Objectivist poets
Encyclopedia
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernist
s who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American
and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound
and William Carlos Williams
. The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky
were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasise sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. Note that while the name is similar to Ayn Rand
's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated, and are, in fact, radically different.
The core group consisted of the Americans Zukofsky, Williams, Charles Reznikoff
, George Oppen
and Carl Rakosi
, and the British poet Basil Bunting
. Later, another American poet, Lorine Niedecker
, became associated with the group. A number of other poets were included in early publications under the Objectivist rubric without actually sharing the attitudes and approaches to poetry of this core group. Although these poets generally suffered critical neglect, especially in their early careers, and a number of them abandoned the practice of writing and/or publishing poetry for a time, they were to prove highly influential for later generations of writers working in the tradition of modernist poetry in English
.
, the first consciously avant garde movement in 20th century English-language
poetry. Pound
, who was Imagism's prime mover, served as foreign editor of Harriet Monroe
's magazine Poetry
. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D.
and Richard Aldington
under the label Imagiste. Aldington's poems were printed in the November issue, and H.D.'s appeared in the January 1913 issue. The March 1913 issue of Poetry also contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and F. S. Flint
's essay Imagisme. This publication history meant that this London
-based movement had its first readership in the United States
. It also meant that Imagism was available as a model for American Modernist
poets of the next generation.
Zukofsky was one such poet. He published a poem in Poetry in 1924 and introduced himself to Pound in 1927, when he sent the older poet his "Poem beginning 'The,'". Pound published the poem in his magazine The Exile
, and a long correspondence and friendship between the two began. This relationship was strengthened by Zukofsky's 1929 essay on Pound's long work in progress The Cantos
. Pound also provided an introduction to William Carlos Williams, another former Imagist who was living in New Jersey
. Zukofsky and Williams quickly became close friends and were to be literary collaborators for the rest of Williams's life.
Another of Zukofsky's literary mentors at this period was Charles Reznikoff
,
a New York
poet whose early work was also influenced by Imagism. By 1928, the young American poet George Oppen
had become friendly with Zukofsky and Reznikoff. Another young American poet, Carl Rakosi
, started corresponding with Pound around this time, and the older poet again put him in contact with Zukofsky. The final member of the core group, Basil Bunting, was an English
poet who came from a Quaker
background and who had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector
during World War I
. In 1923, Bunting met Pound in Paris
and, once again, a close literary friendship developed. In 1930, Bunting published his first collection of poetry, Redimiculum Matellarum, and Pound introduced him to Zukofsky.
It appears that the term Objectivist may have been used because Harriet Monroe insisted on a group name. It also seems that the core group did not see themselves as a coherent movement but rather as a group of individual poets with some shared approach to their art. As well as the matters covered in Zukofsky's essays, the elements of this approach included: a respect for Imagist achievement in the areas of vers libre and highly concentrated language and imagery; a rejection of the Imagists' interest in classicism
and mythology
; for Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Rakosi and Oppen, a shared Jewish heritage (which, for all but Oppen included an early childhood in which English was not their first language); generally left-wing, and, in the cases of Zukofsky and Oppen at least, Marxist politics.
magazine in February 1931; this was arranged for by Pound and edited by Zukofsky (Vol. 37, No. 5). As well as Rakosi, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, George Oppen, Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams, the issue included work by a number of poets who would have little or no further association with the group: Howard Weeks, Robert McAlmon
, Joyce Hopkins, Norman Macleod, Kenneth Rexroth
, S. Theodore Hecht, Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, Whittaker Chambers
, Jesse Lowenthal, Emanuel Carnevali (as translator of Arthur Rimbaud
), John Wheelwright
, Richard Johns and Martha Champion. An appendix (Symposium) featured texts by Parker Tyler
and Charles Henri Ford
, with a note by Zukofsky, a text by Samuel Putnam
and Zukofsky-translated poems by André Salmon
and René Taupin
.
The issue also contained Zukofsky's essays Program: 'Objectivists' 1931 and Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff, a reworking of a study of Reznikoff's work originally written some time earlier. In this second essay, Zukofsky expands on the basic tenets of Objectivist poetics
, stating that in sincerity "Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody", and that objectification relates to "the appearance of the art form as an object". This position echoes Pound's 1918 dictum (in an essay, "A Retrospective", in which he is looking back at Imagism) "I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity".
In which the girder among the rubbish represents –for Zukofsky– the poem as object, sincere in itself. Oppen continued to refer to these lines as a poetic touchstone
as late as 1976.
Oppen's own contribution was a poem titled "1930s", later collected
(without the title) as the opening section of Oppen's first collection
called Discrete Series, a book-length poem sequence.
Of his own poetry, Zukofsky chose to include "A" — Seventh Movement, the first part of a six-page section from what was to become an 800-page poem. This extract takes as its subject a set of roadworks in the street outside his New York home:
that is not explicitly addressed in these essays is an interest in exploiting the resonances of small, everyday words. As Zukofsky was to write some time later (in 1946), "a case can be made for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. Those who do not believe this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words." This concern is also reflected in Oppen's statement "if we still possessed the word 'is', there would be no need to write poems".
