My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

216 REZNIKOFF'S NEARNESS
Rails in the subway,
what did you know of happiness,
when you were ore in the earth;
now the electric lights shine upon yoU. 42
In the Dembo interview (110), Reznikoff reports that a Japanese listener
had questioned the last line of one of his poems, presumably because it
violated the ideal of Haiku-a violation that is just the point of his practice
of comment on, or interference into, the scene:
What are you doing in our street among the automobiles,
horse?
How are your cousins, the centaur and the unicorn?43
Just as the absence of the first-person pronoun in this poem marks its break
from traditional expressive poetry, so the use of the second-person pronoun
marks its break from an ocular imagism.
27. The poetics of adjacency are aversive of the detachment and irony
associated with the "high" modernism of Eliot, or, more accurately, the tradition
of Eliot. Are you apart from the language or a part of it?-What we
do is to take back language from symbolical allusions and metaphysical
contraptions. Yet this swings back to the question of exile, as Reznikoff
laments his exile from Hebrew in his most Jabesian moment:
How difficult for me is Hebrew:
even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun
is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion.44
To be exiled from one's language is to be lost as a son or daughter, to be a
foreigner in one's own tongue, as Jabes says the writer, as Jew, is exiled even
in her own language. Since the Jewish tradition imparts to the word a fundamental
spiritual nature, this exile from a language that one has never
learned suggests the deepest sense of spiritual disconnectedness. Yet the
poem also touches on the idea, fundamental to anti-semitism, that all Jews,
even monolingual native speakers of English or German or French, have
a "hidden language" to which they owe fundamental allegiance-a belief
that, if internalized by the Jew, incites self-hatred, as Sander Gilman discusses
in Jewish Self-Hatred.
Like many of his contemporaries, Reznikoff was a second-language
speaker of English and it was no doubt his newness to English that con-
42. Jerusalem the Golden (1934), #17, U II.
43. Jerusalem the Golden, #39, U 15.
44. Five Groups of Verse (1927), #14,1:72.