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

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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 open- ing 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 innova- tive, 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 ques- tions 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 .
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