Testimony: The United States, 1885-1915: Recitative

by Charles Reznikoff

Récitatif

Genres: Poetry, History, Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) était avec Carl Rakosi, George Oppen et Louis Zukofsky un des quatre poètes du courant dit «objectiviste» américain, qui commencèrent à publier, de manière confidentielle, dans les années vingt du siècle dernier. De Charles Reznikoff ont été publiés en France, Témoignage, Les États-Unis, 1885-1890, un fragment du présent volume (Hachette/P.O.L, 1981, traduction par Jacques Roubaud), aujourd'hui épuisé ; Le Musicien, roman (P.O.L, 1986, traduction par Emmanuel Hocquard et Claude Richard) ; Holocauste (Prétexte, 2007, traduction Jean-Paul Auxeméry). Dans un entretien publié dans Contemporary Literature Charles Reznikoff, pour décrire sa démarche, citait un poète chinois du XIᵉ siècle qui disait : «La poésie présente l'objet afin de susciter la sensation. Elle doit être très précise sur l'objet et réticente sur l'émotion». Sans doute n'est-il pas inutile, aujourd'hui, de présenter avec Témoignage, Les États-Unis (1885-1915) une des illustrations les plus complètes et convaincantes de ce programme. Témoignage, Les États-Unis (1885-1915) est une vaste fresque pour décrire l'entrée des États-Unis dans l'ère moderne à travers la restitution minutieuse et la mise en forme de rapports d'audience de tribunaux amenés à juger aussi bien de conflits de voisinage ou de succession que d'accidents du travail ou de faits divers atroces. Son édition poursuit le travail entamé en 1981 avec la publication de Témoignage, Les États-Unis, 1885-1890 et du Musicien.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe this book isn’t more well-known. Reznikoff was a mainly self-published poet who had a day job at a legal publishing house, where he wrote summaries of court records for reference books. At some point he began to refashion the stories he encountered in these records into short, terse, chunks of prose that reverberate with meaning way beyond the facts presented.

Sample:
It was nearly daylight when she gave birth to the child,
lying on a quilt
he had doubled up for her.
He put the child on his left arm
and took it out of the room,
and she could hear the splashing water.
When he came back
she asked him where the child was.
He replied: “Out there—in the water.”
He punched up the fire
and returned with an armload of wood
and the child,
and put the dead child into the fire.
She said: “O John, don't!”
He did not reply
but turned to her and smiled.

He worked on this project over the course of 30 years, publishing the first volume in 1965. The complete work was published by Black Sparrow in 1978. I read this over the course of many months, a couple of pieces a day, like scripture or sutras, which is the best way to consume it, because these stories are intense, the prose equivalent of murder ballads. In the end it provides a secret history of the U.S. from 1885-1915 from the perspective of the down-and-out, the put-upon, and the deranged. The weirdest/saddest thing you’ll find is that people and their capacities for violence and cruelty have not changed an iota. If you’re writing anything set in this period, it's a must-read for glimpses into everyday life in that time. If you’re a writer looking for prompts, each one of these pieces could be expanded into a novel. One of the most astonishing “forgotten” pieces of literature I’ve ever stumbled onto. Buy this thing today.

[Paul Secor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Reznikoff was trained as a lawyer, though he practiced law for only a short time. These poems are based on law reports, focused through the ear and eye of a master poet.

[Eric]

Holy JEEZ! The fact that this is being reprinted is a BIG DEAL! Unless one was willing to part with his unemployment insurance for an half of the whole--and at $200, well...

[Jeff Buddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reading Charles Reznikoff's poems while I was waiting for the dentist. This particular book is huge, more than 700 pages, a brick at best. The dentist herself saw my book. "what are you reading?" she asked. For me, it was hard to sum up. So what I said was,"It's a book of poems." My dentist laughed, and said, "So you're looking for something to relax you before you are tortured."

So there we have it. Poetry is supposed to be gentle, relaxing, flowers and hearts, unicorns.

Charles Reznikoff's poetry is anything but this. It's death, murder, rape. It's violence and the clashing of spheres. Nothing in the book is relaxing. It's all a horror.

But that's what makes it so good. Reznikoff was part of the Objectivist school, a class that included Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, building on the work of the good William Carlos Williams. Reznikoff's process for this poems was to take existing court documents (he was a lawyer) and distil them down tho their essence. At their essence he lineated the texts, edited here and there, and forged amazing poems.

