Auster on Reznikoff

 Paul Auster, a writer I admire, wrote an essay on Charles Reznikoff, a poet I admire.

The essay is called “The Decisive Moment,” a reference to the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Auster thought that the feeling you get from one of Reznikoff’s short poems is like the feeling you get from looking at a photograph.

Consider the poem “Moonlit Night”:

The trees’ shadows lie in black pools in the lawns.

 

Auster says the poet was trying to see and record, to get a visual image. Reznikoff wandered the streets of New York as Cartier-Bresson wandered the streets of Paris, looking for images.

I knew that Reznikoff was a great walker. I did not know that he would walk 10 to 20 miles a day, from Brooklyn to Riverdale and back. And I did not know that Reznikoff had a dream of walking across the country, “stopping at synagogues along the way to give reading of his work in exchange for food and lodging,” a detail Auster provides in parentheses.

• Sources and notes: Paul Auster’s essay “The Decisive Moment” appears in The Art of Hunger and Other Essays; London: Menard Press, 1982. I found it at the Allen Ginsberg Project here:

https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/reznikoff/decisivemoment.html

I’m a Reznikoff fan, and there are many notes on the poet at this site, including “The case for Charles Reznikoff,” Dec. 10, 2022.