{"id":5605,"date":"2025-09-18T17:17:41","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T17:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/?post_type=books&p=5605"},"modified":"2025-12-17T15:46:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T15:46:51","slug":"reading-charles-reznikoff","status":"publish","type":"books","link":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/books\/reading-charles-reznikoff\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Charles Reznikoff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Charles Reznikoff<\/em> explores Reznikoff\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

This collection of essays explores Reznikoff\u2019s verse and its contemporary poetic and critical legacy in five movements. The first looks at how history and politics are woven into Reznikoff\u2019s work, namely Reznikoff\u2019s complex relationship with Jewish American identity in the 20th century. The second section turns to documentary poetics and to Reznikoff\u2019s 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\u2014Reznikoff\u2019s word for the lyric\u2014showing how Reznikoff\u2019s 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\u2019s work\u2019s journey through Mexican, Polish and French contexts, illustrating Reznikoff\u2019s ongoing transnational relevance. The volume concludes with a foray into some of Reznikoff\u2019s afterlives, in the work of Paul Auster\u2014an early champion of Reznikoff\u2019s method\u2014and through the history of Reznikoff\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

See the documentary film on Reznikoff created by the editors here: https:\/\/writing.upenn.edu\/pennsound\/x\/Reznikoff.php<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":5606,"template":"","subject":[36,37,54],"browse_by_series":[39],"browse_by_imprints":[],"conference":[],"class_list":["post-5605","books","type-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","subject-literature","subject-modernism","subject-poetry","browse_by_series-seminal-modernisms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/5605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/books"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/5605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5739,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/5605\/revisions\/5739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"subject","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/subject?post=5605"},{"taxonomy":"browse_by_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/browse_by_series?post=5605"},{"taxonomy":"browse_by_imprints","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/browse_by_imprints?post=5605"},{"taxonomy":"conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/conference?post=5605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}