, Robert Frost
, Edgar Lee Masters
, and Edna St. Vincent Millay
, all of whom were regular contributors to the magazine. However, not all reactions were so unfavourable; Niedecker read the issue at her home in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin
, and wrote to Zukofsky, beginning a friendship and literary correspondence that would last until her death 40 years later.
The Poetry issue was followed by An Objectivist Anthology in 1932. This anthology featured far fewer contributors: Basil Bunting, Mary Butts
, Frances Fletcher, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky and Forest Anderson, T. S. Eliot
, R. B. N. Warriston and Jerry Reisman. The anthology served to highlight the differences between these poets as much as their shared attitudes to writing. Much of the difference stemmed from Zukofsky's insistence on form over content, which conflicted with many of the other poets' concern with the real world. As Rakosi would later write: "if Reznikoff was an Objectivist, Zukofsky is not and never was one."
An Objectivist Anthology was published by To, Publishers, a small press run by Zukofsky, Reznikoff and George and Mary Oppen
, and funded from Oppen's small private income. They operated from addresses in New York (Zukofsky) and Le Beausset
, a town in France
where the Oppens were living. The press also published A Novelette and Other Prose (1932) by Williams and Prolegomena 1 (1932) by Ezra Pound. This was a reprint of two of Pound's prose books, How to Read and The Spirit of Romance, bound in one volume. They planned to reprint all of Pound's prose, but the press folded in 1932 before any more volumes appeared.
The Oppens returned to the United States in 1932 and, together with Zukofsky and Reznikoff, went on to form the Objectivist Press to publish more books of Objectivist work. The first titles to appear were Williams' Collected Poems 1921–31 (1934), with an introduction by Wallace Stevens, Oppen's Discrete Series, followed by Reznikoff's Jerusalem the Golden, (1934, poetry), his Testimony, (1934, prose), with an introduction by Kenneth Burke
and his In Memoriam: 1933 (1934, poetry). Reznikoff's Separate Way (1936) was the last publication of The Obkjectivist Press, not counting Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry (1948), which was published under its imprint twelve years later.
to escape the strongly anti-Communist political atmosphere of the times. It would be 1958 before Oppen wrote any further poetry. The Oppens returned to New York in 1960, and George went on to publish six books of poetry between 1962 and 1978, by which time he was finding it increasingly difficult to write—he had Alzheimer's disease
. He won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1969 for Of Being Numerous. Mary Oppen published an account of their life, including a close-up view of the Objectivist period, in her 1978 memoir
Meaning a Life. George Oppen died in 1984.
After his 1941 Selected Poems, Carl Rakosi abandoned poetry and dedicated himself to social work for 26 years. A letter from the English poet Andrew Crozier
about his early poetry encouraged Rakosi to start writing again. A collection, Amulet, was published by New Directions Publishers
in 1967, and a number of other volumes were to appear over the following 46 years. These included his Collected Poems in 1986. Rakosi died in 2004, aged 100.
After Redimiculum Matellarum, Bunting's next book publication was Poems: 1950. Around this time he returned to live in his native Northumbria
, and the 1960s were to prove to be a very productive decade for him. Publications from this time include possibly his best-known work, the long poem Briggflatts
(1966), described by critic Cyril Connolly
as "the finest long poem to have been published in England since T. S. Eliot
's Four Quartets
", and Collected Poems (1968, revised editions 1978 and 1985). An Uncollected Poems appeared in 1991 and his Complete Poems in 2000.
In 1933, Niedecker was living in New York, and she and Zukofsky had a brief affair. She soon returned to her home in rural Wisconsin, a landscape that was to influence much of her later writing. Her first book, New Goose, appeared in 1946. In common with a number of her fellow Objectivists, a combination of critical neglect and personal circumstances meant that this early publication was followed by a longish period of poetic silence. Although she continued writing for much of the intervening period, her next book, My Friend Tree, did not appear until 1961. She published relatively frequently after that, and her Collected Works appeared in 2002.
In 1941, Reznikoff published a collection of poems called Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down. After that, although he continued to write and to publish in periodicals, his poetry had no further book publication until the 1959 Inscriptions: 1944–1956. In 1962, New Directions published a selection of poems called By the Waters of Manhattan. Three years later, they brought out Testimony: The United States, 1885–1890: Recitative, the first installment of a long work based on court records covering the period 1855 to 1915. The book was a commercial and critical flop, and New Directions dropped him. In the 1970s, Black Sparrow Press started publishing Reznikoff, bringing out the complete Testimony as well as a similar work, Holocaust, based on courtroom accounts of Nazi
concentration camps. In the years after Reznikoff's death in 1976, Black Sparrow brought all his major works back into print.
Zukofsky had begun work on a long poem in 24 parts called A in 1927. The first seven "movements" of this work appeared in the Objectivist Anthology, having previously appeared in magazines. These early sections show the influence of The Cantos
, though Zukofsky was to further develop his own style and voice as A progressed. The 1930s also saw him continue his involvement in Marxist politics, an interest that went back to his college friendship with Whittaker Chambers.
