My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

REZNIKOFF'S NEARNESS 217
tributed to the newness of his approach to founding an American poetry
broken off from Island English, forged by syntax and music previously
unheard in the language. Reznikoff's poetics of location as relocalization
is not a poetry of exile. Yet loss rips through this poetry, like hot water
spurting from a frozen geyser.
The Hebrew of your poets, Zion,
is like oil upon a burn,
cool as oil;
after work,
the smell in the street at night
of the hedge in flower.
Like Solomon,
I have married and married the speech of strangers;
none are like you, Shulamite.45
28. The social engagement of the Jewish secular left meant not assuming
the "social" as an abstract, static entity but as something to be located, particularized.
In the poetics of nearness, others exist prior to oneself; you do not look
out onto other people as if through a preexisting subjectivity, but find
whomever you may be as person, as poet, in relation to them, by virtue of
your acknowledgment of their suffering, which is to say their circumstance
or bearing in the world. This is the ethical grounding of Reznikoff's work.
29. Vividness not as design but texture:
I have neither the time nor the weaving skills, perhaps,
for the intricate medallions the Persians know;
my rugs are the barbaric fire-worshipper's:
how blue the waters flow,
how red the fiery sun,
how brilliant a green the grass is,
how blinding white the snow.46
30. Witness as care / in-volved / as care-taken, caretaker, care in the language,
for the world. Language is caretaker of the world.
45. Jerusalem the Golden, #1, 1:107. In the Dembo interview, Reznikoff responds to a question
about "a personal sense of isolation or exile" in this poem: "I don't think 'isolation' is the word. I
don't feel isolated in English it's just that I'm missing a lot not knowing Hebrew. Incidentally,
Havelock Ellis, in one of his books, as I remember it, points out the tendency in a writer to use
characteristics of the speech of his ancestors, even a speech he no longer knows" (p. 104).
46. Inscriptions, #21,2:75. Reznikoff's "platform".