See our last year’s posting on Charles Reznikoff (including Allen’s selection of recommended poetry, chosen “according to hardness, objectivity and vividness” – here )
Previous Reznikoff birthday postings – here, here, here, here and here
More recent scholarship:
Reading Charles Reznikoff – The Plain Sunlight of His Verse came out last year from Clemson University Press, (part of their Seminal Modernisms series), a lively collection of essays “exploring Reznikoff’s verse and its contemporary poetic and critical legacy in five movements”. See here
Joel Betteridge’s A Jewish Word or Two – Charles Reznikoff’s Modernism comes out this December from the University of Iowa Press, as part of their Contemporary North American Poetry series
“A Jewish Word or Two..”, the publishers note, “recasts Reznikoff ’s poetry as pleasurable and masterful even when disturbing. In their humor, their encounters with Jewish history, holiness, and identity, as well as their use of drama, horror, joy, and beauty, Reznikoff ’s poems help us celebrate what is simultaneously strange, surprising, lovely, and uncanny in our everyday lives.”
Poet Norman Finkelstein is very much in agreement – “Reznikoff is indeed a funny poet, despite the unbearable darkness of much of his work, and Bettridge opens that dimension with nuance.” Notwithstanding, “(his) understanding and analysis of the violence presented in Reznikoff’s documentary poems is far reaching and profound.”
Forthcoming (in 2027) the first English publication of the documentary poem Testimony from CB Editions) (There’ll be a live reading of the whole text of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London, location to be announced, with anyone who comes through the door welcome to take part). Concurrent with that, Julian Rothenstein’s Redstone Press will be publishing The Sound of the Street, selected poems by Reznikoff presented alongside photographs of early 20th-century New York by Berenice Abbott and others.
The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, (originally in two volumes. as Allen noted) was reprinted in 2005 by Black Sparrow/Godine as a single volume.
Godine is also responsible for the republication of Holocaust , a remarkable achievement in twentieth-century literature, another of Reznikoff’s extraordinary documentary volumes.