Although he would continue to write short poems and prose works, notably the 1963 Bottom: On Shakespeare, the completion of A was to be the major concern of the remainder of Zukofsky's writing life. As the poem progressed, formal considerations tended to be foregrounded more and more, with Zukofsky applying a wide range of devices and approaches, from the sonnet
to aleatory
or random composition. The final complete edition was going to press as the poet lay on his deathbed in 1978. His final written work was the index to this volume.
and Yvor Winters
, as well as Harriet Monroe's already-mentioned unfavourable reaction to the Poetry special issue. However, they did have an immediate impact, especially on the work of their two Imagist mentors, Williams and Pound. Williams and Zukofsky were to maintain a life-long personal and creative relationship which was to prove important for both men. For Zukofsky, the example of Williams helped to keep him focused on external realities and things. For Williams, Zukofsky served as a reminder of the importance of form. As Mark Scroggins writes, "from Zukofsky, Williams learned to shape his often amorphous verse into more sharply chiselled measures."
Pound, too, was influenced by the Objectivist sense of form, their focus on everyday vocabulary, and their interests in politics, economics and specifically American subject matter. The critic Hugh Kenner
has argued that these influences helped shape the sections of The Cantos published during the 1930s, writing "Pound was reading them, and they him".
The poets of the Beat Generation
, a group of American bohemian
writers to emerge at the end of the 1940s that included Allen Ginsberg
, Gary Snyder
and Jack Kerouac
, owed much to Pound and Williams, and were led, through them, to the Objectivists. In the 1950s and '60s
, Zukofsky was sought out by younger poets including Paul Blackburn
, Jerome Rothenberg
, Jonathan Williams
, Denise Levertov
, Gilbert Sorrentino
and Allen Ginsberg
. His work was also well-known to the Black Mountain poets
, especially Robert Creeley
and Cid Corman
, whose Origin journal and press were to serve as valuable publishing outlets for the older poet.
Zukofsky's formal procedures, especially his interest in aleatory writing, were a key influence on Jackson Mac Low
and John Cage
, amongst others, and through them on the Language School, an avant garde group of poets who started publishing in the 1970s and who included Bruce Andrews
, Charles Bernstein
, Ron Silliman
, Lyn Hejinian
, Bob Perelman
, Michael Palmer
, Rae Armantrout
, Carla Harryman
, Barrett Watten
, Clark Coolidge
, Hannah Weiner
, Susan Howe
, Tina Darragh
and Fanny Howe
.
Oppen and Reznikoff influenced subsequent generations of poets, most notably, Theodore Enslin
, Harvey Shapiro
, Michael Heller
, Norman Finkelstein
, Rachel Blau DuPlessis
, and Armand Schwerner
to name a few. Their poetry continues the Objectivist obsession with language, ethics, and world and often addresses modern, urban, Jewish life, both secular and religious. DuPlessis, on first glance, seems an exception to this list. Her poetry seems not to immediately possess the so-called themes of an Objectivist aesthetic as practiced in the work of a Reznikoff, a Niedecker or an Oppen.
As a young woman and university student, DuPlessis began a lifelong correspondence with Oppen and was deeply influenced by Oppen's integrity, sincerity, and courage. Though establishing herself as a poet with tendencies and obsessions at some remove from an Objectivist ethos
(or so it may be argued at a first reading) DuPlessis has played a crucial role in the dissemination and survival of Objectivist poetry and poetics well into the 21st century. The life of a man such as Oppen made a lasting impression on DuPlessis. DuPlessis gained Oppen's trust as well and she was given the opportunity of editing Oppen's Selected Letters, which were published posthumously.
Bunting's physical presence in Newcastle in the 1960s, together with his close relationships with a number of younger poets (including Tom Pickard
, Thomas A. Clark, Richard Caddel
and Barry MacSweeney
), meant that he was a major father figure for the poets of the British Poetry Revival
. This younger generation were also drawn to the works of the other Objectivists, and their writings began to be more widely known in Britain. For example, a letter from the Revival poet Andrew Crozier
was the trigger that prompted Rakosi's return to poetry.
Amidst the continuous reappraisals, critical and otherwise, of the legacy and literary formation of the Objectivists, a well known mapping of the territory continues to be one put forth by poet Ron Silliman
: "three-phase Objectivism". Though unclear, precisely, who coined the phrase, this rubric offers a useful way of dealing with the intercession of the Objectivist poets into our consciousness. Writes Silliman:
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january 22,2010
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...
s who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
. The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasise sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. Note that while the name is similar to Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated, and are, in fact, radically different.
The core group consisted of the Americans Zukofsky, Williams, Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. When asked by Harriet Munroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky provided his essay Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of...
, George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
and Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.-Early life:...
, and the British poet Basil Bunting
Basil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
. Later, another American poet, Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Faith Niedecker was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets...
