Poetry From the Law (part one)

Charles Reznikoff

TESTIMONY
(Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978 and 1979)

When first published (in 1978 and 1979), the two-volume Black Sparrow Press edition of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony saved my poetry-reading soul.

I’d just started law school, after four years majoring in English at Cal-Berkeley. Suddenly, a relatively dreamy college-boy academic life vanished. Gone was the reading of glorious poetry and literature. Now there were law books, and nothing but law books. Huge law books filled with cases.

“Cases” as in published written decisions, typically by an appellate court, regarding various legal disputes. These court decisions for the most part were poorly written: prosaically stated facts, convoluted points of law, and hair-splitting “logic.” Law school “homework” largely consists of reading such cases. Students are supposed to figure out the key legal rulings in the cases and thereby figure out “the law.” It quickly becomes a task of utmost drudgery, one that pretty much kills the desire to read just about anything else.

In those dull seas of legal study, Testimony was a life-line, a connection to the creative. Reznikoff’s Objectivist untitled verse settings of facts taken from published court decisions were short enough to read almost anytime, and impeccably well-made: concise and powerful. That Reznikoff, after being trained as a lawyer, had gathered his facts from case reporters filled with court decisions made the poems all that more miraculous: he’d made incredible poems from the same kinds of tedious cases I was studying.

Here’s a poem from Testimony:

There were three on the locomotive:
the flagman, the fireman, and the engineer.
About two hundred yards from the man—
stone-deaf—
the flagman commenced ringing the bell;

within about a hundred yards
the engineer commenced sounding his whistle:
thirty or forty short blows.

The man did not get off the track or look around.

The poem seems simple, and is, but the writing is exceedingly adroit. In the first stanza, the isolation of “stone deaf” in its own line emphasizes the import of that fact in the narrative, and mirrors how alone the man must of seemed on the tracks. Most compelling here is the way the poem speeds to its sudden end, with a second stanza shorter than the first and the third stanza – a single line – shorter still. The poem, as the accident itself, is a rushing nightmare with a horribly abrupt conclusion.

Here’s another poem from Testimony:

The child was about eight years old.
For some misconduct or other,
his father stripped him naked, threw him on the floor,
and beat him with a piece of rubber pipe,
crying, “Die, God damn you!”
He tried to dash the child against the brick surface of the chimney,
and flung the child again heavily on the floor
and stamped on him.

There’s much, poetically, in this short vignette of awful abuse. The balance of the lines and breaks couldn’t be any finer: the poem’s flow carries attention to the end, even though the subject matter is upsetting enough to cause anyone to want to turn away.

Then there’s the way the second line describes the child’s transgression as “some misconduct or other.” That phrase (“some . . . or other”) shows precisely how trivial or arbitrary it was. In the fifth line, the first word – “crying” – is particularly well set, as it suggests both the wail of the beaten child while actually, and ironically I think, describing the father’s yell.

Finally, and perhaps most compelling, there’s the shockingly effective use of the run-on construction in the poem’s final two lines. These mirrored clauses – each beginning “and”– show how sickeningly long the battery went on, with the final act (“and stamped on him”) made thus to appear as horribly unnecessary, cruel, and redundant as it no doubt was.

Most poems in Testimony are longer (generally ranging from about 20 up to 40 or more lines) than the two poems above. But no matter the length, all have the key Objectivist (or Reznikoff-Objectivist) traits of particulars pared to their essence, stated concisely. And essentially all are narratives.

Narratives about people hurting (or killing) people, people hurt or killed by machines, and even, in a few instances, people hurt or killed by the forces of nature. Cruelty, greed, anger, racism, jealousy, exploitation of the innocent, carelessness, and/or accidents. The poems’ subject matter, especially when read as a whole (and there are almost five hundred of them) is exceedingly grim. It could be no other way, given the source material. The stories told in court, and thus the matters addressed in the court decisions from which Reznikoff made his poems, almost always involve tragic and ignoble aspects of life.

Testimony in this way does not present the sum and substance of human existence, but a part of it, though a part that Reznikoff certainly suggests must not be forgotten. I agree with Milton Hindus (a famous, now deceased Reznikoff scholar) that Reznikoff wants us to not just remember the cruel and tragic aspects of life presented in the poems, but to think, and think hard, of the unstated alternatives. Such as kindness and care and love, as opposed to aggression, hate and all the rest.

Many great essays and comments on Testimony have been published over the last 30 years. My favorite among these was written by reference law librarian Benjamin Watson. Watson’s essay (“Reznikoff’s Testimony”) was first published in 1990, and then again in 2005 in the Law Library Journal and Legal Studies Forum, respectively. It’s now made the jump from those arcane periodicals to the Web, and is available to all (click here to go).

