Emma Lazarus, Charles Reznikoff, and the Origins of Documentary Poetics

“Talking Hebrew in every language under the sun”: Emma Lazarus, Charles Reznikoff, and the Origins of Documentary Poetics

Joshua Logan Wall

Modernism/modernity, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 27-49 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2020.0001

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751790

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] “Talking Hebrew in every language under the sun”: Emma Lazarus, Charles Reznikoff, and the Origins of Documentary Poetics

Joshua Logan Wall

modernism / modernity

volume twenty seven, Perhaps the first prose poem in English appeared in one of number one, pp 27–49. © 2020 the most conventional venues available: the March 1887 issue of johns hopkins The Century, postbellum America’s leading magazine of thought university press and letters, hardly an outlet for poetic experiment. The opening lines to John Vance Cheney’s “In the Lane,” from the same issue, better represent the magazine’s genteel aesthetics: “And art thou then, my heart, too old / Ever to leap with love again.” Yet there it is, sandwiched between “Memoranda on the Civil War” and an article on “The Coinage of the Greeks,” signaling its debt to Charles Baudelaire’s posthumous, formally innovative, and still-untranslated Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose: Emma Lazarus’s seven-poem sequence, “By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose,” examining Jewish exilic history and culture from the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 to the present.1 Among the last poems published in Lazarus’s lifetime (she would Joshua Logan Wall is die of cancer that November), this sequence, alongside her move- a Lecturer in English at ment toward an historical, document-based poetics, represents the University of Michi- an overlooked prehistory to the experimental poetics of the first gan. His book project, decades of the twentieth century. Situating Poetry: Perfor- These “Little Poems in Prose” are among the earliest examples mance and Covenant in of the suite of formal practices that, associated with modernism, American Literature, ex- plores the relationships have come to be called documentary poetics.2 This sequence sug- among genre, form, gests an alternate genealogy for the form that does not flow from religion, ethnicity, and the experiments of Ezra Pound’s early Cantos or the influence immigration in modern of photographic and filmic documentary on poets like Muriel American poetry. MODERNISM / modernity 28 Rukeyser in the 1930s, but precedes and ultimately converges with these histories. “By the Waters of Babylon” reveals not the adaptation of poetic form to grapple with ethnic experience, but the independent innovation of key modernist practices precisely through that encounter. Witnessing this enables us to imagine ethnic literature beyond narratives of identity, to discover how even a poem with no or minimal ethnic content, such as Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, might yet be “about” ethnic or immigrant experience once we take into account the development of the forms which shape it. Such readings are necessary. As Dorothy Wang argues, scholarship suffers from a “double-standard in poetry studies” in which “[f]orm, whether that of traditional lyric or avant-garde poems, is assumed to be the provenance of a literary acumen and culture that is unmarked but assumed to be white.”3 The result, as she puts it, is that “[c]ritics are more likely to think about formal questions—say, poetic tone and syntax—when speaking about [John] Ashbery’s poems but almost certainly to focus on political or black ‘content’ when examining the works of Amiri Baraka” (Wang, Thinking Its Presence, xx).4 Lazarus’s development of a document-based poetics in the final years of her life, as she increasingly grappled with Jewish history, immigration, language, and a racial- ized religious difference, roots the emergence of poetic innovation not in a belated influence of ethnically-unmarked writing onto ethnic verse, but through the encounter with life as an ethnic and religious outsider in the United States. Tracing the parallels between Lazarus’s late experiments and the emergence of Reznikoff’s document-based poetics from his engagement with biblical translation and Jewish history suggests a new framework for reading modernist documentary poetry. Reznikoff was, with Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, one of the founders of the Objectivist circle of poets; his works combine the avant-garde influence of Pound’s Imagism and engagement with found texts with social views in sympathy with those of Depression-era leftist modernists. An American modernist deeply engaged with questions of Jewish and immigrant experience, his experimental magnum opus, Testimony, contains no Jewish figures or themes. Testimony emerges as an ethnic poem through its formal characteristics, not its content. As with Lazarus, Reznikoff’s documentary poetics emerge from Jewish intellectual and literary practices: traditions of biblical reception, translation, and hermeneutics. This process in turn reveals how the innovation of a central and pervasive practice of modernist poetics might itself be read as emerging from the experience of ethnic outsiders in the United States—uncovering the ways in which even a poem with minimal or no ethnic content might, by means of the very form which shapes it, give voice to ethnic or immigrant subjectivity. Poetic form, as a mode of apprehending and thinking about the world, can take its shape from such experience, regardless of the presence or absence of ethnic “content.” This story differs from those usually told about documentary poetics, which only associate it with ethnic poetry following World War II (with, for example, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” 1947). Such belatedness holds across accounts that em- phasize Depression-era, leftist modernist works influenced by film, photography, and newsprint—“poetry,” as Jahan Ramazani puts it, “that steeps itself in journalistic data and reportage”—and in those that focus on the earlier, avant-garde emphasis on the WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” found, historical text pioneered by Pound’s Cantos during the 1920s.5 While its high 29 modernist and expatriate practitioners like Pound and H.D. are, indeed, Anglo-Amer- ican writers, that scholarship would read much early leftist modernism as ethnically- unmarked was not a given. Many of its exemplars, including Muriel Rukeyser, Tillie Olson, and Mike Gold, along with Reznikoff, were Jews who at various moments in their careers wrote poems more readily identifiable as “Jewish” or “ethnic,” engaging explicitly with questions of Jewish history and identity. But by acknowledging the continuities between modernist and late-nineteenth- century American poetry, these works come into focus differently.6 Documentary poetics, already a broad tent of practices from Pound’s poems containing historical documents to Kenneth Fearing’s newsreel collages to contemporary erasure poems, includes practices that predate modern technologies of documentation. As Barbara Foley contends in her study of documentary fiction, the twentieth century has no exclu- sive claim to literary engagement with earlier documents.7 Indeed, even documentary culture as a filmic, new media practice, Thomas S. Davis argues, has its aesthetic roots in earlier decades.8 This should not surprise us. The era of immigration that stretched from the early 1880s through the early 1920s changed the character of the nation’s cities and temporarily unsettled the binaries that defined American “whiteness.” While the aesthetics of the Gilded Age’s Fireside poets rejected engagement with social contexts, they energized others, such as Lazarus, just as they did the realist and naturalist novel- ists whose experiments are long acknowledged. To offer two Jewish poets as examples of the claim that modernist poetic innovations associated with Anglo-American high modernists might emerge from American ethnic experience will strike some as uncontroversial and others as questionable. Today, indeed, Jews of European descent have entered into American “whiteness”—quite like Irish-, Italian-, Southern-, and Eastern-Europeans once classified as “ethnic whites.” But neither whiteness nor its others are transhistorical constants. Jews may (or may not) be “white” in the twenty-first century; that debate has little bearing on the fact that, when Lazarus and Reznikoff wrote, bookending the period of mass immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, Jews (or “Hebrews” or “Israelites”) were regularly seen and singled out as a distinct race or nationality. The period’s political rhetoric questioned whether Italians, the Irish, and especially Jews could ever truly become Americans.9 As Jewish Americans during this time, both Lazarus and Reznikoff grappled with questions of national and religious belonging, multilingualism, cultural continuity and rupture, civic acceptance, and bigotry: experiences which continue to inform ethnic subjectivity and literature in the United States.

