Charles Reznikoff graduated from New York University’s law school in 1915. He was admitted to the bar the next year, and only practiced law for a few months. Yet his legal training defined his life as a poet for the next sixty years, culminating with his final book, Holocaust. Fifty years after its initial publication, Reznikoff’s poetic engagement with the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, remains stunning and disturbing. Somewhat forgotten as a poet now, Reznikoff’s life is worth revisiting.

Born in Brooklyn in 1894, he went to the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism when he was 16, but soon realized he didn’t want to be a reporter. Shortly after his brief legal stint, Reznikoff sent a group of poems to Harriet Monroe to consider for Poetry magazine. “If you do care for them,” he wrote, “don’t bother sending me that $15 since Poetry needs it.” She accepted two poems, but they went back and forth on edits for so long that Reznikoff pulled the pieces to appear in a self-published volume in 1918. He expected to be drafted for military service, and could no longer work on someone else’s timeline. “Surely I can not wait a half year or a year before they print and then go get out my booklet,” he told his friend, “when I may be in France, hell or heaven.”

He finally appeared in Poetry in the 1931 issue, with a short sequence. The first stanza affirms his vision of silence:

All day the pavement has been black
With rain, but in our warm brightly-lit
Room, praise God,
I kept saying to myself,
And saying not a word,
Amen, you answered.

His work was selected by Louis Zukofsky, who guest edited the issue, and also contributed an essay titled “Sincerity and Objectification, With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.” Zukofsky argues that “Reznikoff’s shorter poems do not form mere pretty bits,” but instead “suggest… entire aspects of thought: economics, beliefs, literary analytics.” He sees Reznikoff’s project as one that “involves the process of active literary omission and a discussion of method finding its way in the acceptance of two criteria: sincerity and objectification.” The essay forwards the Objectivist mode as a formidable literary technique, and Reznikoff—even more than Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams—as its finest practitioner.

Reznikoff would go on to describe an Objectivist as a writer “who does not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears; who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law, and expresses his feelings indirectly, by the selection of his subject matter and, if he writes in verse, by its music.” The first edition of his multi-volume work, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), was published by the aptly named Objectivist Press, staffed by George Oppen, Zukofsky, Williams, and others (the publications of each book were largely funded by the writers themselves). Culled from court records, Testimony is lurid, jarring. The first pages are marked with death and sickness. One man, drunk or disoriented, stumbles out of a streetcar, and is led to the sidewalk: “Here he remained / in the drizzle.”

“The feeling is there in the selection of the material,” Reznikoff said of his poetic process. “You pick certain things that are significant—that’s your feeling. You don’t go into the feeling; you portray it as well as you can, hoping that somebody else reading the poem will get your feeling.” Reznikoff sought, accumulated, and shaped his material—and yet, in “the treatment of it, I abstain from comment.” The result is powerful: atrocities laid bare, without the rhetoric of ornamentation.

Testimony eventually grew to over 500 pages. He explained his process for the book using the example of testifying in court in a negligence case: “The judges of whether he is negligent or not are the jury in that case and that judges of what you say as a poet are the readers. That is, there is an analogy between testimony in the courts and the testimony of a poet.” Although an achievement in itself, the work was in some ways a proving ground for Reznikoff’s most essential book, Holocaust.

“Was it possible, then, that the central event of Jewish history in almost two thousand years defied the imagination and had best be surrounded by silence?”

The book begins with a policeman telling a man who “had come from Poland and had been in Germany almost thirty years” that he needed to go with his family to the police station. They were to take nothing with them, except their passports. Although they were told “you are going to come back right away,” they never did. From the police station they went to the town’s concern hall, and “then taken in police trucks to the railway station,” where they passed through harassing crowds.

By the end of the first page, thousands of Polish Jews have been expelled from Germany. Reznikoff’s style is stenographic:

The rain was driving hard
and the Poles had no place to put them
but in stables,
the floors covered with horse dung.

The pared-down lines might feel like a poetic abdication, but that means an assumption of the poetic mode toward ornamentation and figuration. Reznikoff voiced his hesitancy about writing the book-length poem and its subject to Milton Hindus, a scholar from Brandeis. Hindus conjectured: “If even the expressions of survivors sometimes seemed to be little better than exploitative ‘Kitsch’ and those of others more sincere and genuine proved repetitive, diminishing and sentimental, was it possible for an American Jew to do any better?” For Hindus, there existed “an abyss of cliche, propaganda and editorialism in the subject which even the wariest writer might have difficulty in avoiding. Was it possible, then, that the central event of Jewish history in almost two thousand years defied the imagination and had best be surrounded by silence?”

“The scenes of Holocaust unfold in Eastern Europe, but Reznikoff seems to suggest they could happen anywhere, at any time…”

Reznikoff’s project in Holocaust is to reconfigure silence. His annotations of trial records reveal his deep engagement with the texts: notes, questions, rephrasings, extensions and reconsiderations. He didn’t simply select, extract, and reproduce lines from these primary sources; he worked them over in the furnace of poetry. In late revisions, he decided to “eliminate all unnecessary words or phrases,” which included changing “all Latin or French terms to words of Anglo-Saxon origin.”

The lean language—and Reznikoff’s factual method—makes the unbelievable real, as when a woman with a baby is shot, and the S.S. officer “laughed / and tore the baby apart as one would tear a rag.” In the ghetto, living bodies were “swollen with hunger / or terribly thin.” Corpses were “gnawed at by rats; / and crows had come down in flocks / to peck at the bodies.” There are no developed characters here; rather a litany of people characterized by their relation to others (father, sister, children) and their manner of death.

Janet Sutherland has noted that “the scenes of Holocaust unfold in Eastern Europe, but Reznikoff seems to suggest they could happen anywhere, at any time, for the nature of man which has given rise to these scenes is constant, unchanging.” Her observation is certainly true, but Holocaust derives much of its power by being absolutely about a particular moment. One particular scene comes to mind:

An old man carrying pieces of wood to burn
from a house that had been torn down:
there had been no order against this—
and it was cold.
An S.S. commander saw him
and asked where he had taken the wood,
and the old man answered from a house that had been torn down.
But the commander drew his pistol,
put it against the old man’s throat
and shot him.

In a 1961 letter to his wife, Reznikoff wills to her “everything I have, tangible and intangible.” He adds: “Incidentally, although I do not think the occasion will arise in the immediate future—and I certainly hope not—I want you to know that I want the simplest possible Orthodox Jewish funeral—burial in a plain wooden box and no speeches.” There is certainly a place in poetry—and in life—for rhetorical language. There is also a time for the stark, severe truth.