Collected Prose

preordained birthright, automatically take possession of our surroundings. Each moment, each thing, must be earned, wrested away from the confusion of inert matter by a steadiness of gaze, a purity of perception so intense that the effort, in itself, takes on the value of a religious act. The slate has been wiped clean. It is up to the poet to write his own book.
    Tiny poems, many of them barely a sentence long, make up the core of Reznikoff’s work. Although his total output includes fiction, biography, drama, long narrative poems, historical meditations, and book-length documentary poems, these short lyrics are the Ur-texts of Reznikoff’s imagination: everything else follows from them. Notable for their precision and simplicity, they also run counter to normal assumptions about what a poem should aspire to be. Consider these three examples:
April
The stiff lines of the twigs
blurred by buds.

Moonlit Night
The trees’ shadows lie in black pools in the lawns.

The Bridge
In a cloud bones of steel.

    The point is that there is no point. At least not in any traditional sense. These poems are not trying to drum home universal truths, to impress the reader with the skill of their making, or to invoke the ambiguities of human experience. Their aim, quite simply, is clarity. Of seeing and of speaking. And yet, the unsettling modesty of these poems should not blind us to the boldness of their ambition. For even in these tiniest of poems, the gist of Reznikoff’s poetics is there. It is as much an ethics of the poetic moment as it is a theory of writing, and its message never varies in any of Reznikoff’s work: the poem is always more than just a construction of words. Art, then, for the sake of something — which means that art is almost an incidental by-product of the effort to make it. The poem, in all instances, must be an effort to perceive, must be a moving outward . It is less a mode of expressing the world than it is a way of being in the world. Merleau-Ponty’s account of contemplation in The Phenomenology of Perception is a nearly exact description of the process that takes place in a Reznikoff poem:
    … when I contemplate an object with the sole intention of watching it exist and unfold its riches before my eyes, then it ceases to be an allusion to a general type, and I become aware that each perception, and not merely that of sights which I am discovering for the first time, re-enacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some element of creative genius about it: in order that I may recognize the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath this familiar meaning, the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to outline the individual idea of this tree.

    Imagism, yes. But only as a source, not as a method. There is no desire on Reznikoff’s part to use the image as a medium for transcendence, to make it quiver ineffably in some ethereal realm of the spirit. The progress from symbolism to imagism to objectivism is more a series of short-circuits than a direct lineage. What Reznikoff learned from the Imagists was the value — the force — of the image in itself, unadorned by the claims of the ego. The poem, in Reznikoff’s hands, is an act of image-ing rather than of imagining. Its impulse is away from metaphor and into the tangible, a desire to take hold of what is rather than what is merely possible. A poem fit to the measure of the perceived world, neither larger than this world nor smaller than it. “I see something,” Reznikoff stated in a 1968 interview with L. S. Dembo, “and I put it down as I see it. In the treatment of it, I abstain from comment. Now, if I’ve done something that moves me — if I’ve portrayed the object well — somebody will come along and also be moved, and somebody else will come along and say, ‘What the devil is this?’ And maybe  they’re both right.”
    If the poet’s primary obligation is to see, there is a similar though less obvious injunction upon the poet — the duty of not being seen. The Reznikoff equation, which weds seeing to invisibility, cannot be made except by renunciation. In order to see, the poet must make himself invisible. He must disappear, efface himself in anonymity.
I like the sound of the street—
but I, apart and alone,
beside an open window
and behind a closed door.

    *
I am alone—
and glad to be alone;
I do not like people who walk