, became associated with the group. A number of other poets were included in early publications under the Objectivist rubric without actually sharing the attitudes and approaches to poetry of this core group. Although these poets generally suffered critical neglect, especially in their early careers, and a number of them abandoned the practice of writing and/or publishing poetry for a time, they were to prove highly influential for later generations of writers working in the tradition of modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
.
Roots
The period 1909 to 1913 saw the emergence of ImagismImagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
, the first consciously avant garde movement in 20th century English-language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
poetry. Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, who was Imagism's prime mover, served as foreign editor of Harriet Monroe
Harriet Monroe
Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet and patron of the arts. She is best known as the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry Magazine, which made its debut in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S...
's magazine Poetry
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D.
H.D.
H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
and Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...
under the label Imagiste. Aldington's poems were printed in the November issue, and H.D.'s appeared in the January 1913 issue. The March 1913 issue of Poetry also contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and F. S. Flint
F. S. Flint
Frank Stuart Flint was an English poet and translator who was a prominent member of the Imagist group. Ford Madox Ford called him "one of the greatest men and one of the beautiful spirits of the country"....
's essay Imagisme. This publication history meant that this London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
-based movement had its first readership in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. It also meant that Imagism was available as a model for American Modernist
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
poets of the next generation.
Zukofsky was one such poet. He published a poem in Poetry in 1924 and introduced himself to Pound in 1927, when he sent the older poet his "Poem beginning 'The,'". Pound published the poem in his magazine The Exile
The eXile
The eXile was a Moscow-based English-language biweekly free tabloid newspaper, aimed at the city's expatriate community, which combined outrageous, sometimes satirical, content with investigative reporting...
, and a long correspondence and friendship between the two began. This relationship was strengthened by Zukofsky's 1929 essay on Pound's long work in progress The Cantos
The Cantos
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
. Pound also provided an introduction to William Carlos Williams, another former Imagist who was living in New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
. Zukofsky and Williams quickly became close friends and were to be literary collaborators for the rest of Williams's life.
Another of Zukofsky's literary mentors at this period was Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. When asked by Harriet Munroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky provided his essay Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of...
,
a New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
poet whose early work was also influenced by Imagism. By 1928, the young American poet George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
had become friendly with Zukofsky and Reznikoff. Another young American poet, Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.-Early life:...
, started corresponding with Pound around this time, and the older poet again put him in contact with Zukofsky. The final member of the core group, Basil Bunting, was an English
English people
The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...
poet who came from a Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
background and who had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector
Conscientious objector
A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....
during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. In 1923, Bunting met Pound in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and, once again, a close literary friendship developed. In 1930, Bunting published his first collection of poetry, Redimiculum Matellarum, and Pound introduced him to Zukofsky.
It appears that the term Objectivist may have been used because Harriet Monroe insisted on a group name. It also seems that the core group did not see themselves as a coherent movement but rather as a group of individual poets with some shared approach to their art. As well as the matters covered in Zukofsky's essays, the elements of this approach included: a respect for Imagist achievement in the areas of vers libre and highly concentrated language and imagery; a rejection of the Imagists' interest in classicism
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
and mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
; for Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Rakosi and Oppen, a shared Jewish heritage (which, for all but Oppen included an early childhood in which English was not their first language); generally left-wing, and, in the cases of Zukofsky and Oppen at least, Marxist politics.
Early publications
The first appearance of the group was in a special issue of PoetryPoetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
magazine in February 1931; this was arranged for by Pound and edited by Zukofsky (Vol. 37, No. 5). As well as Rakosi, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, George Oppen, Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams, the issue included work by a number of poets who would have little or no further association with the group: Howard Weeks, Robert McAlmon
Robert McAlmon
Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American author, poet and publisher.-Life:McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the youngest of ten children of an itinerant Presbyterian minister....
, Joyce Hopkins, Norman Macleod, Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
, S. Theodore Hecht, Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
, Jesse Lowenthal, Emanuel Carnevali (as translator of Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
), John Wheelwright
John Brooks Wheelwright
John Brooks Wheelwright was an American poet from a Boston Brahmin background. He belonged to the poetic avant garde of the 1930s and was a Marxist, a founder-member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the United States...
, Richard Johns and Martha Champion. An appendix (Symposium) featured texts by Parker Tyler
Parker Tyler
Harrison Parker Tyler, better known as Parker Tyler was an American author, poet, and film critic. Tyler had a relationship with underground filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse from 1945 until his death...
and Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist best known for his editorship of the Surrealist magazine View in New York City, and as the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew...
, with a note by Zukofsky, a text by Samuel Putnam
Samuel Putnam
Samuel Putnam was an American translator and scholar of Romance languages.His most famous work is his 1949 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote...
and Zukofsky-translated poems by André Salmon
André Salmon
André Salmon was a French poet, art critic and writer. He was one of the defenders of cubism, with Guillaume Apollinaire and Maurice Raynal.-Biography:Andre Salmon was born in Paris...
and René Taupin
René Taupin
René Taupin was a French translator, critic, and academic. He moved to the United States in the 1920s. In 1954, he was appointed chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College...
.