“I have done little more than elaborate and versify”

Emma Lazarus has been cursed by the fact that her best-known poem—the poem that, engraved on a plaque inside the base of the Statue of Liberty, will likely always remain her best-known poem—is a sonnet. “Lazarus,” Michael Weingrad observed in 2003, “is not a figure we usually associate with literary experimentation” (“Jewish MODERNISM / modernity 30 Identity,” 107). Indeed. And despite his gestures toward the proto-avant-garde style of “By the Waters of Babylon,” she still is not. Julian Levinson and Ranen Omer- Sherman examine her innovative exploration of a joint Jewish and American identity, but not formal experiment; Max Cavitch and Daniel Marom do attend to Lazarus’s poetic form, but their studies reveal her as a master and manipulator of the sonnet.10 Zachary Turpin offers a striking re-evaluation of Lazarus as a queer poet, but limits her “program of experimentation” to content: rather “than exceed the limits of traditional form . . . Lazarus chose to adhere to them . . . and instead to bend or break the rules of subject.”11 Though Lazarus’s formal experiments remain overlooked, after her turn to Jewish history and subjectivity she increasingly develops a document-based poetics that, less than forty years after her death, would become a central practice of modernist poetics. Considering the experience of religious and ethnic otherness pushes her to seek out forms beyond the limits of poetic convention. With the assassination of Czar Alexander II in March 1881, global Jewish history intruded onto American Jewish life. Official and unofficial propaganda blamed Russia’s Jews for the death of the Czar and, in the years that followed, they were subjected to regular police and civilian violence. These pogroms, as they came to be known, were capable of community-destroying force. Combined with severe legal restrictions im- posed on Jewish life by the 1882 May Laws, this violence led to a massive increase in Jewish emigration and served as one of the first focal points of American debates about human rights, refugees, and humanitarian aid. The American Jewish community, until then primarily composed of wealthy families of Sephardi (Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch) descent who, like the Lazaruses, had been in the Americas since the Colonial period as well as German-speaking Jews who had arrived in recent decades, mobilized to provide material support for and advocate on behalf of these refugees. Lazarus, through her work for the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, was among them.12 Poems including “By the Waters of Babylon,” her collection Songs of a Semite (1882), and sonnets such as “The New Colossus,” “1492,” and “The New Ezekiel” took part in this effort through their examination of Jewish history. These works extend Lazarus’s already-existing interest in reimagining biblical tales and translating earlier Jewish poets to suggest the fates of Jews and the United States are intertwined. Drawing on the biblical tropes of American political rhetoric, she insists that if the United States could be the Promised Land or New Jerusalem of the Puritan imagination, the land to which they came viewing themselves as new Israelites leaving Europe in a modern-day exodus, then it could certainly play that role for the oppressed Jews of 1881. So the first of her “Little Poems in Prose” is “The Exodus (August 3, 1492),” which depicts the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and its fifth poem, “Currents,” takes up the Russian Jewish refugees of her own time. The remaining five poems explore the role(s)—poet, prophet, and philosopher chief among them—that Jews might play in the modern world (and especially the United States), paying particular attention to what the “Orient Jew” and her modern, Americanized cousin might offer each other.13 Her exploration of this relationship marks this poem as the first instance of the self-consciously Jewish American writer.14 WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” In doing so, Lazarus breaks radically from conventional prosody and verse forms; 31 “By the Waters of Babylon” also has a claim to being one of the first (if not the first) self-consciously documentary poems, drawing on and incorporating the King James Bible as a found text, as in Pound’s use of John Adams’s letters or Reznikoff’s use of law reports. Instead of including and reshaping the language of the original, as those poets do, Lazarus turns to the visual field of the biblical text as her documentary source. This effect, unfortunately, has been lost in posthumous publications of “By the Waters of Babylon,” whether one turns to the 1888 Poems of Emma Lazarus or the 2005 Library of America Selected Poems.15 Consider, for instance, the first page of the poem as printed in The Century alongside a page from the 1611 Authorized version of the King James Bible (figs. 1 and 2). Where later editions simply print the poem as plain text in numbered verses that vaguely recall the KJV, the original’s biblical engagement goes beyond this basic typographical feature. In each double-columned text, the numbered prose verse appears not (as in many contemporary editions of the Bible) sequentially within a paragraph, but sits, indented, on a new line at each verse. The opening letter of “The Exodus” is, like that of the King James Book of Exodus, an illuminated initial in a square frame. Careful scrutiny of Lazarus’s initial “T” reveals more than the reduplication of the letter on an overlapping pile of leaves—a miniscule “H” and “E” appear in the lower-right quadrant, mimicking the medieval and early modern practice of incorporating the full first word into the design of the initial. And this, in turn, recalls Pound’s use of the same technique in A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925).16 Centered and capitalized, the numbered title of each “Little Poem” in Lazarus’s sequence takes on the form and position of the numerical chapter headings in the King James. At the same time that the language, narrative, and formatting of Lazarus’s poetry draw on the style of the source-text, she visually documents it as well, producing a poetic photo- graph that captures and cites the entire visual field of a page of the KJV. In doing so, Lazarus effectively blends and blurs the two strands of documentary poetics—Pound’s engagement with textual documents and leftist modernism’s engagement with visual documentation—decades before either had ostensibly been invented. This innovation did not burst forth fully formed. “By the Waters of Babylon” represents the culmination of a document-based, citational poetics that had emerged gradually over the previous eight years. Poems such as “In Exile,” “The Valley of Baca,” and “The Birth of Man” explicitly cite the non-poetic source material on which they are based, while others, such as “The Banner of the Jew,” were footnoted by Lazarus herself to offer explanation of historical figures. (Such citations also appear on the page of the KJV in fig. 2, where marginal notes cross-reference the biblical text with other passages.) In these works, she turned with growing frequency and intensity to Jewish subjectivity in the United States and throughout history. This differs from the rare but occasional use of citation in her early poetry. “Tannhäuser” (1870), for instance, includes an endnote on the time frame of its composition and that of her “Admetus,” insisting that “the imputation of plagiarism already made in private circles” was false, seeking to establish that her poems had preceded that year’s publication of William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. Similarly, the footnote offered in “On the Proposal MODERNISM / modernity 32

▲ Fig. 1. “By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose,” The Century, March 1887.

to Erect a Monument in England to Lord Byron” reads as Lazarus’s effort to avoid the same charge: she sets aside two lines in italics and quotation marks, and the note merely states: “Cain, Act I, Scene I,” referencing Byron’s 1821 drama (Poems, 1:152). In later poems taking up themes of Jewish life and history, however, Lazarus’s notes and documentary practices grow frequent and reveal no concern with charges of plagiarism. Rather, these citations claim the authority and authenticity of an historical document and the record it represents. The use of an “Extract from a letter of a Russian refugee in Texas” as an epigraph to “In Exile,” the historical note on the Maccabees in “The Banner of the Jew,” and the source note connecting “The Birth of Man” to the Talmud all attest to a desire to mark the poem’s text and content as historically real. WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” 33

▲ Fig. 2. King James Bible (1611 printing).

