<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Dear Comrades,</p><p class="MsoNormal">On February 26, we met to discuss the first volume<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>(“Recitative 1885-1890”) of Charles
Reznikoff’s collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Testimony</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Reznikoff, who briefly served as a
lawyer, published the first part in the 1930s, drawing testimonials from actual
court documents to provide the language, narrative, and point of view for the
work. </p><p class="MsoNormal">We began with the question, “how is this poetry?” which is a
prelude to a common criticism of the work. <span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The poems of testimony are marked by a kind of flatness,
although clearly idiosyncratic speech patterns drawn from the testimonials
shape the poems often in different ways; however the flatness makes it
difficult to assess the poems in terms of persona and voice. In other words,
the language culled from the court documents does not immediately seem like
“poetic discourse.” In light of a narrow idea of what constitutes discursive
materials are open to poetic modes, this would seem a limitation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Testimony</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>At the same time, the materials of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Testimony</i> reveal immediately that what would be closed off from
poetry is history itself, especially in terms of the particularities of those
who lived in past moments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Testimony</i> then offers alternatives to
monumentalized notions of history and to an aestheticized art that precludes
direct experience or social commitment. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The poems draw attention to their own artifice insofar as
the many of the most conventional aspects of lyric poetry are absent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Reznikoff’s work foregrounds their own
existence as discourse because they are drawn not from “life” but are mediated
by way of reports and accounts offered by witnesses of various crimes and forms
of violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The language is,
however, the language of the everyday speech of people. Moreover, the lineation,
selection, and compression keep in view the role that composition has in the
process of communicating the narratives. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Thinking of Reznikoff’s contemporary moment, we noted the
general interest in documenting America that is reflected in the work of people
such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and others—work often supported by the
WPA. The poems then give specific accounts drawn from ordinary citizens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>These all lay bare the problems with
sexism, racism, and classism that occur within American culture and yet
struggle itself is never romanticized or made to seem heroic.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">We discussed the motivations of Reznikoff’s project, which
does not seem to be explicitly critical of the ideology of the U. S. and
American history and yet it certainly does not glorify or celebrate such things
either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>While there is a kind of
social realism that informs Reznikoff’s poems, it does not offer the sort of
condemnation that occurs in the novels of Upton Sinclair or Stephen Crane. </p><p class="MsoNormal">Given that the sources of Reznikoff’s sequences are drawn
from 1885-1890 (he would go further ahead in time when he returned to write
later sections of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Testimony</i>. In that
way, the timeframe is at a slight remove (recognizable to Reznikoff and his
contemporaries but still at a slight enough temporal distance for there to be an
available perspective), perhaps so that the stories are not bogged down in the
mire of contemporary political (and thus politicized) issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Still, the timeframe would be current
enough that impact of the cases and their implications in terms of an American
social reality would continue to be germane.</p><p class="MsoNormal">We discussed at length the fact that although Reznikoff
works to keep personality out of the poems, the work very often activates moral
responses because of—not despite--the flatness of the poems. The language then
reflects a lack of sympathy or empathy, but what is described (often scenes of
violence and depraved indifference[thank you, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Law & Order</i>!]) call out for such reactions. The question was
raised that if the poems present such violence and immorality, does the reader
become inured to the shock?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We
discussed this in terms of current media saturation that most people now
experience because of the twenty-year news.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Does the cumulative effect of Testimony change the experiece
of the individual moments and poems?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Does the moral force become dulled because of overfamiliaity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or is it possible that the reader’s
experience might devlop beyond first shock then oversaturuation, to a third
state?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Thus, as is evident, the question of how is <i>Testimony </i>poetry
led over the course of our two hour discussion to the moral, historical, and
social funcution of poetry within American culture. </p><p class="MsoNormal">A really informative, thoughtful article on Testimony and
legal discourse appeared in the Legal Studies forum and can be accessed at</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/29-1/watson.html">http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/29-1/watson.html</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> Below I will paste a scan ( as pulled from Steven Fama’s
blog <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/01/poetry-from-law-part-one.html">http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/01/poetry-from-law-part-one.html</a>)
from one of the court documents that Reznikoff read and incorporated into Testimony. </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">In the meantime,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Have a great rest of break,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming</p><p class="MsoNormal">+++++++++++</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p>We can compare the scan that follows to Reznikoff’s version:</o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The boy was only four years old<br>
and his mother left him on the front doorstep<br>
with his little sister; told them to stay there<br>
and went into the house to do her washing.<br>
The house was about two hundred feet from the railroad track<br>
and the boy and his sister climbed the embankment<br>
and the boy went upon the track.<br>
<br>
A freight train had just broken apart<br>
and the forward part of the train had gone by<br>
leaving about thirty feet between the forward part<br>
and the rear cars that followed.<br>
The boy took off his hat and waved good-by<br>
to the part of the train that had passed.<br>
His sister called to him to come back<br>
and he replied,<br>
“Why the train has gone by!”<br>
<br>
But he was run over by the cars that followed.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-no-proof:yes"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype
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