Janet Holmes's Poetry Month Pick, April 3, 2008
"1. Sunday Walks in the Suburbs"
from "A Fourth Group of Verse"
by Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976)On stones mossed with hot dust, no shade but the thin, useless shadows of roadside grasses;
into the wood’s gloom, staring back at the blue flowers on stalks thin as threads.The green slime—a thicket of young trees standing in brown water;
with knobs like muscles, a naked tree stretches up,
dead; and a dead duck, head sunk in the water as if diving.The tide is out. Only a pool is left on the creek’s stinking mud.
Someone has thrown a washboiler away.
On the bank a heap of cans;
rats, covered with rust, creep in and out.
The white edges of the clouds like veining in a stone.Janet Holmes Comments:
I wish the work of Charles Reznikoff were better known than it is. A son of Russian immigrant Jews, he was born in Brooklyn and lived in New York virtually all his life, trained (a bit) in journalism and (quite a bit more) in law, and worked as a poet under his own steam from high school onward. He self-published his earliest books, including the one from which this poem is taken, without self-consciousness; he withdrew two poems accepted by Poetry magazine’s Harriet Monroe so as to work on them further. The story of his grandfather, whose manuscript of unpublished poems in Hebrew was burned upon his death, seemed to haunt him, and he saw to it that his own work would be preserved in print even if he financed it himself—but he never sought out anyone’s approval. Later, both Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen would seek out and champion Reznikoff, credit him as a forebear, and even publish several of his books.This poem echoes Whitman's rhythms while anticipating William Carlos Williams and the Objectivist poets (primarily Zukofsky and Oppen) with its meticulous attention. Reznikoff moves us from the dry road with an ironic and anticipatory metaphor ("stones mossed with hot dust") into the unromantic, fetid suburban woods. He once said that he left journalism because its definition of "news" ("man bites dog") was the opposite of the materials of literature, which could be "nothing": the "nothing" of the slimy tidal pool with its dead duck, rusted washboiler, and rats. From him, the "naked" dead tree "with knobs like muscles" receives the same treatment as the young, live trees just as in his other work the lives of the poor, the immigrant, and (in Testimony and Holocaust) the criminal, victim, and participants on both sides of the Nazi genocide too are given voice. When "the white edges of the clouds like veining in a stone" arrive at the end of the poem, it is possible to see this moment, and the "blue flowers," and the "thicket of young trees" described earlier, as gold threads among the dross represented by garbage and slime. I am grateful for Reznikoff's spare and sometimes fragmentary diction, his unblinking gaze, his love for the world as it is, and his confidence that regardless of editorial fashion, his poems deserved to be read.
There’s an archive of sound recordings of Reznikoff (including an affectionate introduction by George Oppen).
About Janet Holmes:
Janet Holmes is author of F2f (U of Notre Dame, 2006), Humanophone (U of Notre Dame, 2001), The Green Tuxedo (U of Notre Dame, 1998), and The Physicist at the Mall (Anhinga, 1994). Her work has twice been included in the annual Best American Poetry anthologies, and she has received numerous prizes and honors for her writing, including grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and The Loft. Her recent work appears in 1913, Cutbank, Gutcult, MiPoesias, and Practice. She is director of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry publishing house at Boise State University, where she has taught in the MFA program since 1999.
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