I am by no means going to say these poems are beautiful. How can murder and rape be beautiful? I am in no way going to say that these easily accessible poems are easy to read. Reading about shootings, stabbings, and strangulations is not easy. But these poems exist, heavy and real, they exist.

Reznikoff is now one of my favorite poets. You should read him as soon as you can.

[meadow · Rating 5 out of 5]

the simplicity of language used by reznikoff makes these poems extremely powerful. it was difficult to read too many of them in one sitting. i think this is the perfect example of poetry that doesn't strive for obscurity and instead focuses all efforts on expressing intensely emotional things. the language used is never emotional and instead the stark objectivity forces the situation directly upon you, giving you a more direct feeling of the experience.

because of the subject matter and the style, i think it is pretty comparable to "the part about the crimes" in Roberto Bolaño's 2666

[Christopher]

Who would have thought that the most disturbing thing I'd have read in 2021 was a book of poetry containing metered court documentation from over 100 years ago?

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was originally published at The Scrying Orb.

Okay. OK. The first thing this book will teach you is that…

…between the years of 1885 and 1915, an enormous amount of industrial accidents occurred in this country. Limbs caught in belts or spools and torn off, bodies crushed by debris or collapsing mine shafts, slick and poorly constructed scaffolding leading to great falls into chasms or machinery or boiling fat.

Also, a whole lot of people, a whole lot of children, were killed by trains.

All of this illustrated in sparse, evocative verse:

“In the good old summertime,”
Ellen, all of fourteen, worked in a steam laundry
as a “feeder”:
put collars through the machine that pressed them.

The feeder sat on a platform,
collars on the small table in front of her;
the lower roller hot enough to iron collars as they were passed through,
while the upper roller pressed down upon them
with a pressure of two hundred pounds;
the heated roller was hollow and revolved around gas jets–
so hot that if a collar stopped on it for a minute
It would be scorched.

Ellen saw a collar with a lap on it–
the buttonhole part lapped back on the collar–
put her hand out to pull it away
and her finger was caught in a buttonhole
and she could not get it out
before her hand was drawn between the rollers–
burnt and crushed as she screamed.

(Typing this extends my appreciation of Reznikoff’s precision. The punctuation is so carefully chosen and communicative of the story’s pace.)

Poetry is not my forte. I’ve read very little of it, voluntarily, in my adult life. Certainly not cover to cover. Testimony may be cheating a bit since it’s almost as much short story as verse, but still: now I read poems. I read several vignettes, which ranged from a few lines to two pages, before bed every night and hoped not to dream of getting my arm caught in a belt (I worked on a belt for a long time…) or my torso rent in half by a runaway mine cart. It became somehow soothing.

Racism is another key factor explored here, some verses illustrating the plight of post-reconstruction blacks, written in a time of segregation without the foreknowledge of the civil right’s movement, still thirty years in the future.

Several white men went at night to the Negro’s house,
shot into it,
and set fire to his cotton on the gallery;
his wife and children ran under the bed
and, as the firing from the guns and pistols went on
and the cotton blazed up,
ran through a side door into the woods.
The Negro himself, badly wounded, fled to the house of a neighbor–
a white man–
and got inside.
He was followed,
and one of those who ran after him
put a shotgun against the white man’s door
and shot a hole through it.
Justice, however, was not to be thwarted,
for five of the men who did this to the Negro
were tried:
for “unlawfully and maliciously
injuring and disfiguring”–
the white man’s property.

Only a portion of the “Negro” sections follow this kind of tract. Many, perhaps most involving black people, are about the violence they’re enacting, which is nominally no different than the ones about whites, had not every single passage referred to each man or woman as “the Negro” or “the colored woman”, like they’re another species.

The back of the book references the poet William Carlos Williams, who wrote Paterson, which influenced a movie of the same name I enjoyed a great deal. Williams will be the next point I continue delving into poetry.

[17CECO · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutal. Had to put it down around page 400. Instead of getting numb and slogging through the cavalcade of whittled down, flatly reported cases of death, dismemberment, and theft, I was starting to flinch around the book. Death in this very American book is not over there--it is in workplaces, families, bedrooms, streets, and bars. It comes from greed, stupidity, negligence, petty jealousies and momentary impulses.

from Testimony, The United States (1901 – 1910): Recitative
Charles Reznikoff

The rendering plant making fat into tallow
had a narrow covered passageway
between its factory and engine-house,
and in the passageway were four tanks for the hot fat.
One of the tanks, five by four feet and three feet deep,
was right at the door of one of the passageway
but with a wooden cover on hinges.

