Charles Reznikoff Early Years Objectivist Poet Court Poetry

Reznikoff was born in a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn, New York of Russian parents. After a year studying journalism, he entered the law school of New York UniversityMotto Perstare et praestare ("To persevere and to excel") Established 1831 School type Private President John Sexton Location New York, NY, USA Enrollment 19,506 undergraduate, 18,682 graduate and professional Faculty 1,907 Campus Urban Athletics 18 sport in 19121912 is a leap year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar) Events January 1 Establishment of Republic of China. January 6 New Mexico is admitted as the 47th U. January 17 British polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott and a team of four begin the and graduated in 19161916 is a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar) Events January 1 -The first successful blood transfusion using blood that had been stored and cooled. Impressionist Monet paints Water Lilies'. January 8 Allied forces withdraw from. He practised law briefly and entered officer training school in 1918, but failed to see active service before the end of the war.

Reznikoff worked for a time for his family's business as a hat salesman. He then worked for a legal publishing house where he wrote summaries of court records for legal reference books. This experience was to prove important for his later writing.

From his teens, Reznikoff had been writing poetry, much of it influenced by the Imagists, and publishing it himself using handset printing plates. Throughout his writing life, Reznikoff was always concerned to ensure that his work was published, even at his own expense. This appears to have been inspired by a family story of his grandfather, an unpublished HebrewThe word Hebrew can variously mean: The Hebrew language or Hebrew languages The Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew calendar Pertaining to Jews or Judaism The ancient Hebrew people An Israelite, Jew, Pashtun, Bnai Israel The term Hebrew is sometimes used by certai poet whose manuscripts were destroyed after his death.

2 Objectivist Poet

Around the time the Objectivist issue of Poetry appeared, Reznikoff, Zukofsky and George OppenGeorge Oppen ( April 24, 1908 July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the founders of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism and eventually moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the Ho set up To Publishers and later the Objectivist Press, essentially to publish their own work. Reznikoff had had some success with his 19301930 is the common year starting on Wednesday. see link for calendar) Events January-February January 6 The first diesel-engine automobile trip is completed ( Indianapolis, Indiana, to New York City). January 27 Miguel Primo de Rivera resigns January 30 G novel By the Waters of Manhattan, and the new press published three titles by him, two that gathered together previously self-published work and the third a first installment of a long work called Testimony.

3 Court Poetry

Testimony was, initially, a prose retelling of stories that Reznikoff had discovered while working on court records. In these stories, Reznikoff discovered something of the story of America between 1855 and 1915 both in its diversity and its violence. Tellingly, he chose to omit the judgements, focusing on the stories themselves.

Over the following forty years, Reznikoff worked on turning these stories into an extended found poem that finally ran to some 500 pages over two volumes. He aimed to present the stories in as near as possible the words of the participants, and the result was a poetry almost entirely stripped of metaphor and of authorial personality and emotion. In this sense, Testimony can be read as the great monument of Objectivist poetry.

The poetic mode developed in the making of this work was to prove invaluable when Reznikoff started work on Holocaust, which was based on courtroom accounts of Nazi concentration camps. He also adopted this style for many of his poetic retellings of stories from the Old Testament.

4 Late Recognition

Reznikoff lived and wrote in relative obscurity and poverty for most of his life, with his work being either self-published or issued by small independent presses. In the early 1960s, this situation seemed set to change when New Directions published two books, including the first installment of the verse Testimony. However, critical reaction to this book was generally negative and Reznikoff one again found himself publishing his own work.

In 1971, he was awarded the Morton Dauwen Zabel Prize of $2,500 by The National Institute of Arts and Letters . He also found a new publisher around this time, Black Sparrow Press . They published By the Well of Living and Seeing: New and Selected Poems, 1918-1973 in 1974. At the time of his death, Reznikoff was correcting proofs of the first volume of the Black Sparrow Collected Poems. In the years immediately following his death, Black Sparrow brought all his major poetry and prose works back into print.

5 External links

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