Reznikoff at SFSU

It’s the birthday today of one of Allen’s great heroes – Charles Reznikoff.  We’ve featured Reznikoff extensively over the years on The Allen Ginsberg Project  – see, for example here    and “Meditation and Poetics”, a twelve-part transcription of Allen’s 1978 Naropa class devoted to him, starting here.

Our focus today is on the recently-digitalized video of his historic March 1974 reading at the SFSU Poetry Center – “Reznikoff reads nearly 60 poems from the span of his poetry that would soon be collected in the two-volume edition of his Complete Poems, 1918–1936, and 1937–1975, edited by Seamus Cooney for Black Sparrow Press, which appeared in 1976, (the year of Reznikoff’s death)”

This was supplanted by the one-volume edition, The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, that came out in 2005

Reznikoff is introduced by his friend, George Oppen. The two had read together at the Poetry Center a decade and more before in a memorable reading – (see here).

Charles Bernstein, a long-time enthusiast for Reznikoff’s work, addresses specifically this 1974 reading in his 1989 talk at the Cinquième Rencontres Internationales de Littérature à Royaumont  – see here 
and see also his essay “Reznikoff’s Voices”, (which can be found, along with the pretty-much-complete set of Reznikoff recordings available, on that extraordinary treasury of recorded sound  PennSound (which Charles both oversees and helped to create).

Happy Reznikoff Birthday!