The most extensive and fully developed examples of her documentary poetics before “By the Waters of Babylon” are the 1880 verse drama The Dance to Death and the 1882 poem, “An Epistle from Joshua Ibn Vives of Allorqui.”17 Both deploy citation to foreground their engagement with and origins in earlier documents—and the events that produced them. The Dance to Death, a closet drama, tells of the demise of a medieval German-Jewish community as their Christian neighbors blame them for the Black Plague and then attempt to stave off its arrival by burning them alive. Lazarus weaves a melodramatic plot of mistaken identity into this narrative, culminating with a striking meditation on Jewish identity when a woman born to Christians but adopted by Jews chooses to die as the latter rather than live as the former. The text of the play is marked by an array of footnotes sourcing passages and lines of dialogue, and offering historical context. These include explanations of and citations to Jewish liturgy (the burial service, Yom Kippur, the blessing on seeing a great scholar), an anti-Semitic “rhyme of the times” from the German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews, and the insistent declaration, after the decree condemning the town’s Jewish population has been read aloud, that “This is an authentic document” (Lazarus, Poems, 2:138). Lazarus even ends The Dance to Death on a footnote:

The plot and incidents of this Tragedy are taken from a little narrative entitled “Der Tanz zum Tode; ein Nachstück aus dem vierzehnten Jahrhundert,” (The Dance to Death—a Night-piece of the fourteenth century). By Richard Reinhard. Compiled from authentic documents communicated by Professor Franz Delitzsch. (2:172) MODERNISM / modernity 34 Lazarus does more than allow readers to see the way in which The Dance to Death contains other documents. She also openly presents the precise way in which the Bible, liturgy, and historical texts are adapted: trimmed here, elaborated there, transformed from prose to verse throughout. Süsskind von Orb, a leader of the town’s Jews, offers an extended metaphor on the eternity of, if not this Jewish community, then the larger Jewish people:

Rather a vine, full-flowered, golden-branched, Ambrosial-fruited, creeping on the earth, Trod by the passer’s foot, yet chosen to deck Tables of princes. Israel now has fallen Into the depths, he shall be great in time. (2:164)

Lazarus provides a footnote to these lines:

The vine creeps on the earth, trodden by the passer’s foot, but its fruit goes upon the table of princes. Israel now has fallen in the depths, but he shall be great in the fullness of time.—Talmud (2:164)

This is not the fear of accusations of plagiarism that informed her earliest poetic footnotes, but its opposite: providing the text in order to show the similarities, to show the ways in which it has been swallowed by her poem. Foregrounding this documentary sourcing achieves two ends that emerge from the play’s immigrant and Jewish American contexts: first, it provides a degree of historical verification, indicating, like the refer- ences to Graetz throughout, that these events and words either did or plausibly could have occurred as described. Second, it links Jewish intellectual and cultural history, through the Talmud, with Lazarus’s own medium: poetry. As the raw stuff of Lazarus’s blank verse, the Talmud is cast not as dry, arcane legalisms but as cultural ferment capable of contributing to the American literary scene. This very textual engagement, moreover, reproduces that of the Talmud itself—known for its Russian-doll layout of texts and commentaries—thus grounding both Lazarus’s poem and its document-based poetics in Jewish textual culture. Lazarus goes beyond the documentary paratexts of The Dance to Death in a note that prefaces “An Epistle.” In it, she describes her textual practices in language mir- roring that used by modernist documentary poets. “In this poem,” she writes, “I have done little more than elaborate and versify the account given in Graetz’s History of the Jews (Vol. VIII., page 77), of an Epistle actually written in the beginning of the 15th century by Joshua ben Joseph Ibn Vives to Paulus de Santa Maria” (2:45). This documentary practice, reading through the many volumes of Graetz’s work to find the raw material for her poetry, does not differ greatly from what Reznikoff would describe in his “Foreword” to “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (1932), the first published version of what would become Testimony: “I glanced through several hundred volumes of old-cases—not a great many as law reports go—and found almost all that follows. I am indebted to the reporters and judges not only for the facts but for phrases and WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” sentences” (14). From the beginning of this verse adaptation of a challenge to Paulus, 35 a rabbi, convert to Catholicism, and inquisitor in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Spain, Lazarus insists that readers recognize her poetics have not simply been inspired by Graetz, but that reading and adapting his prose constitutes an original and specific practice of poetic composition. Five and a half pages of “Notes to ‘Epistle’ of Joshua Ibn Vives of Allorqui” follow “An Epistle” in both Songs of a Semite and Poems of Emma Lazarus. Together with her introductory note, they create a second way of reading and experiencing the poem: not only working through the stanzas themselves, but going back and comparing her poem to the source-texts she provides (the bulk of the “Notes” are not simply citations, but relevant excerpts from Graetz). Lazarus offers specific sources for specific lines, setting them against one another and laying out her compositional practices for readers to examine. “Verses 29 and 30,” she writes, “are paraphrases from an epistle to Paulus by Chasdai Crescas,” a fourteenth-century Spanish-Jewish rationalist philosopher. She then cites the passage in full:

These are burning questions, from which the fire of the stake may be kindled. Christianity gives itself out as a new revelation in a certain sense completing and improving Judaism. But the revelation has so little efficacy, that in the prolonged schism in the Church, a new divine message is already needed to scatter the dangerous errors. Two Popes and their partisans fulminate against each other bulls of excommunication and condemn each other to profoundest hell. Where is the truth and certainty of revelation?” [Graetz’s History of the Jews]. (Lazarus, Poems, 2:257, emphasis mine)

And verses (stanzas) 29 and 30:

XXIX.

I handle burning questions, good my lord, Such as may kindle fagot, well I wis. Your Gospel not denies our older Word, But in a way completes and betters this. The Law of Love shall supersede the sword, So runs the promise, but the facts I miss. Already needs this wretched generation, A voice divine—a new, third revelation.

