In Holocaust poet Charles Reznikoff's subject is people's suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government's record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff's own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust. He lets the terrible history unfold--in history's own words.

A major work by an essential American poet, published in full for the first time. Available again for the first time since 1978-and complete in one volume for the first time ever-Charles Reznikoff'sTestimonyis a lost masterpiece, a leg- endary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's "A" and William Carlos Williams'sPatersonas a milestone of modern American poetry. Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Reznikoff's book sets forth a stark panorama of late- 19th- and early 20th-century America-the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease-in a radically stripped-down lan- guage of almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff 's prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger.

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), the son of Russian garment workers, was an American original: a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from the Bronx to the Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He wrote narrative poems based on Old Testament sources. Above all, he wrote spare, intensely visual, epigrammatic poems, a kind of urban haiku. The language of these short poems is as plain as bread and salt, their imagery as crisp and unambiguous as a Charles Sheeler photograph. But their meaning is only hinted at: it is there in the selection of details, and in the music of the verse. Reznikoff was sincere and objective, a poet of great feeling who strove to honor the world by describing it precisely. He also strove to keep his feelings out of his poetry. He did not confess, he did not pose, he did not cultivate a myth of himself. Instead he created art-an unadorned art in praise of the world that God and men have made-and invited readers to bring their own feelings to it. In an age of ephemera, of first drafts rushed into print and soon forgotten, Reznikoff's poetry is a sturdy, well-wrought thing-"a girder, still itself / among the rubble." A timeless testament-impersonal, incorruptible, undeniably American-it will survive every change in literary fashion. Book jacket.

"Verse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle the chains." (from "The Revenge of the Poet-Critic") In My Way, (in)famous language poet and critic Charles Bernstein deploys a wide variety of interlinked forms—speeches and poems, interviews and essays—to explore the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging." Addressing many interrelated issues, Bernstein moves from the role of the public intellectual to the poetics of scholarly prose, from vernacular modernism to idiosyncratic postmodernism, from identity politics to the resurgence of the aesthetic, from cultural studies to poetry as a performance art, from the small press movement to the Web. Along the way he provides "close listening" to such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, as well as a fresh perspective on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine he coedited that became a fulcrum for a new wave of North American writing. In his passionate defense of an activist, innovative poetry, Bernstein never departs from the culturally engaged, linguistically complex, yet often very funny writing that has characterized his unique approach to poetry for over twenty years. Offering some of his most daring work yet—essays in poetic lines, prose with poetic motifs, interviews miming speech, speeches veering into song—Charles Bernstein's My Way illuminates the newest developments in contemporary poetry with its own contributions to them. "The result of [Bernstein's] provocative groping is more stimulating than many books of either poetry or criticism have been in recent years."—Molly McQuade, Washington Post Book World "This book, for all of its centrifugal activity, is a singular yet globally relevant perspective on the literary arts and their institutions, offered in good faith, yet cranky and poignant enough to not be easily ignored."—Publishers Weekly "Bernstein has emerged as postmodern poetry's sous-chef of insouciance. My Way is another of his rich concoctions, fortified with intellect and seasoned with laughter."—Timothy Gray, American Literature

Poems.

The Objectivists were a group of left-wing, mainly Jewish American poets who formed a brief though important alliance in the 1930s, when they felt poetry needed a new identity. The guiding principles of Objectivist poetry were fresh vocabulary and musical shaping, drawing on a stripped-down but radiant language of images and perceptions. The core of the group was formed by Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi, but Lorine Niedecker, Kenneth Rexroth and Muriel Rukeyser were affiliated players, as well as Basil Bunting in Britain. They are especially interesting to us today because they took up the challenge of experiment with a modern ambitious lyric poetry sharpened by their experience of the new metropolitan city. In the Objectivists' heyday, the Depression years, they laid down examples which have been picked up in turn by the Black Mountain Poets and the Beat Generation, and later by Postmodernism, and which still remain fruitful. The trademark smartness and brevity of Objectivist poetry, along with a vital commitment to the spirit of the century, make Andrew McAllister's anthology an exciting and relevant book for a new generation of poetry readers.

This landmark volume of correspondence by the great Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) sheds light not only on the difficulties of a dedicated artist trying to keep afloat in a materialistic society, but on the relation of poetry to a wider culture during an eventful and turbulent period of modern history. Most of the letters here date from the 1920s and 1930s, when the young Reznikoff, an NYU. law school graduate employed sporadically as an editor of legal encyclopedias and as a traveling salesman for his parents' millinery business, devotes his heart and soul to his writing--turning out poems, plays, short stories and novels which, for want of commercial takers, he himself publishes in small editions. Letters to magazine editors such as Henry Hurwitz of The Menorah Journal (the main forum for Reznikoff's early poetry and prose) and Harriet Monroe of Poetry (a 1931 issue, guest-edited by Reznikoff's friend Louis Zukofsky, launched his verse on a wider public) show the poet's meticulous attention to craft and revision. At the center of this volume are many intensely personal and revealing letters to the writer, teacher and Zionist activist Marie Syrkin, who in 1930 became Reznikoff's wife. During their courtship, Charles sends Marie drafts of poems along with declarations of love, somewhat uneasily confronting the problem of being a provider on a poet's income: I expect my love for you to feed my work--and my love for my work to feed you. Another major correspondent is a lifetime Reznikoff friend, the film producer, director and writer Albert Lewin, who for a time in the Thirties hired the poet as an editorial assistant. Initially intrigued by Hollywood's Arabian nightish lifestyle, Reznikoff dispatches lively reports on studio gossip to Marie back in New York. Before long, however, he is finding the celluloid business degrading, urging Lewin to give up movies to write, and then taking his own advice. To his friend he confides his poetic credo: The vertical' is the moment, the as / is; if possible from the top of the sky to the bottom of the earth. For that my instrument is the poem--and, of course I rarely succeed. But I will try to write some verse every day...