[Wgcp-whc] testifying on behalf of Testimony

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Mon Mar 15 15:25:52 EDT 2010


Dear Comrades,

On February 26, we met to discuss the first volume  (“Recitative  
1885-1890”) of Charles Reznikoff’s collection Testimony.  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.

We began with the question, “how is this poetry?” which is a prelude  
to a common criticism of the work.  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 Testimony.  At  
the same time, the materials of Testimony 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.  Testimony  
then offers alternatives to monumentalized notions of history and to  
an aestheticized art that precludes direct experience or social  
commitment.



The poems draw attention to their own artifice insofar as the many of  
the most conventional aspects of lyric poetry are absent.  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.  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.



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.  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.



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.  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.

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 Testimony. 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.  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.

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, Law & Order!]) 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?  We discussed this in terms of  
current media saturation that most people now experience because of  
the twenty-year news.  Does the cumulative effect of Testimony change  
the experiece of the individual moments and poems?  Does the moral  
force become dulled because of overfamiliaity?  Or is it possible that  
the reader’s experience might devlop beyond first shock then  
oversaturuation, to a third state?



Thus, as is evident, the question of how is Testimony poetry led over  
the course of our two hour discussion to the moral, historical, and  
social funcution of poetry within American culture.

A really informative, thoughtful article on Testimony and legal  
discourse appeared in the Legal Studies forum and can be accessed at

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/29-1/watson.html

  Below I will paste a scan ( as pulled from Steven Fama’s blog http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/01/poetry-from-law-part-one.html) 
  from one of the court documents that Reznikoff read and incorporated  
into Testimony.



In the meantime,

Have a great rest of break,

Richard Deming

+++++++++++

We can compare the scan that follows to Reznikoff’s version:



The boy was only four years old
and his mother left him on the front doorstep
with his little sister; told them to stay there
and went into the house to do her washing.
The house was about two hundred feet from the railroad track
and the boy and his sister climbed the embankment
and the boy went upon the track.

A freight train had just broken apart
and the forward part of the train had gone by
leaving about thirty feet between the forward part
and the rear cars that followed.
The boy took off his hat and waved good-by
to the part of the train that had passed.
His sister called to him to come back
and he replied,
“Why the train has gone by!”

But he was run over by the cars that followed.



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