XXX.

Two Popes and their adherents fulminate Ban against ban, and to the nether hell Condemn each other, while the nations wait Their Christ to thunder forth from Heaven, and tell Who is his rightful Vicar, reinstate His throne, the hideous discord to dispel. Where shall I seek, master, while such things be, Celestial truth, revealed certainty! (2:56, emphasis mine) MODERNISM / modernity 36 The phrases I have italiczed in Lazarus’s verses and their sources in Crescas’s letter reveal both the elaboration and versification Lazarus describes in her prefatory note. Lazarus “elaborates” in order to draw out her defense of Jewish difference and critique of Christian supersessionism—just as she does throughout the poem, extend- ing Graetz’s three-page summary of controversies surrounding Paulus to thirty-four eight-line stanzas across thirteen pages. But when she takes words or phrases directly from the document, Lazarus is loyal to the original—except where the need to “versify” requires change. She keeps these minimal, as in the first line of the thirtieth verse, “Two Popes and their adherents fulminate.” She merely swaps Crescas’s “partisans” for “adherents.” Doing so allows her to keep the line itself loyal to the poem’s iambic pentameter while changing nothing else: she exchanges the two stresses of “partisans” for the single stress of “adhérents.” All told, Lazarus’s introduction and notes to “An Epistle” overstate her reliance on historical documents and understate the role and extent of her own elaboration (one is tempted to call it “imagination” or “invention”)—that is, they deflect attention away from her own talent. For Lazarus, creating documentary poetry is not an exercise in reducing her own voice as a poet, paring down, editing, and presenting the words of others, as do Reznikoff and Rukeyser. Rather, she uses the original sources as scaffolds around which to build the remainder of her poem. Most strikingly, she regularly and openly attributes the words of others to Joshua Ibn Vives. This is the case in her note to the final lines of verse 28: “Master, if thou to thy pride’s goal should come, / Where wouldst thou throne—at Avignon or Rome?” (2:56). “This sentence,” she writes, “occurs in another Epistle to Paulus by Profiat Duran,” a fourteenth-century Jewish philosopher who, forced to convert, later fled Spain to return to Judaism (2:256). This letter is discussed in the same section on Paulus de Santa Maria in Graetz’s History which Lazarus offers as her source—but it is not, in fact, written to Paulus, but about him; the actual recipient was David Bonet Buen-Giorno, who, forced to convert, chose to remain a Christian. At least this source passage actually appears within Graetz’s study. The letter from Chasdai Crescas which Lazarus quotes in her footnote to verses twenty- nine and thirty does not.18 This is not to claim that Lazarus deliberately manufactured the letter; it seems more likely that she misattributed the passage, or that her notes were poor and combined several passages. The words, regardless, are not those of Ibn Vives; Lazarus, again, strains to insist on the historical veracity of the documentary sourcing for “An Epistle.” Here, David Ten Eyck’s summary of Pound’s documentary practices in his Adams Cantos helps elucidate “An Epistle.” Pound (like Lazarus) “adopts a formal strategy that thrusts the incompleteness of the material evidence with which he works to the forefront of his poetry, deliberately exposing the rough edges of the documents which he exhibits.”19 Where these rough edges, for Pound, produce a new vision of a subject or “take ‘a totalitarian hold on our history,’” the exposed “rough edges” of Lazarus’s documentary poetry reveal the way in which her work crosses the line into what Foley calls “documentary overdetermination” (Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, 54; Foley, Telling the Truth, 235). Where a quest for historical or extratextual WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” verification defined the documentary fiction of the nineteenth century, documentary 37 overdetermination goes beyond and exaggerates this practice. Foley reads overdetermination as a characteristic of African American modernism in particular: it emerges from the demands of literary truth-telling when challenges to the status quo run into established prejudices and communal complicity. Lazarus, writing “An Epistle” and The Dance To Death at the same time that she was challenging anti-Semitic editorials in The Century that blamed Jews for the violence visited upon them, and at the same time that public attitudes toward Jewish Americans began to reach a nativist nadir, likewise overdetermines the documentary sourcing of her poetry. These documentary innovations emerge from ethnic experience in the same way that the forms of African American modernist fiction would after the turn of the century. The pressure for veracity, and to reinforce and verify the content of her poetry (the historical reality of Jewish suffering and oppression; the potential for Jews to be good citizens; historical Jewish peoplehood) prompts Lazarus to exaggerate the documentary accuracy of her writing. This overdetermination and its subsequent modest experiments lead her, in turn, to the more radical formal innovations of “By the Wa- ters of Babylon.” Reading this work as the culmination of her documentary practice suggests an alternative to claims like Weingrad’s, that “Lazarus turned to the form of the prose-poem as an attempt to mark her poetry as Jewish” (“Jewish Identity,” 116, emphasis in original). The form of the prose poem, certainly, marks Lazarus’s poetry as different—but neither the prose poem in general nor the specific act of visual citation through which she crafts hers are necessarily Jewish. Indeed, her documentary source is not the prose of the Hebrew Bible, but the style, language, and visual elements of the King James Bible in particular—of a decidedly Christian text. Both prosodic convention and innovation, Meredith Martin rightly observes, are shaped by the question of “with what else, in addition to the measure of the line, were [the poets] wrestling?” (The Rise and Fall of Meter, 204). Lazarus wrestled not only with Jewish American experience or the role and goals of a Jewish American author—goals which might lead her to visually and textually cite the Bible so that readers might associate the plights, triumphs, and potential of contemporary American Jews and Russian Jewish refugees with the Israelites of the Biblical exodus and the Puritan imagination—but also with a struggle to claim veracity shared across the borders of ethnicity, religion, and time with other American ethnic writers.

