Poets and Poems: Charles Reznikoff and "Poems"

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) is best known for a multi-volume collection entitled Testimony: The United States 1885-1915. With William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, he was part of a group of poets known as the Objectivists, who treated the poem as an object used to explain a clear view of the world. Reznikoff continued as an Objectivist poet through his lifetime, focusing on immigrants, Black Americans, and the poor. For his last collection, Holocaust (1975), he used court testimony from the war crimes trials and Nazi death camps as his research material. 

Before he was labeled and associated with a group, Reznikoff was publishing poetry. He had his first two collections, Rhythms (1918) and Rhythms II (1919), privately printed for friends. Both were very short, more like short chapbooks, but already he was showing the writing style that would come to characterize his works of the 1930s and afterward.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Leaving the Island – poem by A.E. Stallings at The Times Literary Supplement.

 

Sing a New Song to the Lord: The Hundredfold by Anthony Esolen – Jeremiah Tobin at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

My Boy – a Little League Baseball Poem by Gregory Ross at Society of Classical Poets. 

 

Things Worth Remembering: Contemplating the Ruins – Douglas Murray at The Free Press. 

Poets and Poems: Boris Pasternak and “February”

Perhaps it was the watery eyes of Omar Sharif, the beauty of Julie Christie, the fierceness of Alec Guiness, or the wounded look of Geraldine Chaplin. What it was, I was a young teenager when I was pulled into the movie version of Doctor Zhivago, directed by David Lean. It was one of the movies rarely made today – a big movie, with dozens of characters, stories and sub-stories. It was an epic film based on an epic literary work that had only recently been published.

Published in Russian in Italy and forbidden in the author’s own country.

The movie pulled me to the novel by Boris Pasternak, and I read it when I was all of 14. It’s a love story, actually several love stories, set against the backdrop of World War I, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and the long Soviet night that followed. Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, largely on the strength of Doctor Zhivago and his poetry, but the Soviet regime forced him to refuse the honor.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting of Boris Pasternak and his brother by his father, Leonid Pasternak.