The issue also contained Zukofsky's essays Program: 'Objectivists' 1931 and Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff, a reworking of a study of Reznikoff's work originally written some time earlier. In this second essay, Zukofsky expands on the basic tenets of Objectivist poetics
Poetics
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...
, stating that in sincerity "Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody", and that objectification relates to "the appearance of the art form as an object". This position echoes Pound's 1918 dictum (in an essay, "A Retrospective", in which he is looking back at Imagism) "I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity".
Some example poems
As an example, Zukofsky cites the following short section from A Group of Verse, a long poem sequence that was Reznikoff's contribution to the issue:- Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
- a girder, still itself among the rubbish.
In which the girder among the rubbish represents –for Zukofsky– the poem as object, sincere in itself. Oppen continued to refer to these lines as a poetic touchstone
Touchstone (metaphor)
As a metaphor, a touchstone refers to any physical or intellectual measure by which the validity or merit of a concept can be tested. It is similar in use to an acid test, litmus test in politics, and a shibboleth.-Touchstone in literature:...
as late as 1976.
Oppen's own contribution was a poem titled "1930s", later collected
(without the title) as the opening section of Oppen's first collection
called Discrete Series, a book-length poem sequence.
- The knowledge not of sorrow, you were
- saying, but of boredom
- Is — aside from reading speaking
- smoking —
- Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,
- wished to know when, having risen,
- “approached the window as if to see
- what really was going on”;
- And saw rain falling, in the distance
- more slowly,
- The road clear from her past the window-
- glass —
- Of the world, weather-swept, with which
- one shares the century.
Of his own poetry, Zukofsky chose to include "A" — Seventh Movement, the first part of a six-page section from what was to become an 800-page poem. This extract takes as its subject a set of roadworks in the street outside his New York home:
- Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words
- Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but
- They have no manes, so there are no airs, birds
- Of words, from me to them no singing gut.
- For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood,
- For their stomachs are logs with print on them;
- Blood red, red lamps hang from necks or where could
- Be necks, two legs stand A, four together M.
- "Street Closed" is what print says on their stomachs;
- That cuts out everybody but the diggers;
- You're cut out, and she's cut out, and the jiggers
- Are cut out. No! we can't have such nor bucks
- As won't, tho they're not here, pass thru a hoop
- Strayed on a manhole — me? Am on a stoop.
extract from "A"-7 by Louis Zukofsky
Language and poetry
Another aspect of Objectivist poeticsPoetics
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...
that is not explicitly addressed in these essays is an interest in exploiting the resonances of small, everyday words. As Zukofsky was to write some time later (in 1946), "a case can be made for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. Those who do not believe this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words." This concern is also reflected in Oppen's statement "if we still possessed the word 'is', there would be no need to write poems".
Reaction
Reaction to the issue was not uniformly welcoming, and the March 1931 issue of the magazine contained a hostile response by the editor herself under the title "The Arrogance of Youth". Monroe was particularly angered by Zukofsky's rejection of Edwin Arlington RobinsonEdwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.- Biography :Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, but his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870...
, Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
, Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist...
, and Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work...
, all of whom were regular contributors to the magazine. However, not all reactions were so unfavourable; Niedecker read the issue at her home in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin
Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin
Fort Atkinson is a city in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, United States. It is located on the Rock River, a few miles upstream from Lake Koshkonong. In 1996, Money Magazine named Fort Atkinson "One of America's Hottest Little Boomtowns." The population was 11,621 at the 2000 census.- History :Fort...
, and wrote to Zukofsky, beginning a friendship and literary correspondence that would last until her death 40 years later.
The Poetry issue was followed by An Objectivist Anthology in 1932. This anthology featured far fewer contributors: Basil Bunting, Mary Butts
Mary Butts
Mary Frances Butts was a British modernist writer. Her work found recognition in important literary magazines such as The Bookman and The Little Review, as well as from some of her fellow modernists, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Bryher...
, Frances Fletcher, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky and Forest Anderson, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, R. B. N. Warriston and Jerry Reisman. The anthology served to highlight the differences between these poets as much as their shared attitudes to writing. Much of the difference stemmed from Zukofsky's insistence on form over content, which conflicted with many of the other poets' concern with the real world. As Rakosi would later write: "if Reznikoff was an Objectivist, Zukofsky is not and never was one."
An Objectivist Anthology was published by To, Publishers, a small press run by Zukofsky, Reznikoff and George and Mary Oppen
Mary Oppen
Mary Oppen was an American activist, artist, photographer, poet and writer.-George Oppen:...
, and funded from Oppen's small private income. They operated from addresses in New York (Zukofsky) and Le Beausset
Le Beausset
Le Beausset is a commune in the Var department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.-External links:*...
, a town in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
where the Oppens were living. The press also published A Novelette and Other Prose (1932) by Williams and Prolegomena 1 (1932) by Ezra Pound. This was a reprint of two of Pound's prose books, How to Read and The Spirit of Romance, bound in one volume. They planned to reprint all of Pound's prose, but the press folded in 1932 before any more volumes appeared.
