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 N.Y.U. law school graduate employed sporadically as an editor of legal encyclopedias and as a travelling 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 like 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 try to write some verse every day..".

Outstanding poets and critics present cultural readings of the Objectivist poets, a group whose works have been largely unexamined.

Yiddish literature and culture take a central position in Jewish literatures. They are shaped to a high degree, not least through migration, by encounter, transfer, and transformation. Translation, sustained by writers, translators, journalists amongst others, encompasses besides texts also discourses, concepts and medialities. The volume's contributions negotiate this dynamic field between Yiddish studies, translation and world literature in different spatial and temporal contexts. The focus on translation in Yiddish literature and culture allows insights into the glocal Yiddish cultural production as well as it delivers incentives to current transdisciplinary cultural theories.

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 personal memoirs, family history, and tenement tales in verse. 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.

By the Waters of Manhattan was Charles Reznikoff's first novel, published in 1930 by Charles Boni in New York. Part family saga, part bildungsroman, and part unrequited love story, the novel follows the lives of a Jewish family at the turn of the century from Elizavetgrad, Russia to Brownsville, Brooklyn, birthplace of the novel's protagonist, Ezekiel, a young poet in search of ways to feed his stomach and his soul. Like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Henry Roth, Reznikoff's subject is as much the great island of Manhattan, as it is its inhabitants.

A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.

The first major Jewish poet in America and a key figure of the Objectivist movement, Charles Reznikoff was a crucial link between the generation of Pound and Williams, and the more radical modernists who followed in their wake. A Menorah for Athena, the first extended treatment of Reznikoff's work, appears at a time of renewed interest in his contribution to American poetry. Stephen Fredman illuminates the relationship of Jewish intellectuals to modernity through a close look at Reznikoff's life and writing. He shows that when we regard the Objectivists as modern Jewish poets, we can see more clearly their distinctiveness as modernists and the reasons for their profound impact upon later poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bernstein. Fredman also argues that to understand Reznikoff's work more completely, we must see it in the context of early, nonsectarian attempts to make the study of Jewish culture a force in the construction of a more pluralistic society. According to Fredman, then, the indelible images in Reznikoff's poetry open a window onto the vexed but ultimately successful entry of Jewish immigrants and their children into the mainstream of American intellectual life.

"As poet and journalist, Zionist activist and public intellectual, Syrkin's work and actions illuminate a wide range of twentieth-century literary, cultural, and political concerns. Her passions demonstrate, as Irving Howe said, "a life of commitment to values beyond the self.""--

"Focusing on five poets of the New York literary scene in the period between 1910 and 1940, the author shows that fractioned ethnic and immigrant groups could locate democratic communities through innovative poetic forms in which belonging was produced not by identity narratives but through attention directed to particular genres"--

A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality? Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form. By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things.