My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

224 R E Z N I K 0 FF • S N EAR N E S S
when both Oppen and Carl Rakosi had stopped writing, in part because
of the conflict they felt between their left political commitments and their
poetic commitments. Perhaps Testimony can be seen as a labor-intensive
counterpart to the lacuna in these poets' work.
Reznikoff's work is preoccupied with those left out of society, people
whose lives were destroyed by things (machines, circumstances, an economy)
out of their control: again, the neglected, the overlooked. His one
reference to Marx is placed strikingly as the last of four poems in a series
about prophecy called "Jerusalem the Golden", which is itself the final
series of his book of the same title, published, Significantly, in 1934 (#79,
1: 127-29). ''Jerusalem the Golden" begins with "The Lion of Judah"-a
poem in which the prophet Nathan denies the right to permanent foundation
even, or already, to the Jews ("you shall not build the Lord's house /
because your hands have shed much blood"). This poem, considered in
the light of the first poem of Jerusalem the Golden ("The Hebrew of your
poets, Zion / is like oil upon a bum / ... I have married ... the speech of
strangers") suggests the intractability of the Jewish diaspora (understood,
however, not as exile but a series of displacements/replacements). In the
second poem, "The Shield of David", the prophets locate "all the lights of
heaven" in "the darkness of the grave", abjuring the emptiness of ritual as
shells for "unseeing eyes", eyes that look but do not see: looked and saw the
Light in the Darkness:
worship Me in righteousness;
worship me in kindness to the poor and weak,
in justice to the orphan, the widow, the stranger among you,
and in justice to him who takes hire in your hand
The third poem, a brief evocation of pantheism, is entitled "Spinoza", after
the prototypical Jewish "excommunicate" or "non-Jewish Jew", in Isaac
Deutscher's phrase, whose pantheism and determinism significantly prefigure
historical materialism (both Marx and Spinoza are crucial sources for
Zukofsky's "A"-9). In the last of the series, "Karl Marx", Reznikoff writes:
We shall arise while the stars are still shining ...
to begin the work we delight in,
and no one shall tell us, Go ...
to the shop or office you work in
to waste your life for a living ...
there shall be bread and no one hunger for bread ...
we shall call nothing mine-nothing for ourselves only ...
50. Darkness and light; or dusk, when dark and light can no longer be separated-