My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

206 R E Z N I K 0 F F '5 N EAR N E 5 5
-so Reznikoff continues his "platform". "Without house and ground"
hints of the wandering of exile and the absence of foundations, but this
nomadic poetry refuses exile in its insistence that grounds are only and
always where one sleeps, a view suggested by the poem's epigraph from
the Mishnah (Aboth 6:4): "and on the ground shalt thou sleep and thou
shalt live a life of trouble". Exile suggests expulsion from a native land,
but in Reznikoff's verse the native is what lies at one's feet, ground for
walking on: so no loss of prior foundations, no absent center, as in
Edmond Jabes, but "finding as founding" to use Stanley Cavell's Emersonian
phrase from This New yet Unapproachable America.
Perhaps there are those who possess house and land, who can afford
to live higher off the ground, imagining possession as a prophylactic for
loss. Damage is given, not chosen. The nomad, neither uprooted or
upmoting, roots around, reroutes. Reznikoff's new world is not one of
absence, but neither is it one of plenty.
Like a tree in December
after the winds have stripped it
leaving only trunk and limbs
to ride and outlast
the winter's blast.
The "writer of verse", like the nomad, "must learn to fast / and drink water
by measure". Reznikoff's baggage is, literally, the light that emanates from
conversation and song (dialogue and psalm), exactly the measures of his
verse. This is a poetry not of dislocation or banishment but of the "blinding"
intensities of location as relocation, relocalization.
9. A typology of Reznikoff's parataxis would begin by distinguishing his
non-developmental seriality from sequential seriality, to use Joseph
Conte's terms in Unending Design, a distinction that is in some ways similar
to that between analytic and synthetic cubism.
Certainly, the modulation of disjunctiveness between poems in a
Reznikoff "group of verse" is one of the poetry's most distinctive features.
As Burton Hatlen has argued, reading Reznikoff means reading each of his
groups as a series, not as autonomous poems.21 Such readings will need
to take account of the fact that Reznikoff reordered the sequences of his
groups in ways that underscore the modular, permutable, status of each
discrete poem.
Reznikoff's groups are composed by varying the degree of continuity
21. Burton Haden, "Objectivism in Context: Charles Reznikoff and Jewish-American
Modernism", presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, New
York,1992.