The man who skimmed the fat in the tank
had opened the cover
and left it open;
and Dixon bringing a message to a fireman in the engine-house
from the fireman’s brother
left the stable to go into the engine-house through the passageway.
A workman at the stable
saw him but did not trouble to warn him about the tank;
and neither did the engineer standing on a platform
within a few feet of Dixon
as he was about to enter the passageway.
The door had no latch but swung outward
as Dixon opened it,
and he did not see the tank-cover leaning against the wall—
the color of the hot fat almost that of the greasy cement floor—
and at his first step into the passageway
he plunged into the open tank,
its fat heated to a temperature of about two hundred degrees,
and was scalded to death.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

One way to gloss Modernism is as writing about writing--Modernism's concern is with how minds make meaning, and that is the central question of writing, too, how to make meaning. If that's the case, then Reznikoff's is more about editing than writing. He reviewed thousands of legal documents from the nineteenth century, which he then edited into free-form poems, creating a vivid document of American social history. Is it depressing? Indeed. But then so is much of history. Is it too long? Yeah, probably, and I greatly prefer the abridged version of this book, which is pungent exactly because of its brevity. Good to dip into, though, and savor slowly.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning collection of found poetry. Every poem is drawn from an event that allegedly happened. While the bulk the selections are from court documents detailing instances of evil, it’s oddly encouraging to be reminded that humanity has always been committing cruel acts against one another, even in the ‘good ole days,’ and that the cycle of bad news we see today is nothing new. In addition to grounding my expectations of humanity (since I tend to err on the side of idealism,) Testimony made me grateful for the regulations that have been put in place against racial persecution, child labor, and unsafe workplaces.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy crisp, understated language masking fraught emotions and social critique, this is some great stuff. Reznikoff's style feels effortless and raw, a perfect voice for the scenes of injustice and brutality he presents at the turn of the 19th century. The work does feel longer than necessary, but viewing it as something to experience from the beginning to the end is probably the wrong approach. I'd try diving in at random points throughout instead, something which seemed central to any meaning you can impose over the world he presents.

[N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished volume 1 but I’ve bought the edition with all volumes. Excited to read it all.

[Kevin P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most moving books of poems in 20th century.

[ASC Library]

811.52 Rez

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is indeed a rough book to read, as it focuses primarily on heartache, murder, disfigurement, suffering, and loss. And yet, it’s pretty great too. Its style (Objectivism) is blunt, to the point, and utterly devoid of literary flourishes. The words mean what they mean and nothing besides.

Taken from court records between 1880 and 1915, “Testimony” reaches across time to illuminate forgotten (and jarringly common) moments of anguish. However, while the stories these poems tell are tough to absorb, it does become increasingly clear that they are versions of events; sometimes deliberately false, sometimes painfully earnest. This isn’t a merely a journalistic document. It’s a multi-layered, poetic re-telling of very specific tales.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a long, grim litany of mayhem and violence - murder, rape, conspiracy, industrial accidents, railroad accidents, fraud, deceit, and treachery. Reznikoff takes only the facts of court decisions to craft his prose poems, so there is no account of the aftermath, or of any possible justice, just people doing terrible things and having terrible things done to them. I got a little past page 300, slightly more than halfway through, when I had to throw in the towel; without any catharsis, this reader was just left with pity, revulsion, and despair, which, frankly, I get enough from reading current news. But if you are looking for plots for crime novels, hoo boy, there are plenty here.

[Neil Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a compelling, addictive, and sad book about the preterite of America's history. Meaning, this is about people you won't read about in history books, since they were too busy robbing, killing, cheating, or were the ones being robbed, killed, and cheated in everyday life around the turn of the 20th century. All this crime told in pitch-perfect poetry that you can read like a story. Really haunting stuff and well worth checking out. I read this over a few months as sort of bed-time stuff to fall asleep to and shape my dreams.

[Allen]

CR delves into actual law cases, and the results are hair raising. he made the best use possible of his law degree with this work.

[Peter Gooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read. As powerful as ever. Evocative. Haunting.