Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

shrewd, often polemical presence of the author in the ways this leveling is
interrupted. It’s interesting that my students last week noted first of all–
somewhat complainingly–the repetitiousness of the book, the endless
permutations of violence and neglect was "predictable," they said. We spent a
lot of time talking about courts and law and what testimony is in that context,
and after a while they grasped that not all testimony is true. They began to
notice, also, Reznikoff’s sarcasm, and the fact that not all meets the eye in these
stories. Of course this only annoys them further since if there’s anything they
hate more than the depressing it’s the subtle–Testimony being both. All of
which is to say that the particularity has meaning above all because of the
clarity with which Reznikoff organizes it conceptually.
I could say more about Testimony in this regard, but the message is long
enough. A quote then from Charles Bernstein’s Sulfur essay:
"I’ve been told that Reznikoff disliked obscurity and would certainly not have
wanted his work to be characterized as obscure. Yet Reznikoff, from the
beginning, seemed to expect that obscurity was the likely outcome for his
poetic work and seemed to accept that with remarkable equanimity. Perhaps he
understood the nature, the social structure, of obscurity better than his
contemporaries. Neglect, disregard–the socially obscure, the forgotten and
repressed, the overlooked–this was his subject. Hiding in plain sight you may
never be found: if sight is not to ‘See by but to look at,’ not to use but behold."
I like that.