Charles Reznikoff’s Verse (1894-1976): The Plain Sunlight

This collection of essays explores Reznikoff’s verse and its contemporary poetic and critical legacy in five movements. The first looks at how history and politics are woven into Reznikoff’s work, namely Reznikoff’s complex relationship with Jewish American identity in the 20th century. The second section turns to documentary poetics and to Reznikoff’s practice of composing from historical and well as legal documents, in the context of modernist concerns over realism as well as contemporary ones over memory and appropriation. The third section delves into the concept of verse--Reznikoff’s word for the lyric--showing how Reznikoff’s rhythms compose an abstract yet accurate vernacular portrait of America. It places Reznikoff among his fellow poets, known as the Objectivists, and in relation to larger issues pertaining to the rhythmic fabric of free verse and the aesthetic vocabularies of the spare and the ordinary. The fourth opens onto issues of translation, and Reznikoff’s work’s journey through Mexican, Polish and French contexts, illustrating Reznikoff’s ongoing transnational relevance. The volume concludes with a foray into some of Reznikoff’s afterlives, in the work Paul Auster--an early champion of Reznikoff’s method--and through the history of Reznikoff’s complex engagement with the African American experience, the representation of injustice and testimony as a dialogical means of witnessing intended to foster a sense of community.