Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (60 page)

I was walking along Forty-Second Street as night was falling.

On the other side of the street was Bryant Park.

Walking behind me were two men

and I could hear some of their conversation:

“What you must do,” one of them was saying to his companion,

“is to decide on what you want to do

and then stick to it. Stick to it!

And you are sure to succeed finally.” 

I turned to look at the speaker giving such good advice

and was not surprised to see that he was old,

But his companion

to whom the advice was given so earnestly,

was just as old;

and just then the great clock on top of a building across the park

began to shine.

*

The tramp with torn shoes

and clothing dirty and wrinkled—

dirty hands and face—

takes a comb out of his pocket

and carefully combs his hair.

The feeling that emerges from these glimpses of city life is roughly equivalent to what one feels when looking at a photograph. Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” is perhaps the crucial idea to remember in this context. The important thing is readiness: you cannot walk out into the street with the expectation of writing a poem or taking a picture, and yet you must be prepared to do so whenever the opportunity presents itself. Because the “work” can come into being only when it has been given to you by the world, you must be constantly looking at the world, constantly doing the work that will lead to a poem, even if no poem comes of it. Reznikoff walks through the city — not, as most poets do, with “his head in the clouds,” but with his eyes open, his mind open, his energies concentrated on entering the life around him. Entering it precisely because he is apart from it. And therefore this paradox, lodged in the heart of the poem: to posit the reality of this world, and then to cross into it, even as you find yourself barred at all its gates. The poet as solitary wanderer, as man in the crowd, as faceless scribe. Poetry as an art of loneliness.

It is more than just loneliness, however. It is exile, and a way of coming to terms with exile that somehow, for better or worse, manages to leave the condition of exile intact. Reznikoff was not only an outsider by temperament, nurturing those aspects of himself that would tend to maintain his sense of isolation, he was also born into a state of
otherness
, and as a Jew, as the son of immigrant Jews in America, whatever idea of community he had was always ethnic rather than national (his dream as a poet was to go across the country on foot, stopping at synagogues along the way to give readings of his work in exchange for food and lodging). If his poems about the city — his American poems, so to speak — dwell on the surfaces of things, on the skin of everyday life, it is in his poems about Jewish identity that he allows himself a certain measure of lyrical freedom, allows himself to become a singer of songs.

Let other people come as streams

that overflow a valley

and leave dead bodies, uprooted trees and fields of sand:

we Jews are as dew,

on every blade of grass,

trodden under foot today

and here tomorrow morning.

And yet, in spite of this deep solidarity with the Jewish past, Reznikoff never deludes himself into thinking that he can overcome the essential solitude of his condition simply by affirming his Jewishness. For not only has he been exiled, he has been exiled twice — as a Jew, and from Judaism as well.

How difficult for me is Hebrew:

even the Hebrew for
mother
, for
bread
, for
sun

is foreign. How far I have been exiled, Zion.

*

The Hebrew of your poets, Zion,

is like oil upon a burn,

cool as oil;

after work,

the smell in the street at night

of the hedge in flower.

Like Solomon,

I have married and married the speech of strangers;

none are like you, Shulamite.

It is a precarious position, to say the least. Neither fully assimilated nor fully unassimilated, Reznikoff occupies the unstable middle ground between two worlds and is never able to claim either one as his own. Nevertheless, and no doubt precisely because of this ambiguity, it is an extremely fertile ground — leading some to consider him primarily as a Jewish poet (whatever
that
term might mean) and others to look on him as quintessentially American poet (whatever that term might mean). And yet it is safe to say, I think, that in the end both statements are true — or else that neither one is true, which probably amounts to the same thing. Reznikoff’s poems are what Reznikoff is: the poems of an American Jew, or, if you will, of a hyphenated American, a Jewish-American, with the two terms standing not so much on equal footing as combining to form a third and wholly different term: the condition of being in two places at the same time, or, quite simply, the condition of being nowhere.

We have only to go on the evidence. In the two volumes of
Complete Poems
(1918–75), recently published by Black Sparrow Press, there are a surprising number of poems on Jewish themes. Poems not only about Jewish immigrant life in New York, but also long narratives on various episodes from ancient and modern Jewish history. A list of some of these titles will give a fair idea of some of Reznikoff’s concerns: “King David,” “Jeremiah in the Stocks: An Arrangement of the Prophecies,” “The Synagogue Defeated: Anno 1096,” “Palestine under the Romans,” “The Fifth Book of the Maccabees,” “Jews in Babylonia.” In all, these poems cover more than 100 pages of the approximately 350 pages in the two volumes — or nearly a third of his total output. Given the nature of the poems he is best known for — the spare city lyrics, transcriptions of immediate sensual data — it is strange that he should have devoted so much of his writing life to works whose inspiration comes from
books
. Reznikoff, the least pretentious of all poets, never shows any inclination toward the scholarly acrobatics of some of his contemporaries — Pound, for example, or Olson — and yet, curiously, much of his writing is a direct response to, almost a translation of, his reading. By a further twist, these poems that treat of apparently remote subjects are among his most personal works.

