“The child, about six, thin and feeble and sick of a disorder of its bowels, was whipped by its father for befouling its bed: twenty or more “licks” with a switch as thick as its father’s finger, and large “whelks” left on its body. And then, on a cold and rainy December day, sent to its grandfather’s in another county— where it died in a few days.”
“Reznikoff learned the value of concision from Pound’s and William Carlos Williams’s Imagism. Out of thousands of volumes of court cases and hundreds of pages of transcripts in some trial, he took only this to make a poem out of it: When they told her husband that she had lovers all he said was: one of them might have a cigar and set the barn on fire.”
“Reznikoff’s poetry is written in plain language the kind that “cats and dogs can read,” as Marianne Moore put it, a language freed of the sentiments and poetic verbiage that poetry inherited from the Romantics. “I put it down as I see it,” he told an interviewer. The eye has knowledge the mind cannot share. “A poem in his hands,” Paul Auster said, “is an act of image-ing, rather than of imagining.” When Reznikoff was young he walked twenty miles per day. Older, he forced himself to keep a pace of less than two miles per hour so he could see everything he wanted to see. He brings to mind that other solitary wanderer and image-hunter of New York City, Joseph Cornell. Reznikoff wrote thousands of poems, but his best ones, everyone agrees, tend to be short and rely on an image or two to captivate the reader’s imagination and suggest some broader meaning. Here are two short ones and one longer one from his early years:”
“The tramp with torn shoes and clothing dirty and wrinkled— dirty hands and face— takes a comb out of his pocket and carefully combs his hair.”
“Rainy Season It has been raining for three days. the faces of the giants on the bill-boards still smile, but the gilt has been washed from the sky: we see the iron world.”
“Millinery District The clouds, piled in rows like merchandise, become dark; lights are lit in the lofts; the milliners, tacking bright flowers on straw shapes, say, glancing out of the windows, It is going to snow; and soon they hear the snow scratching the panes. By night it is high on the sills. The snow fills up the footprints in the streets, the ruts of wagons and of motor trucks. Except for the whir of the car brushing the tracks clear of snow, the streets are hushed. At closing time, the girls breathe deeply the clean air of the streets sweet after the smell of merchandise.”
“As for Testimony, if you’ve heard of found poetry, that brainchild of the Dadaists, then you are familiar with a claim that any mundane bit of writing (from a circus poster to bathroom graffiti) can, once taken out of its context and with little or no tinkering, become a poem, then, surely, what we have here is the first found epic poem.”
“What is missing from Testimony is the customary idealistic hero, the one last encountered in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass who doesn’t avert his eyes from suffering and sordidness, but who nevertheless is full of hope for a better future. Testimony is a corrective, an anti-epic. Reznikoff shares with Whitman a sympathy for the underdog, a desire to convey just how hard the lives of many Americans are. The crimes and vices of other countries are surely as bad, but is the violence among their citizenry as prevalent and as lethal, their brutality and sadism so commonplace, their acts of injustice as frequent as ours? It should not be surprising that Testimony is rarely assigned at our colleges and universities these days; it causes too much discomfort to those who prefer to know nothing about what goes on in the world. This may be precisely what Reznikoff intended with a book like this. Let whoever reads it be upset.”