Translating the Document: Charles Reznikoff

In 1918, thirty years after Lazarus’s death, a young New York attorney privately printed his first volume of poetry, a slim chapbook titled Rhythms. Charles Reznikoff’s Imagist-inflected poems and sequences focused on the overlooked details of the city’s streets, its poor, and its immigrant communities. This was New York as he was most familiar with it: Reznikoff’s parents were among those Russian Jews who, in the decades after 1881, reshaped Lazarus’s conscience and writing, the American Jewish community, and New York City. Yiddish-speaking milliners, they arrived in the early 1890s and MODERNISM / modernity 38 worked their way from sweatshop toil to owning a small business of their own. Unlike Lazarus, whose family had established itself in stable affluence generations before her birth, Reznikoff grew up in multilingual communities of outsiders, moving back and forth among Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, and Harlem, with financial failure always possible. Despite their different backgrounds, Reznikoff’s openly avant-garde modernism, and even his critique of nineteenth-century Jewish American poetry as “a bankrupt concern that has left no assets,” Reznikoff’s documentary poetics develop from the same nexus of immigrant and ethnic concerns that informed Lazarus’s documentary turn in the 1880s.20 Scholarship usually places Reznikoff within a standard history of modernist documentary poetics. In this telling, Reznikoff spent his day job as an editor and researcher for the legal encyclopedia Corpus Juris during the late 1920s and early 1930s confronted with immense quantities of documentary source-texts: judgments, court records, and law reports ranging from the mid-nineteenth century into his present. Reznikoff, the story goes, turned to these documents with his characteristically terse, straightforward poetic presentation, replacing Imagism’s object with the document, informed by both leftist aesthetics of reportage and the innovations of Pound’s ongoing Cantos.21 In this reading, the practices associated with modernist documentary emerge as a consequence of the failure (or simply the chronological passing) of Imagism, cast as the first iteration of what Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins term an “avant-garde anti-lyricism” in which nineteenth-century lyric is considered sentimental, its “lyric I” excessively present.22 Imagism focused on the object in order to pare away this excess. But by the early 1920s, Pound and other Anglo-American high modernists had moved away from this label. It had, perhaps, failed to escape the gravity well of “sentiment.” The document-based poetics that followed were built toward the same end, simply replacing the object with the document. Reznikoff’s documentary turn culminated with his largest, most ambitious, and best-known works: 1975’s Holocaust (based on the transcripts of the Eichmann trial) and Testimony, at which he labored from roughly 1931 until his death in 1976. Yet this timeline doesn’t fit. Reznikoff didn’t begin to work for the American Law Book Company on Corpus Juris until 1928, and he had already begun to explore historical narrative and the poetic adaptation of document in his verse dramas of the early and mid-1920s.23 These plays, including Uriel Acosta (1921), Meriwether Lewis (1922), Coral (1923), and Captive Israel (1923) begin the turn toward historical verse that culminates in Testimony, predating the 1925 publication of Pound’s A Draft of XVI Cantos. During the same period, Reznikoff began his decades-long engagement with biblical Hebrew, teaching himself to read the language and translating from the Hebrew Bible—to form his own poetry. Reznikoff’s autodidactic immersion in Hebrew language and Jewish history mir- rors Lazarus’s and gestures toward their works’ intertextual conversation. Indeed, his very expressed disdain for nineteenth-century American Jewish literature reveals the depth of his reading in and engagement with these works. He displays his familiarity with Penina Moise, Mordecai Noah, and Isaac Harby—some of the preeminent voices of eighteenth-century American Jewish literature, though generally neglected WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” by scholarship—in the same moment he dismisses them.24 This familiarity leads to a 39 wide-ranging and complex engagement with Lazarus’s poetry: beyond their common early-adult interest in Jewish language, each translated the Hebrew poetry of the medieval Spanish rabbi and poet Yehuda Halevi; each pored over the details of Jew- ish history; and, most strikingly, Reznikoff’s verse dramas of the 1920s share subject matter, plots, and storylines with Lazarus’s historical and dramatic poetry. Lazarus and Reznikoff share enough that it seems quite possible that her works stood along with those of Halevi and the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, the Hebrew Bible, and the Talmud, as Jewish literary predecessors which Reznikoff’s documentary poetry drew on as source-texts. These parallels with Lazarus’s writing mark Reznikoff’s decade-long work with verse drama as the beginning of his development as a documentary poet. From 1921 to 1927, Reznikoff wrote a series of short plays that took up subject matter ranging from the Bible, the westward travels of Lewis and Clark, the American Civil War, and, of course, Jewish history: under Roman rule, after the Spanish Expulsion, and through the mass slaughters of the Crusades and medieval blood libels.25 These are exactly the periods of Jewish history that capture Lazarus’s attention in her historical poetry and verse dramas. Indeed, Reznikoff follows her lead as he approaches Jewish history. For instance, her dramatic poems “Raschi in Prague” and “The Death of Raschi” present the eleventh-century French rabbi as a world-traveler defined by his Christ-like forgive- ness. So, too, does Reznikoff characterize him in the verse drama “Rashi.” Reznikoff’s 1922 play The Black Death reads like a revision, compressed and redacted in his distinct style, of Lazarus’s The Dance with Death. Each tells of the destruction of a medieval European Jewish community as their Christian neighbors hear news of and come to fear the advance of the bubonic plague. Jews, the townspeople and their leaders understand, have likely produced this evil—either through active involvement or as divine punishment for their presence within Christendom. Lazarus’s play consists of five acts across 104 pages of blank verse; Reznikoff’s, at one act of five scenes and a total of ten pages, is almost exactly one-tenth the length. Yet the plots of each match almost precisely. Both plays begin with the arrival of a visitor to the Jewish community who brings news of other lands. In both cases, their hosts are anxious about the spread of plague: “Bring they fresh tidings of the pestilence?” asks one of Lazarus’s Jewish townsmen, while Reznikoff’s play begins with the question “What news?” followed shortly by the insistent, “Have you not heard of a new sickness / Coming westward?” and then, a little later, “This sickness worries me” (Lazarus, Poems, 2:72).26 Both visitors, ultimately, serve as prophetic figures, foretelling the doom of the community in which they have arrived. In both towns, the appearance of the plague swiftly follows them, prompting Christian villagers and their leaders to debate, at length, whether killing their Jewish community would be an appropriate or effective inoculation. Both plays, in turn, conclude with the slaughter of the town’s Jews as they pray in the synagogue. Given these similiarities, it seems that one of Lazarus’s early experiments with a document-based poetics may have served as one of Reznikoff’s earliest documentary sources. Even if this is not the case, and their works share so much only by coinci- MODERNISM / modernity 40 dence, they indicate that each poet turned to historically-sourced poetry at similar moments and with similar motivations: Reznikoff, like Lazarus, turns to and creates his own documentary practices as he grapples with what it means to be both Jewish and American, part of an immigrant community, a religious and ethnic outsider in the context of renewed ethnic violence both at home and abroad.27 The study of Hebrew, in particular, proved momentous for the development of Reznikoff’s poetry. It served, on the one hand, as one of his most vivid and powerful thematic tokens, the language in which his grandfather wrote poetry that was destroyed after his death, “lost— / except for what / still speak[s] through me / as mine,” at once the symbol of cultural rupture and the site of poetic creation.28 The idiosyncratic manner in which he taught himself to read Hebrew shaped his documentary practices. By his own recollection, Reznikoff had no childhood Hebrew education but “began to pick it up when I was in my twenties”: that is, sometime in the 1910s or 1920s.29 His accounts always imply that he was self-taught; he used modern Hebrew’s Sephardi pronunciation, not his grandfather’s Ashkenazi, but seems to have had little interest in the modern project of a spoken Hebrew. How he studied it at this time, or with what intensity, is also unclear: Marie Syrkin’s recollection of his reading, each evening before bed, several pages of the Bible in Hebrew with the King James and Martin Luther’s German translation open beside it, dates from later decades (they met in 1927 and married in 1930, after his study began).30 Reznikoff’s development of a document-based poetics runs through his encounter with Hebrew language and the Hebrew Bible: that is, through Jewish language, literature, and history. Before Testimony, the documentary poetics that would soon shape his approach to American legal history first came to flower in “Israel” and “King David,” first published in his 1929 miscellany,By the Waters of Manhattan: An Annual.31 These sequences translate and adapt the narratives and legal codes of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings. In his turn to the Bible as a documentary source-text, Reznikoff’s poetics once more echo Lazarus’s—even in the collection’s title, which refers to the same line in Psalm 137 as her “By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose.” But where Lazarus develops a documentary poetics rooted in visual citation, Reznikoff’s emerges from the act of translating from Hebrew into English. “Israel” and “King David” appear in the third and final section of By the Waters of Manhattan under the heading “Editing and Glosses”—terms that recall Lazarus’s self-description of her document-based poetry as “little more than elaborat[ing] and versify[ing]” (Poems, 2:45). Each poem eschews the Bible’s third-person narrative. In its place, biblical figures, especially secondary characters, offer first-person accounts as witnesses. “Israel” traces the history of the Hebrews between Jacob’s theft of his brother’s birthright and the revelation at Sinai through the voices of Rebecca, Rachel, Laban, Joseph’s older brothers, Potiphar’s wife, and Pharaoh’s cupbearer. The major figures of the biblical narratives appear only in situationally-dependent roles: Isaac, in dialogue with Rebecca and Jacob; Jacob, in dialogue with Laban, Esau, and his father; Moses, as he interacts with Pharaoh and delivers the legal code revealed at Sinai. WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” Though they reside at the narrative center, they are testified about rather than offering 41 testimony of their own. The structure of “King David” even more closely approximates the retrospective testimony offered in a courtroom—or, later, in Reznikoff’s Testimony. Rearranging the order in which the events of David’s rise and rule are narrated (though not in which they are said to have occurred) so that their presentation enhances his brief, Reznikoff assumes the role of poet-prosecutor, calling Saul, Jonathan, Ahimelech, Ish-bosheth, Abner, Joab, minor military and court figures and messengers, the residents of Jabesh-gilead, and the leaders of non-Israelite peoples (the King of Gath, Philistines, Doeg the Edomite, ambassadors from Hamath) to testify against David.32 Reznikoff calls these witnesses to narrate past events straightforwardly, without the extrapolation that he later insisted had no place in poetry because it had no place in the courtroom.33 The voice of a third-person narrator occasionally intervenes to introduce a new event. By recovering these forgotten voices and arranging them as testimony, “King David” highlights the trauma of the civil war between David and his predecessor, Saul. David’s voice is minor, almost absent, with the exception of a few ironic snatches of dialogue and a psalm of thanksgiving, presented near the poem’s end. The king is depicted only as a defendant never called to the stand. Reznikoff treats the documentary record of the Hebrew Bible as, in years to come, he would treat the American legal system: as a record of erasure and suppressed history. “King David” and “Israel” demonstrate that Reznikoff’s documentary poetics develop directly from his knowledge of the law, his experience with Jewish language, and, especially, his beliefs about the role of the translator. In this, his position as a Jewish American is essential. In a 1927 poem about learning Hebrew, Reznikoff describes it as linguistic exile:

How difficult for me is Hebrew: even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion. (The Poems, 58)

