move chronologically through time to give the reader an understanding of the tragic loss of life that befell the gay community in 1970s America. Despite the horror of what happened that summer in the New Orleans French Quarter, little attention was paid to the case or the victims who perished at the scene. In a “Note to the Reader” prefacing the collection, Elledge writes: On June 23, 1973, someone set fire to the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in the French Quarter, killing thirty-two individuals in sixteen minutes. Considered “the largest mass-killing of gay people in the U.S.,” it was a hate crime, but a far more complicated one than the phrase might suggest. Published in 2017, Bonfire of the Sodomites sets out to explain the complicatedness of a hate crime to a society still mourning the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed forty-nine people. Yet, unlike the mass-murder that happened in 2016 Orlando, the mass-murder that occurred in 1973 New Orleans remains overlooked or unknown. In this sense, Bonfire of the Sodomites is politically motivated and unsentimentally elegiac. It’s political in the sense that it speaks out in angst over the lack of fair and just treatment for the thirty-two individuals killed by arson: people who weren’t considered significant enough to warrant effort on the part of authorities, acknowledgement by local or statewide government, or even mourning by New Orleans churches. As such, Elledge demands that we look at what happened while reticent to speak on behalf of the dead. In a New Directions Poetry Pamphlet titled Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker (2013), Susan Howe writes: “Historical or geographical accident isolated us from the cold reality of mud and hunger.” The accidental isolation of time and space is what motivates Elledge’s reticence, without which I don’t think the book would be near as successful. What saves the book from exploiting the already exploited is its documentary structure. Howe writes that film documentarist Dziga Vertov listed among his techniques “substituting the appearance of truth for truth itself.” This is one of Elledge’s techniques, since Bonfire of the Sodomites is mostly composed of “published documents, including newspaper articles, interviews, and police reports.” The author’s note and the bibliography at the back of the collection both suggest that Elledge is concerned with fidelity to the truth; a brief tour through some of his sources proves how close he’s remained to facts and direct quotation, which can be identified throughout the poems by quotation marks. Having read both the poems and some of their source material, I could give you most of the details of what happened, but that’s the point of Elledge’s book. Certainly a shorter story could be told, but it would be heretical, not unlike the way Cleanth Brooks disparages paraphrasing a single poem. What Elledge does is take back from the indifferent media the details that are synecdochically inseparable from...

Casting a shadow backwards and forwards: the para-holocaust fiction of Charles Reznikoff, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernrd Malamud

Casting a shadow backwards and forwards: the para-holocaust fiction of Charles Reznikoff, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernrd Malamud

Poetry of Secular Memorialization: Charles Reznikoff’s “Kaddish” and George Oppen’s “In Memoriam Charles Reznikoff”

ABSTRACT In declaring, finally, the superfluity or disposability of “prayers and words and lights” before the presence or memory of a dead loved one, Charles Reznikoff’s “Kaddish” exemplifies a break with the traditional kaddish, and appears to mediate a self-consciously secular memorialization. Yet it does not merely reflect or represent a secular regime as it has developed outside the world of the poem; rather, it labors to articulate an uncertain, yet recognizably Jewish, sensibility of the secular. This sensibility should be understood in the context of the poet’s broader concerns with the modern significance of biblical and post-biblical Judaism, concerns that can be read in the very cycle of which “Kaddish” is the conclusion, the 1941 “Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down.” In addition, George Oppen’s own poem in memory of Charles Reznikoff enables us to identify an aesthetics of the humble that, intertwined with an ethics of humility, is distinctive of Reznikoff’s work, and that leads to the conclusion that the secular sensibility in “Kaddish” amounts to more than a simple act of negation, a simple disregard or scorn for the trappings of traditional ritual.