To be schematic for a moment, a simplified explanation would be as follows: America is Reznikoff’s present, Judaism is his past. The act of immersing himself in Jewish history is finally no different for him than the act of stepping out into the streets of New York. In both cases, it is an attempt to come to terms with what he is. The past, however, cannot be directly perceived: it can only be experienced through books. When Reznikoff writes about King David, therefore, or Moses, or any other Biblical figure, he is in effect writing about himself. Even in his most light-hearted moments, this preoccupation with his ancestors is always with him.

God and Messenger

The pavement barren

as the mountain

on which God spoke to Moses—

suddenly in the street

shining against my legs

the bumper of a motor car.

The point is that Reznikoff the Jew and Reznikoff the American cannot be separated from one another. Each aspect of his work must be read in relation to the
oeuvre
as a whole, for in the end each point of view inhabits all the others.

The tree in the twilit street—

the pods hang from its bare symmetrical branches

motionless—

but if, like God, a century were to us

the twinkling of an eye,

we should see the frenzy of growth.

Which is to say: the eye is not adequate. Not even the seen can be truly seen. The human perspective, which continually thrusts us into a place where “only the narrow present is alive,” is an exile from eternity, an exclusion from the fullness of human possibility. That Reznikoff, who insists so strenuously in all his work on this human perspective, should at the same time be aware of its limits, gives his work a reflexive quality, an element of self-doubt that permeates even the most straightforward lyric. For all his apparent simplicity, Reznikoff is by no means a primitive. A reductionist, perhaps, but a highly sophisticated one — who, as an adroit craftsman, always manages to make us forget that each poem is the product (as he put it in one work) of “hunger silence, and sweat.”

There is, however, a bridge between time and eternity in Reznikoff’s work, a link between God and man, in the precise place where man is forced to abstain most vigorously from the demands of the self: in the idea of the Law. The Law in the Jewish sense of the word and, by extension, in the English sense.
Testimony
is a work in which reading has become the equivalent of seeing: “Note: All that follows is based on the law reports of the several states.” What Reznikoff has observed, has brought to life, is the word, the language of men. So that the act of witness has become synonymous with the act of creation — and the shouldering of its burden. “Now suppose in a court of law,” Reznikoff told Dembo in their interview, “you are testifying in a negligence case. You cannot get up on the stand and say, ‘The man was negligent.’ That’s a conclusion of fact. What you’d be compelled to say is how the man acted. Did he stop before he crossed the street? Did he look? The judges of whether he is negligent or not are the jury in that case and the judges of what you say as a poet are the readers. That is, there is an analogy between testimony in the courts and the testimony of a poet.”

Trained as a lawyer (though he never practiced) and for many years a researcher for a legal encyclopedia, Reznikoff used the workings of the law not only as a description of the poetic process, but also, more basically, as an aesthetic ideal. In his long autobiographical poem,
Early History of a Writer
, he explains how the study of the law helped to discipline him as a poet:

I saw that I could use the expensive machinery

that had cost me four years of hard work at law

and which I had thought useless for my writing:

prying sentences open to look at the exact meaning;

weighing words to choose only those that had meat for my purpose

and throwing the rest away as empty shells.

I, too, could scrutinize every word and phrase

as if in a document or the opinion of a judge

and listen, as well, for tones and overtones,

leaving only the pithy, the necessary, the clear and plain.

Testimony: The United States (1885 –1915) Recitative
is perhaps Reznikoff’s most important achievement as a poet. A quietly astonishing work, so deceptive in its making that it would be easy to misread it as a document rather than as a piece of art, it is at once a kaleidoscopic vision of American life and the ultimate test of Reznikoff’s poetic principles. Composed of small, self-contained fragments, each the distillation of an actual court case, the overall effect is nevertheless extremely coherent. Reznikoff has no lesson to teach, no axe to grind, no ideology to defend: he merely wants to present the facts. For example:

At the time of their marriage

Andrew was worth about fifty thousand dollars;

Polly had nothing.

“He has gone up to the mine,