Precisely the language’s separation from the everyday is what renders it “difficult” for him. Yet Reznikoff deliberately foreignized his Hebrew, eschewing the spoken, modern language (in which one might talk about family, meals, or the weather) for the Bibli- cal—while also rejecting the more familiar, Ashkenazi pronunciation in favor of the Sephardi pronunciation adopted in the language’s modern revivification.34 And this very linguistic exile is the concept which, in the poem “Joshua at Shechem,” enables an exiled and “scattered” Jewish people to become “citizens of the great cities, talking Hebrew in every language under the sun” (The Poems, 113). This is the act which, for Reznikoff, translation and documentary perform (if not quite in all languages, then at least in English). Reznikoff approaches the Hebrew text with an open acknowledgment of the limitations of his knowledge. But this humility does not subordinate Reznikoff’s translations to the original or place them in its service. The translator’s voice does not have the right to take priority over those contained within the original—but, at the same time, a final, finished original also makes no claim on the translator’s fealty. Reznikoff’s MODERNISM / modernity 42 concern as a translator is always with those voices which are contained within the original text but which have been subordinated to that of author, redactor, or to the document’s unity of form. His documentary poetry “talk[s] Hebrew in every language under the sun” by applying this concern to the way he approaches legal history, where his primary concern is with the voices occluded in the legal record, those that history and judicial decisions have similarly suppressed.35 The recovery-oriented, prosecutorial roles of translator and documentary poet con- verge most clearly in Reznikoff’s treatment of Michal, David’s first wife and the daughter of Saul. She speaks in the concluding section of “King David,” enjoying prominence as the prosecution’s closing witness. Yet her words alone have no origin in the biblical text. The erasure of Michal’s voice from the record is a crime that has not yet been committed at the time of her testimony, but she knows that it will be. “Your scribes,” she predicts in the sequence’s final lines, “will write me down a cold, proud woman, / wandering about the garden of the king, / and you a glorious king, a glorious king” (The Poems, 90). To recover her testimony, Reznikoff ranges outside the Bible and into a wider documentary record that includes a Talmudic discussion and the comparison of English and German translations. The details of Michal’s life most central to her character in “King David” emerge from Reznikoff’s investigation of a textual crux. According to the biblical narrative, Michal, separated from David during the civil war, married Paltiel.36 This is straightforward. But later, there is a puzzling reference to ḥameshet bnei-Mikhal bat-Sha’ul asher yalda l’Adri’el (“the five sons of Michal, daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Adriel”)—her brother-in-law, a biblically-prohibited coupling.37 Michal, moreover, is regularly referred to as childless in the biblical text. The Talmud, confused by this passage, asks, V’khi Mikhal yalda? (“And did Michal give birth?”). No, it concludes: Merav yalda u-Mikhal gidla—another of Saul’s daughters, Meirab, gave birth to the children, but Michal raised them.38 Luther’s German translation reads “die fünf Söhne Merabs, der Tochter Sauls, die sie dem Adriel geboren hatte”; the KJV, on the other hand, refers to “the five sons of Michal . . . whom she brought up for Adriel” (emphasis, in both cases, mine). The former denies Michal’s role entirely, while the latter insists that she was the guardian, not the mother, of these children—all of whom, on David’s orders, would be executed.39 Reznikoff rejects this attempt to paper over the true nature of Michal’s suffering and David’s cruelty. In his reading, she had five children with Paltiel during the civil war and David hanged them in order to end a famine brought on by the sins of Saul, their grandfather. This—not, as the Bible insists, because he danced half-naked and exposed himself before God—is why she hates David: he is responsible for the deaths of her father, her brothers Ish-bosheth and Jonathan, her nephews, and her five sons. Indeed, these deaths prompt the king to sneer at her toward poem’s end with no regard for syntax, transforming the Bible’s third-person narration of her childlessness into a taunt: “God— / Who chose me rather than your father and all his house / to be king of Israel; / but you shall die childless” (The Poems, 89). In “King David,” Michal is not childless because of her sins, but because of David’s quest for power, his jealousy WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” of her happier marriage with Paltiel, his rejection of his own responsibility for the 43 civil war, blaming it instead on “Saul and his bloody house” (88). She is childless, she retorts, only “After you have hanged my sons, / from the eldest who was as tall as I / to the youngest who had not yet learned to walk” (90). Her words produce an effect Reznikoff’s documentary poetry shares with the next decade’s leftist modernists: the recovery of history’s forgotten voices, documentary as counter-history.

Testimony, Form, and Ethnic Poetry

Reznikoff labored at Testimony across five decades, publishing four distinct versions of the project: in 1932 (as “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee”), 1934, 1941, and over the course of 1965 to 1978.40 These vary in style and length: the 1932 and 1934 versions are prose poetry and the later editions lineated verse; the 1941 version is a short sequence within a larger collection while the one-volume, 2015 edition of the final version, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative, runs over 500 pages. All four versions share an absence of explicitly Jewish content. They all contain immigrants, ethnic whites, and African Americans—but Testimony, unlike Reznikoff’s historical poetry, his translations, his autobiographical verse, and even his observations of New York’s streets, resists easy classification as a Jewish, immigrant, or ethnic poem. Yet Testimony, as an ongoing poetic project, does emerge as a Jewish poem through the avant-garde forms that shape it. Each version of the poem continues to apply the documentary poetics that Reznikoff developed in the 1920s. Legal documents inform its content, but the Hebrew Bible shapes its form and structure on the levels of line, stanza, and tone. Reznikoff derives the “objective,” courtroom-governed legal idiom of his later poetry not only from the experience of having translated the legal codes of Leviticus, but also from adapting the poetics of the Hebrew Bible into English. Indeed, “Israel” and “King David” seem to call forth the very project Reznikoff undertakes in Testimony. This is clearest in the climactic moments of “Israel,” Reznikoff’s retelling of the revelation on Mount Sinai. This scene, which comprises the final third of “Israel” and acts as a pivot to “King David,” lays out the legal structure of the sacred kingdom that David will undermine even as he tries to establish it—for which Reznikoff’s poem holds him accountable. As Reznikoff translates and edits the Mosaic code, he also develops the formal poetics and the ethical goals of the legal verse that characterizes Testimony—the standards to which he holds the United States accountable. To behave according to the law—any law—is, in Reznikoff’s telling, determined by how one treats the most vulnerable: to borrow the biblical parlance, the orphan, beggar, widow, and stranger (that is, the immigrant):

When you come into the land that shall be yours, and reap your harvest, you shall not reap the corners of the field, neither shall you gather the gleaning: you shall not glean your vineyard, MODERNISM / modernity

44 neither shall you gather the fallen fruit; you shall leave them for the poor and the wanderer. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning; you shall not muzzle the ox when he treats out the corn. If a stranger comes among you, you shall not do him wrong; the stranger shall be as the home-born among you, you shall love him as yourself; for you know the heart of a stranger, you were strangers in Egypt. You shall do no unrighteousness in measures of length, of weight, or of quantity: you shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin. (The Poems, 72)

The language of this scene prefigures the frequent dryness of Testimony and similarly focuses on the details that might attract the eye of an attorney or jurist rather than a poet. These details also reveal Reznikoff’s use of two of the foundational poetic forms of the Hebrew Bible, parallelism and intensification. In parallelism, the juxtaposed lines or phrases “are approximate equivalents but prove to be, on closer inspection, logically discriminated actions that lead imperceptibly from one to the next.”41 That is, parallelism in biblical poetics does not merely juxtapose images or ideas, but joins them in a syntactically real progression of causality, referred to as intensification, or a heightening of emotion, strength of language, and readerly awareness through parallel repetition. For example, the parallelism that links the lines “you shall not reap the corners of the field, / neither shall you gather the gleanings” with “you shall not glean your vineyard, / neither shall you gather the fallen fruit” demonstrates intensification by establishing the second couplet as specific, clear-cut examples of the actions the former prohibits. Reznikoff’s translation creates this effect by recombining biblical passages. The bulk of the text quoted above comes from Leviticus 19, but Reznikoff trims the language, quoting only verses 9–10, 13, and 33–36. Within these, he interpolates lines from Deuteronomy 25:4 and Exodus 23:9. The new passage uses parallelism and intensification to join laws of land use, scales, and animal welfare with those of labor rights, immigration, and the treatment of the indigent. Reznikoff deploys these biblical poetic techniques to similar effect in each version of Testimony. In the 1941 version, he tells the story of Amelia, an orphan working in an automated book-bindery. The form itself, emerging from Reznikoff’s engagement with Jewish history, language, and difference, marks this as a Jewish, and an ethnic, poem—regardless of Amelia’s religion or race (which the poem never states). Her suffering is horrible:

She felt her hair caught gently; put her hand up and felt the shaft going round and round and her hair caught on it, wound and winding around it, until the scalp was jerked from her head, and the blood was coming down all of her face and waist. (The Poems, 207)

