Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff

From Charles Reznikoff’s “Rivers and Seas, Harbors and Ports,” published in “Testimony,” Objectivist Press (1934):

a cargo of sandalwood at the Fiji Islands and at Guam a quantity of beech de mer, betel nuts, and deer horns; ivory rings for martingales; a cargo of copper ore, shipped in Chile; sperm and whale oil, sperm candles and whalebone; pigs of copper; six seroons of indigo; pigs of lead, moys of salt, and frails of raisins; seal skins, prime fur and pup skins, from seals taken at the Falkland Islands; a cargo of tea, fresh, prime, and of the finest chop, quarter chests of tea, hyson skin and congo, with the present of a shawl from the hong merchant in Canton; cases, trunks, bales, casks, kegs and bundles

Here’s a big shout-out to Eliot Weinberger, whose “Poet at the Automat” piece in the London Review of Books, Jan. 22, 2015, introduced me to a writer I’ve known about for years – but have never read. This Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) seems, in Weinberger’s smart and considered interpretation, a kindred spirit. Some reasons why:

“There was the legend of Reznikoff, the invisible poet, walking twenty miles a day in New York City, writing down his observations in a little notebook, meeting cronies who never knew he was a writer at the Automat, publishing his own books of perfect poems for more than fifty years. A sweet, elderly man who was maddeningly self-deprecating. George and Mary Oppen told me about a reading in Michigan, at the end of which the audience was on its feet, wildly cheering. Rezi, as they called him, was heard to mumble: ‘I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.’

It is an aspiration of mine to be seen as a kind and self-effacing man like Charles Reznikoff, a writer who until his mid-sixties published nearly all his books himself, setting type for many of them on a printing press in his parents’ basement.

Charles Reznikoff is an American original, a writer’s writer. Please note: This is not an Amazon published writer. Rather, Reznikoof is a man who self-published and continues to be read and discussed in the most learned journals of today. After Weinberger's timely introduction (I am not yet in my mid-sixties!), I can’t wait to sit and read his work.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Mental Fitness



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