Reading Charles Reznikoff

The Plain Sunlight of His Verse

Edited by Xavier Kalck, Fiona McMahon, and Naomi Toth

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Reading Charles Reznikoff explores Reznikoff’s unique position as a modernist writing spare verse, rich with urban detail, but also as a paragon of found text poetry who created lasting works of testimony, and as a Jewish American poet whose translations and adaptations from scripture and biblical commentary verge on the prophetic.

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 as 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 of 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.

About the Editors

Xavier Kalck is Professor of North-American Literature at Lille University (France). He is the author of several books on twentieth-century poetry in English (George Oppen’s Poetics of the Commonplace, 2017; Pluralism, Poetry, and Literacy: A Test of Reading and Interpretive Techniques, 2021) and in French ("We said Objectivitst": Lire les poètes Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, 2019; La poésie américaine entre chant et parole: l’héritage objectiviste, 2020), as well as many articles on poetics. His upcoming book is Exacting Facts. American Objectivist Poetry Across the 20th Century (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Fiona McMahon is Professor of North-American Literature at the Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry (France) where she is the director of the series, Profils américains at the Presses universitaires de de la Méditerranée. Her research addresses topics in literary modernism and contemporary poetry and poetics (US/CAN). She is the author of H.D. Trilogy (Atlande, 2014) and Charles Reznikoff : une poétique du témoignage (L’Harmattan, 2011). She has co-edited a volume in the Palgrave Macmillan Series in Adaptation and Visual Culture, Adapting Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond (2021) and Penser le genre en poésie contemporaine (Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2019).

Naomi Toth is Assistant Professor of English at the Université Paris Nanterre. Her research interests include modernist and experimental 20th century prose, particularly the work of Virginia Woolf and Nathalie Sarraute. She also works on documentary aesthetics and the justice system. She has published several articles on documentary poetry and art in journals such as Jacket 2, Textual Practice, Hybrid, and Countertext, and she guest-edited the 2020 issue of Synthesis entitled Just Art? Documentary Poetics and Justice. She is currently preparing a series of short films and a book on documentary aesthetics and the law.

Introduction | Xavier Kalck, Fiona McMahon, and Naomi Toth

I. HISTORY/POLITICS
1. The Method of Irreducible Detail: Charles Reznikoff the Historian | Stephen Fredman
2. Reznikoff and the Rabbis | Norman Finkelstein
3. “There’s so much trouble—and he sings”: Reznikoff’s Lyrical Diasporism | Ranen Omer-Sherman
4. Charles Reznikoff’s Poetic Cross-Nationalism | Shira Wolosky

II. DOCUMENTARY POETICS
5. Subjectivities of the Law | Jena Osman
6. “That it might be put down in capitals”: The Objective Correlative in Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1934) | Natina Gilbert
7. Engraving Destruction and Disappearance: Law, Historiography, and Poetry in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust | Valentine Auvinet

III. LYRIC
8. Reznikoff among the Objectivists | Mark Scroggins
9. “like a rest in music or a turn in the dance”: Rhythm, Feeling, and the Significance of Vernacular Language in Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1965) | Miriam Ould Aroussi
10. Reznikoff: “A Girder Still Itself” | Michael Heller

IV. TRANSLATIONS
11. Translating Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony into Spanish | Sarug Sarano
12. Post-Socialist Objectivism? Charles Reznikoff’s Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down in the Former Socialist Countries (with Particular Reference to Poland) | Joanna Orska
13. A Test of Poetry and “Never Again”: Charles Reznikoff’s French Reception | Abigail Lang

V. AFTERLIVES
14. Paul Auster’s Reznikoffs | François Hugonnier
15. African American Experiences and Charles Reznikoff’s Poetics in the Black Lives Matter Era | Almas Khan