The first three lines present repeating, interwoven actions, each inching forward temporally while increasing in urgency, detail, and vividness. First, she merely “felt” WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” it, then she “put her hand up and felt the shaft.” So, too, with the gruesome develop- 45 ment of intensification from the penultimate to the ultimate line. Intensification also occurs in phrases within individual lines, as Reznikoff’s repetition of words to intensify and highlight an action mimics the repetition of a root or lexeme in biblical Hebrew, which he at times manipulates to develop a poetic leitmotif (“the shaft going round and round”; “wound and winding around it”). Elsewhere, Reznikoff’s poems utilize this technique but end with a break from the parallel, rather than intensifying it.42 This, what Charles Bernstein refers to as “Reznikoff’s nearness” in the context of his sequences of short verse, turns the readers’ focus of attention to a final image they would otherwise overlook: the beggar on the corner, litter in Central Park, the cobweb hanging above a murder victim.43 Testimony takes up the categories of vulnerability to which the Hebrew Bible re- turns again and again, commanding the Israelites concerning their treatment with the explanation, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:22). Indeed, these categories structure the 1941 version: the poems describe part-time dockwork- ers trapped belowdecks as a ship takes on water; the orphaned and exploited Amelia; an immigrant husband who is murdered and his widow forced into prostitution; and a wealthy woman who attempts to poison an elderly beggar she finds annoying. The formal poetics and legal ethics that lead Reznikoff to recover Michal’s voice also lead him to tell Amelia’s story. In this sense, Testimony, like “Israel” and “King David,” is dialogic in the strong sense of the term that Ramazani proposes, pushing back against Mikhail Bakhtin’s insistence that poetry is by its nature monologic; rather, it “is infil- trated by and infiltrates its generic others” (Poetry and Its Others, 5). This is especially pronounced in Testimony, which casts readers into the role of judge and jury while the poet acts as a prosecuting attorney, calling and arranging the testimony of witnesses to present a composite snapshot of the United States between 1885 and 1915: a land of poverty, exploitation, crime, and violence. The suppressed victims of this history, on whose behalf Testimony advocates, are precisely those “Israel” considers the test of justice: the orphan, widow, beggar, and stranger. To advocate on their behalf is simply another way to “talk Hebrew in every language under the sun.” These readings produce a decidedly plural and decentered vision of American modernism, one in which the way that American poetry was “made new” at the turn of the twentieth century more closely resembles the way in which the United States itself was made new by a period of mass immigration and internal migration that threw what it meant to “be” an American into question: by fits and starts, sometimes lasting, sometimes forgotten. This period, of course, runs alongside—even precedes—the innovations in technology, transit, urban life, and politics associated with aesthetic and political modernism. That scholarship takes for granted the relevance of such contexts to formal innovation but frequently stops short of ethnic experience stems from a seem- ing tension between the ideas of ethnic and avant-garde literature. “Ethnic, minority cultures,” Steven S. Lee writes, “connote tradition and descent—one’s inheritance from the past. Avant-garde, on the other hand, is a military term (the vanguard of a unit) with political and aesthetic connotations—the revolutionary vanguard and artistic MODERNISM / modernity 46 avant-garde each progressing toward a liberated future.”44 But such ethnic experiences, as the examples of Lazarus and Reznikoff show, are in fact deeply relevant to the study and development of poetic form. Each grapples with questions of ethnic belonging, history, and language—a process of questioning that leads them to develop, for themselves, a documentary poetics. Discussions of form and ethnic poetry need not and should not be limited to the application of formal innovation to address ethnic experience, a practice that, even if it avoids the language of belatedness, does not avoid its premises. Rather, such discussions show that even a formal practice as central to the experiments of the English-language avant-garde as documentary poetics might be independently (even originally) developed through the poetic negotiation of ethnic subjectivity. Lazarus and Reznikoff were by no means the only poets to do so—but their relationship to documentary poetics as well as the intertextual connections among their works make them particularly salient examples. Their examples propose a path for future scholarship to reassess the reputations of poets, like Lazarus, who are not thought of as modernists or those, like Reznikoff, relegated to its “second wave.” Indeed, Lazarus, by the end of her career—an experimental poet who nonetheless did not belong to any avant-garde movement—demonstrates that formal innovation and experimentation arising from ethnic subjectivity might even emerge in the pages of The Century from the pen of an acolyte of Longfellow and Emerson. The lesson of these readings need not be limited by geography, periodization, or even language: ethnic poetry might emerge without recourse to authorial identity or narrative content through the very ways it thinks and works as poetry—in and through its formal structures.

Notes 1. The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 33, November 1886–April 1887, 706; Esther Schor and Michael Weingrad claim that Lazarus’s poem was, indeed, the first English prose poem, observ- ing that it precedes both Stuart Merrill’s 1890 Pastels in Prose (translations from French) and Oscar Wilde’s 1894 Poems in Prose, widely credited as the first appearances of the English-language prose poem. See Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (New York: Schocken, 2006), 194; Michael Weingrad, “Jewish Identity and Poetic Form in ‘By the Waters of Babylon,’” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 3 (2003): 107–20. 2. Documentary, or document-based, poetics “is less a systematic theory or doctrine of a kind of poetry than an array of strategies and techniques that position a poem to participate in discourses of reportage,” a key technique as modernist poetry turned toward longer forms following World War I (Adelaide Morris, “Documentary Poetics,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Stephen Cushman et al. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012], 372). It is informed both by the visual and filmic documentary aesthetics of Depression-era leftist modernism and the incor- poration of found documents by Ezra Pound in his Cantos. Michael Thurston and Michael Davidson attend to the ways in which much modernist documentary poetry drew on both models. See Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 3. Dorothy Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 20. 4. In a recent example, Albert Gelpi writes that in African, Latino, or Asian American poetry “the strong focus on issues of ethnic identity . . . mean[s] that most of this poetry starts with and is WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” sustained by a different set of questions”—that is, they are “less relevant to the questions of form and 47 language that I am pursuing” (American Poetry After Modernism: The Power of the Word [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], ix). Anthony Reed makes an intervention parallel to Wang’s in Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hop- kins University Press, 2014). 5. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chi- cago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 67. 6. Sarah Ehlers, Meredith Martin, and John Timberman Newcomb have been at the forefront of exploring these continuities. See Sarah Ehlers, “Making It Old: The Victorian/Modern Divide in Twentieth-Century American Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2012): 37–67; Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and John Timberman Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 7. Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially 9–41. 8. Thomas S. Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), especially 27–67. 9. The seminal works on this subject are Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 10. See Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 16–36; Ranen Omer-Sherman, Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, Roth (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 15–67; Max Cavitch, “Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty,” American Literary History 18, no. 1 (2006): 1–28; and Daniel Marom, “Who Is the ‘Mother of Exiles’? Jewish Aspects of Emma Lazarus’s ‘The New Colossus,’” Prooftexts 20, no. 3 (2000): 231–61. 11. Zachary Turpin, “Yearning to Breathe Free: Emma Lazarus’s Queer Innovations,” J19 4, no. 2 (2016): 419–24, 419, emphasis in original. 12. The Hebrew Emigrant (later, Immigrant) Aid Society was founded in December 1881; Laza- rus’s involvement with the organization began in 1882, including visits to refugee housing on Ward’s Island and New York Times articles about their conditions. See Schor, Emma Lazarus, 125–27, 147–50. 13. The “Orient Jew” would today be called an Eastern European Jew. Differences of class and religious practice defined this difference. Poor, religiously-observant, speaking Yiddish and Russian, the Jews Lazarus encountered during her work with refugees bore little resemblance to herself or her assimilated relatives. The result was a deep ambivalence: they needed America’s care and concern, yet at the same time needed to modernize. See Schor, Emma Lazarus, 166–69. 14. See Weingrad, “Jewish Identity,” 114; Levinson, “Exiles on Main Street,” 34; and Schor, Emma Lazarus, 198. 15. See Emma Lazarus, The Poems of Emma Lazarus, 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1888); and Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems, ed. John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 2005). 16. Pound commissioned the artist Henry Strater to design headpieces to each Canto, drawing on the style and techniques of illuminated manuscripts. See Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 201–9 and the illustrations following page 178. 17. See Lazarus, Poems, 2:45–57 and 2:69–176. 18. Nor has research revealed where Lazarus may have found it. A similar sentence does appear in Crescas’s The Refutation of the Christian Principles, trans. Daniel Lasker (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992): “they have had two leaders as Popes for approximately twenty years. Each one and his followers think the other is excommunicated and punished by Heaven” (66). This occurs, however, in a chapter on prophecy, not revelation; the remainder of Lazarus’s passage does not appear here. 19. David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 54. MODERNISM / modernity