The Oppens returned to the United States in 1932 and, together with Zukofsky and Reznikoff, went on to form the Objectivist Press to publish more books of Objectivist work. The first titles to appear were Williams' Collected Poems 1921–31 (1934), with an introduction by Wallace Stevens, Oppen's Discrete Series, followed by Reznikoff's Jerusalem the Golden, (1934, poetry), his Testimony, (1934, prose), with an introduction by Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.-Personal history:...
and his In Memoriam: 1933 (1934, poetry). Reznikoff's Separate Way (1936) was the last publication of The Obkjectivist Press, not counting Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry (1948), which was published under its imprint twelve years later.
Aftermath of Objectivism
In 1935, the Oppens joined the Communist Party of America, and George abandoned poetry in favor of political activism. In 1950, the couple moved to MexicoMexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
to escape the strongly anti-Communist political atmosphere of the times. It would be 1958 before Oppen wrote any further poetry. The Oppens returned to New York in 1960, and George went on to publish six books of poetry between 1962 and 1978, by which time he was finding it increasingly difficult to write—he had Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease also known in medical literature as Alzheimer disease is the most common form of dementia. There is no cure for the disease, which worsens as it progresses, and eventually leads to death...
. He won the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
in 1969 for Of Being Numerous. Mary Oppen published an account of their life, including a close-up view of the Objectivist period, in her 1978 memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
Meaning a Life. George Oppen died in 1984.
After his 1941 Selected Poems, Carl Rakosi abandoned poetry and dedicated himself to social work for 26 years. A letter from the English poet Andrew Crozier
Andrew Crozier
Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Life:Crozier was educated at Dulwich College, and later Christ's College, Cambridge. His 1976 book Pleats won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, awarded jointly that year with Lee Harwood...
about his early poetry encouraged Rakosi to start writing again. A collection, Amulet, was published by New Directions Publishers
New Directions Publishers
New Directions Publishing Corp. is an independent book publishing company that was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin. The company was incorporated in 1964 as the New Directions Publishing Corporation and operates from New York City, and its books today are distributed by WW Norton & Company. Its...
in 1967, and a number of other volumes were to appear over the following 46 years. These included his Collected Poems in 1986. Rakosi died in 2004, aged 100.
After Redimiculum Matellarum, Bunting's next book publication was Poems: 1950. Around this time he returned to live in his native Northumbria
Northumbria
Northumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...
, and the 1960s were to prove to be a very productive decade for him. Publications from this time include possibly his best-known work, the long poem Briggflatts
Briggflatts
Briggflatts is a long poem by Basil Bunting published in 1965. The work is subtitled "An Autobiography." The title "Briggflatts" comes from the name of a meetinghouse in a Quaker community near Sedbergh in Cumbria, England...
(1966), described by critic Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...
as "the finest long poem to have been published in England since T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's Four Quartets
Four Quartets
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, "Burnt Norton", was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral...
", and Collected Poems (1968, revised editions 1978 and 1985). An Uncollected Poems appeared in 1991 and his Complete Poems in 2000.
In 1933, Niedecker was living in New York, and she and Zukofsky had a brief affair. She soon returned to her home in rural Wisconsin, a landscape that was to influence much of her later writing. Her first book, New Goose, appeared in 1946. In common with a number of her fellow Objectivists, a combination of critical neglect and personal circumstances meant that this early publication was followed by a longish period of poetic silence. Although she continued writing for much of the intervening period, her next book, My Friend Tree, did not appear until 1961. She published relatively frequently after that, and her Collected Works appeared in 2002.
In 1941, Reznikoff published a collection of poems called Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down. After that, although he continued to write and to publish in periodicals, his poetry had no further book publication until the 1959 Inscriptions: 1944–1956. In 1962, New Directions published a selection of poems called By the Waters of Manhattan. Three years later, they brought out Testimony: The United States, 1885–1890: Recitative, the first installment of a long work based on court records covering the period 1855 to 1915. The book was a commercial and critical flop, and New Directions dropped him. In the 1970s, Black Sparrow Press started publishing Reznikoff, bringing out the complete Testimony as well as a similar work, Holocaust, based on courtroom accounts of Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
concentration camps. In the years after Reznikoff's death in 1976, Black Sparrow brought all his major works back into print.
Zukofsky had begun work on a long poem in 24 parts called A in 1927. The first seven "movements" of this work appeared in the Objectivist Anthology, having previously appeared in magazines. These early sections show the influence of The Cantos
The Cantos
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...
, though Zukofsky was to further develop his own style and voice as A progressed. The 1930s also saw him continue his involvement in Marxist politics, an interest that went back to his college friendship with Whittaker Chambers.
Although he would continue to write short poems and prose works, notably the 1963 Bottom: On Shakespeare, the completion of A was to be the major concern of the remainder of Zukofsky's writing life. As the poem progressed, formal considerations tended to be foregrounded more and more, with Zukofsky applying a wide range of devices and approaches, from the sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
to aleatory
Aleatory
Aleatoricism is the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially the creation of art or media. The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice...
or random composition. The final complete edition was going to press as the poet lay on his deathbed in 1978. His final written work was the index to this volume.
