Charles Reznikoff - Early years, Objectivist poet, Court poetry, Late recognition

Poet and writer, born in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He studied at the University of Missouri (1910–11), settled in New York City, and earned a law degree from New York University (1915). He worked in publishing much of his life, and is noted for his spare poetry of the objectivist school. A frequent theme in his work was the role of Judaism in his life, as in Poems 1937–75 (1977).

When asked by Harriet Munroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky used his essay Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.

Early years

Reznikoff was born in a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn, New York of Russian parents.

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.

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.

Objectivist poet

Around the time the Objectivist issue of Poetry appeared, Reznikoff, Zukofsky and George Oppen set up To Publishers and later the Objectivist Press, essentially to publish their own work. Reznikoff had had some success with his 1930 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.

Court poetry

Testimony was, initially, a prose retelling of stories that Reznikoff had discovered while working on court records.

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.

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.

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 Publishers, at the behest of friend and fellow poet George Oppen, together with Oppen's sister June Oppen Degnan's press San Francisco Review Books published two books, including the first installment of the verse Testimony. However, critical reaction to this book was generally negative and Reznikoff once again found himself publishing his own work. 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.