48 20. He said this, concurring with the remarks of Alfred Kazin, by then one of the nation’s preeminent literary critics, during a 1954 conference of the American Jewish Historical Society. The proceedings of the conference were published in The Writing of American Jewish History, ed. Moshe Davis and Isidore Meyer (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1957), 440–42. 21. See Norman Finkelstein, Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 31, 107; and Stephen Fredman, A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 47. Daniel Listoe and Todd Carmody focus on the role of courtroom testimony on Reznikoff’s documentary poems. See Daniel Listoe, “‘With All Malice’: The Testimonial Objectives of Charles Reznikoff,” American Literary History 26, no. 1 (2014): 110–31; and Todd Carmody, “The Banal- ity of the Document: Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust and Ineloquent Empathy,” Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 1 (2008): 86–110. 22. On avant-garde anti-lyricism, see Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 451–59. In Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), Tim Dayton likewise casts Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (and, by extension, the leftist modernist documentary poetics it exemplifies) as “attempts to break with the self-enclosed quality of the modern lyrical subject” and that “reportage” emerged from “the limitations of lyric poetry” (1, 62). 23. See Fredman, A Menorah for Athena, 163; and Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917–1976, ed. Milton Hindus (Boston, MA: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), 200–1. 24. Reznikoff had recently completed work on The Jews of Charleston: A History of an American Jewish Community (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1950). Michael P. Kramer, in an article of the same name, refers to writers predating the 1880s as “The Wretched Refuse of Jewish American Literary History” (Studies in American Jewish Literature 31, no. 1 [2012]: 61–75). 25. See Charles Reznikoff’s Chatteron, The Black Death, and Meriwether Lewis: Three Plays by Charles Reznikoff (New York: Charles Reznikoff, 1922) and Nine Plays (New York: Charles Reznikoff, 1927). 26. Charles Reznikoff, “The Black Death,” in Chatteron, The Black Death, and Meriwether Lewis, 27–37, 28, 29. 27. The 1920s saw a new peak in violence and racial terror targeting African Americans, the renewal of the KKK, and nativist legislation; in the 1930s, as fascism and Nazi Germany rose in Europe, Henry Ford republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Father Tom Coughlin broadcast virulent anti-Semitism into millions of American homes. 28. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, ed. Seamus Cooney (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 2005), 249; Fredman refers to this loss of Hebrew as “the primal scene of poetry for Charles Reznikoff,” as- sociating the compactness of Hebrew language with that of Reznikoff’s poetry (A Menorah for Athena, 41, see also 29–31). Omer-Sherman and Maeera Shreiber associate Hebrew with an exilic, diasporic attitude in Reznikoff’s poetry. See Diaspora and Zionism, 167–70; and Shreiber, Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 74. 29. Charles Reznikoff and Reinhold Schiffer, “The Poet in His Milieu,” in Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, ed. Milton Hindus (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984), 109–26, 121. In a 1923 letter, he mentions “working very hard at” Hebrew (Selected Letters, 37). 30. See Marie Syrkin, “Charles: A Memoir,” in Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, 37–67, 59. 31. The bulk of this collection was prose: a series of short stories, some previously published, which he would revise into the second half of the following year’s novel, By the Waters of Manhattan; and “Early History of a Seamstress,” a family memoir written either by or in the voice of his mother, which would be lightly revised to serve as the first half of the novel. 32. For instance, the source texts for section IV of “King David” (The Poems, 81–83) are, in order: 1 Samuel 20:1–3, 1 Samuel 22:1–5, 1 Samuel 23:23, 1 Samuel 23:14, 1 Samuel 24:1–3, 1 Samuel 27:1–12, 1 Samuel 22:7–8, 1 Samuel 21:2–10, 1 Samuel 22:9–19, and 1 Samuel 25:44. WALL / “talking hebrew in every language under the sun” 33. In a 1969 interview, Reznikoff described the “analogy between testimony in the courts and 49 the testimony of a poet”: he is 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” (quoted in L. S. Dembo, “Charles Reznikoff,” Contemporary Literature 10, no. 2 [1969]: 193–202, 195, 194). 34. His father, hearing him pronounce the words, exclaimed, “That’s Arabic!” (Reznikoff and Schiffer, “The Poet in His Milieu,” 121). The differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew include the pronunciation of diphthongs, vowels, and some dental consonants. 35. I mean this in distinction from Walter Benjamin’s belief that “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages,” which, in its ultimate, mes- sianic aspiration, would eliminate foreignness by achieving an ideal language—the “final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation,” the “higher and purer linguistic air” of the translated text over the original (“The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti [New York: Routledge, 2000], 19). For Reznikoff, linguistic foreignness prompts an encounter between individual and language that simulates the encounter between the individual as subject and a second individual as other. (The foreignness of Hebrew, this is to say, is not dissimilar from the foreignness of the beggars Reznikoff notices on New York’s streets.) Reznikoff’s translations neither treat the practice as a means to construct original poetic authorship nor as a means, through fealty to the original, to “foreignize” English. In this, he differs from contemporaries like Ezra Pound or Louis Zukofsky. They only recover what has been suppressed by other translations into English: the chatty, eroticized anti-imperialism of Pound’s Sextus Propertius, or Zukofsky’s attention to the sound of the original in his homophonic translations. Reznikoff, by contrast, seeks to recover that which has been suppressed by the very text he sets out to translate. 36. See 1 Samuel 25:44 and 2 Samuel 3:15. 37. 2 Samuel 21:8. 38. Sanhedrin 19b. 39. The revised 2000 Jewish Publication Society edition foregrounds this difficulty. Its English translation reads “Merab” while retaining the Hebrew reading of “Michal.” A note on this verse observes that Hebrew and (Greek) Septuagint editions are also divided on this point, with the Hebrew tending (but not exclusively) toward “Michal” and the Septuagint likewise toward “Merab.” 40. The 1932 version was published across two issues of William Carlos Williams’s journal Contact. See Contact 1, no. 1 (1932): 14–34 and 1, no. 2 (1932): 99–108. The 1934 version was published as a short book by The Objectivists Press, co-founded by Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Louis Zukofsky, and the 1941 sequence was included in Going To And Fro And Walking Up And Down. The publication history of the final, 1965–78 version is more complicated: Testimony: The United States (1885–1890): Recitative was published jointly by New Directions and the San Francisco Review in 1965; Reznikoff privately printed a second volume, covering the years 1891–1900, in 1968; and the complete work, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative was brought out posthumously, in two volumes, by Black Sparrow Press in 1978. In 2015, Black Sparrow published a single-volume edition that also reprints the 1934 version. 41. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 39. 42. Similar techniques can even be found in the 1934, prose version of Testimony, in which Reznikoff’s use of paragraphs function much like two versets in biblical poetry, joining and exploring, for example, economic and psychological depression through parallelism and intensification. 43. Charles Bernstein, “Reznikoff’s Nearness,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 197–228. 44. Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 2–4.