[Wgcp-whc] February 26, Testimony, Reznikoff, WHC 116, 3-5pm

[Jean-Jacques Poucel]

	Dear Fellow Poeticians,

	Our Beinecke session on Zaum and artificial languages needs to be  
indefinitely postponed (or, provisionally,) as Tim Young, our friend  
and trusted archivist of modern European literatures, has been under  
the weather--get well son, Tim!

	So, quick change of plans...

	Instead of reading (about) Russian avant-garde work written in 1913,  
for our next wgcp session, scheduled for February 26 (next Friday),  
3-5pm, in our usual location (WHC 116), we will interrogate Charles  
Reznikoff's Testimony, The United States 1885-1890 (Recitative),  
published in 1934. All are welcome.

	Photocopies will be available for pick-up by 2pm tomorrow (Friday)  
in our cubby hole near the reception desk at the WHC. If you'd prefer  
to have these documents e-mailed directly to you, please send a note  
to: jean-jacques.poucel at yale.edu

	Charles Reznikoff is an important American Objectivist poet, one of  
the few we've not yet read together as a group. Testimony is a  
powerful, sometimes disturbing, rewriting of legal documents  
Reznikoff sifted through while working for a law book company; it is  
not light reading. Our conversation will take as its primary point of  
departure (and analysis) the first volume of Testimony; those poems  
present the facts in cases stretching from 1885 to 1890.

	We may wish to discuss Reznikoff's work in relation to the questions  
of collage, editing, and serialization raised during our discussion  
with K. Waldrop. It would thus be useful to read a few short  
interviews and articles about the context, reception, and influence  
of this work (and other books by Reznikoff). To this end, I recommend:
	1. Michael Davidson's "On Testimony" essay, available (in brief) via  
the link below;
	2. a short chapter from C. Bernstein's My Way; and,
	3. a couple of chapters from Depression Glass: Documentary  
Photography and the Medium of the Camera Eye in C. Rezikoff, G.  
Oppen, W.C.Williams (M. Vescia)--the first provides a general intro  
to Objectivism in its historical context (with documentary as theme),  
the second relates more directly to Testimony.

	In addition, and for your reading pleasure (because tertiary for our  
purposes), I'm including herewith comments on Testimony from a legal  
journal, where, among other things, one is reminded that "People use  
dishonest language to protect themselves from other people's pain" ;  
and, last, but not least, reflections on the "Ineloquent Empathy" of  
Reznikoff's Holocaust.

	In the vein of fun (and discovery?) you may also care to hear  
Reznikoff read/speak--especially during his 1975 appearance on Susan  
Howe's radio program "Poetry Today"; there are numerous mp3 streaming  
on the web (cick links below).

	With great anticipation,

	Jean-Jacques Poucel
             Poetics group co-coordinator and sometimes scribe



SHORT BIO, EXCERPTS OF INTERVIEWS, EXCERPTS OF DAVIDSON ESSAY
http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/reznikoff/reznikoff.htm

"On Testimony" by M. DAVIDSON from Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern  
Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California, 1997)


NUMEROUS SOUND RECORDINGS
  http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Reznikoff.php

(nb - not readings from Testimony; often a bit cheerier)
(? was C.R. the first poet ever recorded at St Marks ?)






This article has useful appendices; here's its conclusion:








by Todd Carmody
University of Pennsylvania

This essay argues that Charles Reznikoff ’s Holocaust is a response  
to the controversy
that broke out among Jewish intellectuals in the wake of the trial of  
Adolf Eichmann. I
demonstrate that Reznikoff ’s documentary poems, drawn from  
transcripts of the Eichmann
and Nuremberg trials, work to undercut the politicization of survivor  
testimony
in the Israeli prosecution’s case against Eichmann. Reznikoff  
implicitly sides with Hannah
Arendt against the sentimental Zionist cause for which his wife Marie  
Syrkin and
Attorney General Gideon Hausner fought. My central claim is that  
Holocaust appropriates
survivors’ language in order to demonstrate the limits and political  
dangers of
appropriating emotion. As such, Reznikoff’s objectivist approach  
offers an alternative to
recent work on historical trauma, models that often call on us to  
identify with survivors
in order to understand the Holocaust.





55. L. Wittgenstein, Zettel,
155, p.28e





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