Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading Charles Reznikoff: The Plain Sunlight of His Verse

Reading Charles Reznikoff: The Plain Sunlight of His Verse

Kalck, Xavier
Toth, Naomi
McMahon, Fiona

Hardcover

Series: Clemson University Press: Seminal Modernisms

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1638041911
ISBN13: 9781638041917
Publisher: Clemson University Press W/ Lup
Published: Dec 11 2025
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.39
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This collection of essays explores Reznikoff's verse and its contemporary poetic and critical legacy in five movements. The first looks at how history and politics are woven into Reznikoff's work, namely Reznikoff's complex relationship with Jewish American identity in the 20th century. The second section turns to documentary poetics and to Reznikoff's practice of composing from historical as well as legal documents, in the context of modernist concerns over realism as well as contemporary ones over memory and appropriation. The third section delves into the concept of verse--Reznikoff's word for the lyric--showing how Reznikoff's rhythms compose an abstract yet accurate vernacular portrait of America. It places Reznikoff among his fellow poets, known as the Objectivists, and in relation to larger issues pertaining to the rhythmic fabric of free verse and the aesthetic vocabularies of the spare and the ordinary. The fourth opens onto issues of translation, and Reznikoff's work's journey through Mexican, Polish and French contexts, illustrating Reznikoff's ongoing transnational relevance. The volume concludes with a foray into some of Reznikoff's afterlives, in the work of Paul Auster--an early champion of Reznikoff's method--and through the history of Reznikoff's complex engagement with the African American experience, the representation of injustice and testimony as a dialogical means of witnessing intended to foster a sense of community.

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