Legacy
The early critical reception of the Objectivists was generally hostile, particularly in reviews by Morris SchappesMorris Schappes
Morris U. Schappes was a Jewish-American educator, writer, radical political activist, historian, and magazine editor. Schappes is best remembered for a 1941 perjury conviction obtained in association with testimony before the Rapp-Coudert Committee investigating Communism in education in New York,...
and Yvor Winters
Yvor Winters
Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.-As modernist:Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American...
, as well as Harriet Monroe's already-mentioned unfavourable reaction to the Poetry special issue. However, they did have an immediate impact, especially on the work of their two Imagist mentors, Williams and Pound. Williams and Zukofsky were to maintain a life-long personal and creative relationship which was to prove important for both men. For Zukofsky, the example of Williams helped to keep him focused on external realities and things. For Williams, Zukofsky served as a reminder of the importance of form. As Mark Scroggins writes, "from Zukofsky, Williams learned to shape his often amorphous verse into more sharply chiselled measures."
Pound, too, was influenced by the Objectivist sense of form, their focus on everyday vocabulary, and their interests in politics, economics and specifically American subject matter. The critic Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner
William Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
has argued that these influences helped shape the sections of The Cantos published during the 1930s, writing "Pound was reading them, and they him".
The poets of the Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, a group of American bohemian
Bohemian
A Bohemian is a resident of the former Kingdom of Bohemia, either in a narrow sense as the region of Bohemia proper or in a wider meaning as the whole country, now known as the Czech Republic. The word "Bohemian" was used to denote the Czech people as well as the Czech language before the word...
writers to emerge at the end of the 1940s that included Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
and Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, owed much to Pound and Williams, and were led, through them, to the Objectivists. In the 1950s and '60s
1960s
The 1960s was the decade that started on January 1, 1960, and ended on December 31, 1969. It was the seventh decade of the 20th century.The 1960s term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends across the globe...
, Zukofsky was sought out by younger poets including Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn may refer to:* Paul Blackburn * Paul Blackburn with English group, Gomez* Paul Blackburn , youth convicted of attempted murder in 1978, cleared and released in 2005...
, Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...
, Jonathan Williams
Jonathan Williams (poet)
Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
, Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...
, Gilbert Sorrentino
Gilbert Sorrentino
Gilbert Sorrentino was an American novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and editor.In over twenty-five works of fiction and poetry, Sorrentino explored the comic and formal possibilities of language and literature...
and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
. His work was also well-known to the Black Mountain poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...
, especially Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
and Cid Corman
Cid Corman
Cid Corman was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.-Early life and writing:...
, whose Origin journal and press were to serve as valuable publishing outlets for the older poet.
Zukofsky's formal procedures, especially his interest in aleatory writing, were a key influence on Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
and John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, amongst others, and through them on the Language School, an avant garde group of poets who started publishing in the 1970s and who included Bruce Andrews
Bruce Andrews
Bruce Andrews is a U.S. poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets .-Life and work:...
, Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets . In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American...
, Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
, Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .-Life:Hejinian was born in the San...
, Bob Perelman
Bob Perelman
Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor and teacher. He is often associated with the Language School group of poets. Perelman is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.-Life and work:...
, Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists...
, Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies...
, Carla Harryman
Carla Harryman
Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College...
, Barrett Watten
Barrett Watten
Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets.Since 1994, Watten has taught modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University in Detroit...
, Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge is an American poet born in Providence, Rhode Island.Often associated with the Language School, his experience as a Jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects--- including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, and movies--- often finds...
, Hannah Weiner
Hannah Weiner
Hannah Adelle Weiner was an American poet who is often grouped with the Language poets because of the prominent place she assumed in the poetics of that group.- Early life and writings :...
, Susan Howe
Susan Howe
Susan Howe is a American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre...
, Tina Darragh
Tina Darragh
Tina Darragh is an American poet who was one of the original members of the Language group of poets.Darragh was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in the south suburb of McDonald, Pennsylvania. She began writing in 1968 and studied poetry in Washington, DC at Trinity University from 1970 to 1972...
and Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She has written many novels in prose collection. Howe was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S...
.
Oppen and Reznikoff influenced subsequent generations of poets, most notably, Theodore Enslin
Theodore Enslin
Theodore Vernon Enslin was an American poet associated with Cid Corman's Origin and press. He is widely regarded as one of the most musical of American avant-garde poets. Enslin was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father was a biblical scholar and his mother a Latin scholar...
, Harvey Shapiro
Harvey Shapiro
Harvey Shapiro was a New York-born American cellist of world renown.-Childhood and early career:Harvey Shapiro, of Russian parentage, was born in New York City. His first cello teacher was Willem Willeke , who was both a medical doctor and a well-known cellist of the early 20th century...
, Michael Heller
Michael Heller (poet)
Michael Heller , is an American poet, essayist and critic. Among his many books are Exigent Futures, In The Builded Place, Wordflow and Living Root: A Memoir. He wrote the libretto for the opera, Benjamin, based on the life of Walter Benjamin...
, Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein (poet)
Norman Finkelstein is a poet and literary critic. He has written extensively about modern and postmodern poetry and about Jewish American literature. According to Tablet Magazine, Finkelstein's poetry "is simultaneously secular and religious, stately and conversational, prophetic, and...
, Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Rachel Blau DuPlessis an American poet and essayist, is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry.-Life and work:...
, and Armand Schwerner
Armand Schwerner
Armand Schwerner was an avant-garde Jewish-American poet. His most famous work, Tablets, is a series of poems which claim to be reconstructions of ancient Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions, complete with lacunae and "untranslatable" words....
to name a few. Their poetry continues the Objectivist obsession with language, ethics, and world and often addresses modern, urban, Jewish life, both secular and religious. DuPlessis, on first glance, seems an exception to this list. Her poetry seems not to immediately possess the so-called themes of an Objectivist aesthetic as practiced in the work of a Reznikoff, a Niedecker or an Oppen.
As a young woman and university student, DuPlessis began a lifelong correspondence with Oppen and was deeply influenced by Oppen's integrity, sincerity, and courage. Though establishing herself as a poet with tendencies and obsessions at some remove from an Objectivist ethos
Ethos
Ethos is a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology. The Greeks also used this word to refer to the power of music to influence its hearer's emotions, behaviors, and even morals. Early Greek stories of...
(or so it may be argued at a first reading) DuPlessis has played a crucial role in the dissemination and survival of Objectivist poetry and poetics well into the 21st century. The life of a man such as Oppen made a lasting impression on DuPlessis. DuPlessis gained Oppen's trust as well and she was given the opportunity of editing Oppen's Selected Letters, which were published posthumously.
Bunting's physical presence in Newcastle in the 1960s, together with his close relationships with a number of younger poets (including Tom Pickard
Tom Pickard
Tom Pickard is a poet, radio and film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival....
, Thomas A. Clark, Richard Caddel
Richard Caddel
Richard Caddel was a poet, publisher and editor who was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival.-Biography:Caddel was born in Bedford and grew up in Gillingham, Kent. He studied music at the University of Newcastle, but changed to English after meeting poets Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard...
and Barry MacSweeney
Barry MacSweeney
Barry MacSweeney was an English poet and journalist.-Life and work:Barry MacSweeney was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. He worked as a professional journalist throughout most of his life...
), meant that he was a major father figure for the poets of the British Poetry Revival
British Poetry Revival
The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...
. This younger generation were also drawn to the works of the other Objectivists, and their writings began to be more widely known in Britain. For example, a letter from the Revival poet Andrew Crozier
Andrew Crozier
Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Life:Crozier was educated at Dulwich College, and later Christ's College, Cambridge. His 1976 book Pleats won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, awarded jointly that year with Lee Harwood...
was the trigger that prompted Rakosi's return to poetry.
Amidst the continuous reappraisals, critical and otherwise, of the legacy and literary formation of the Objectivists, a well known mapping of the territory continues to be one put forth by poet Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
: "three-phase Objectivism". Though unclear, precisely, who coined the phrase, this rubric offers a useful way of dealing with the intercession of the Objectivist poets into our consciousness. Writes Silliman:
- DuPlessis, Rachel BlauRachel Blau DuPlessisRachel Blau DuPlessis an American poet and essayist, is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry.-Life and work:...
& Peter Quartermain (eds) The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). ISBN 0-8173-0973-X - Kenner, HughHugh KennerWilliam Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
, The Pound Era (Faber and Faber, 1975 edition). ISBN 0-571-10668-4 - McAllister, Andrew (ed) The Objectivists: An Anthology (Bloodaxe Books, 1996). ISBN 1-85224-341-4.
- Perloff, MarjorieMarjorie PerloffMarjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
, "Barbed-Wire Entanglements": The "New American Poetry," 1930–1932" in Modernism/modernity - Volume 2, Number 1, January 1995, pp. 145–175. - Scroggins, Mark. The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.
Online
- Andrew Crozier: On Carl Rakosi's Life and Career Captured October 13, 2005.
- Milton Hindus: Charles Reznikoff: A Biographical Essay Captured October 13, 2005.
- Joseph G. Kronick: George Oppen's Life and Career Captured October 13, 2005.
- Mark Scroggins: A Biographical Essay on Louis Zukofsky Captured October 10, 2005.
- Richard Caddel: Minor Poet, Not Conspicuously Dishonest: Basil Bunting at 100 Captured October 27, 2005.
- Peter Nicholls: Modernising Modernism: from Pound to Oppen Captured November 14, 2005.
External links
- Four poems by Basil Bunting Captured November 23, 2005.
- Some poems by Lorine Niedecker Captured November 23, 2005.
- A poem by George Oppen Captured November 23, 2005.
- Some poems by Carl Rakosi Captured November 23, 2005.
- Two versions of a poem by Charles Reznikoff Captured November 23, 2005.
- a poem by shivani diwakar
january 22,2010