If Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is not the great Objectivist poem, this one is. And, like Pound’s poem, it’s too short to summarize:
About an excavation
a flock of bright red lanterns.
This is a simile poem comparing a concrete object to another concrete object with the barest suggestion. A “flock” of lanterns has settled around the construction site like … what? A flock of ducks settling on a pond?
It’s by Charles Reznikoff, the star of yesterday’s note.
I’m a fan of the Objectivist poets of the 1930s. They liked concrete images, and so do I.
Reznikoff, 1894-1976, was arguably the oddest in a flock of odd ducks. He was
born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn and, hoping to become a writer, entered the University of Missouri School of Journalism. It was not a match made in heaven. Reznikoff fled, after a year, back to New York and became a lawyer.
He published some of his own poems. He worked as a hat salesman in his family’s firm and as a freelance writer. When the family business failed in the Depression, he got a job summarizing legal cases of injustice and tragedy.
He married Marie Syrkin, a high school teacher, in 1930. In the late ‘20s, he met George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, kindred spirits, and was in the February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine, the Objectivist issue.
The Objectivist Press published several works, including Testimony, a prose collection based on law cases. The same technique was used for Holocaust in 1975. The book mined legal records to document Nazi atrocities.
With respect to the famous poets, I love the neglected ones. Every now and then I pick up Reznikoff's poems and start reading. I’m always struck by the same thought: This voice could only be his.
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