I like Watson’s essay because he went back to Reznikoff’s working papers (housed at UC San Diego) and found notes that allowed him to match up about 150 of the poems in Testimony with the actual published court decisions Reznikoff used as the source material. Watson closely compares one court decision to the poem made from it to convincingly show that Reznikoff changed not only the names of persons and towns (as the poet had said he’d done in an introductory note) but sometimes also altered the sequential order of events from the order they were said by the court decision to have actually occurred.

The facts in Testimony’s poems, in other words, sometimes time-traveled; dialogue or events were compressed or re-arranged, presumably to sharpen the intensity of the narrative presentation, or of the emotions triggered by the story told. These changes only occurred in some poems, concerned relatively few of the facts in those poems, and never involved changing the ultimate event (e.g., whether a person was killed or maimed). To me, the revelation that there is in some poems yet another layer of imposed Reznikoff-ian reality emphasizes even further the poetic achievement of Testimony.

Watson’s essay provides a great service by including (as an appendix) a list that matches specific poems to citations of about 150 specific published court decisions. It’s incredible to compare the source material (the court decision) and the resulting poem, to see fully the dross from which Reznikoff extracted the facts that he then fashioned into his poem-treasures.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult these days to find either the court decisions or Reznikoff’s poems. The case reporters in which the decisions were published can be found only in an extremely well-stocked law library (since the books are mostly one hundred or more years old) or via web-based, subscription-required legal search sites such as WestLaw (which holds the copyright, such as it is, on the case reporters).

It’s just as hard to find Reznikoff’s poems, at least in the two volume complete edition. The Black Sparrow Testimony has been out of print for years. Used sets (the two volumes together) are rare, and even single volumes of the paperback, when available, can be priced above a hundred dollars.

Your humble blogger, however, can provide one example. Below is a particular court decision (Butler et al. v. New York, N.H. & H. R.R. Co., 58 N.E. 592 (Mass. 1900)), direct from a case reporter (I’ve cut and pasted it onto a single page for ease of viewing here), and then the poem Reznikoff made from its facts.

The court decision, it must be noted, was written by one of the greatest judge-writers in American legal history: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at the time the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The Butler decision, with regard to its writing, is far better than most. The facts are not scattered about but found in a single (albeit very long) paragraph. Also, the brevity here is exceptional: the decision is only three paragraphs long.

Nevertheless, Justice Holmes’ presentation of the facts doesn’t clearly depict what happened, mostly due to poor writing. The third sentence – the first that sets out specific details – is compound three or four times over. It’s easy to lose the narrative thread in its complexity. And I want to take a gavel and smash the fourth sentence, particularly its unfortunate double-negative (“It is not argued that there was not evidence . . .”). And of course it all gets very foggy if the decision’s two other paragraphs are factored in, with their heady discussion of legal principles and precedent. See for yourself what Reznikoff saw (please click on the image to enlarge it, in a new window: the paragraph with the facts is about half-way down the first column):

Now here’s Reznikoff’s Testimony poem from this case:

The boy was only four years old
and his mother left him on the front doorstep
with his little sister; told them to stay there
and went into the house to do her washing.
The house was about two hundred feet from the railroad track
and the boy and his sister climbed the embankment
and the boy went upon the track.

A freight train had just broken apart
and the forward part of the train had gone by
leaving about thirty feet between the forward part
and the rear cars that followed.
The boy took off his hat and waved good-by
to the part of the train that had passed.
His sister called to him to come back
and he replied,
“Why the train has gone by!”

But he was run over by the cars that followed.

It couldn’t be any clearer, or sadder, could it?

+++++++

End Note: The writing and publishing history, in brief, of Testimony:

Reznikoff’s Testimony project began in the early 1930s, when for a few years he worked for the company that published the legal encyclopedia Corpus Juris. The job required him to read and analyze court decisions found in case reporters. From the facts of some of the cases, he made prose poems (yes, prose poems!). These poems were first published in 1932 under the title “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” in the first two issues of Contact (a magazine edited by W.C. Williams), and that same year in the Zukofsky-edited An Objectivists Anthology. In 1934, a small book of the prose poems, titled Testimony, was published by the Objectivist Press. A scan of the front of that book ends this post, below.

Reznikoff included three verse poems based on facts from the case reports, and collectively titled “Testimony,” in his self-published 1941 collection, Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down.

Reznikoff fervently took up Testimony again in the 1960s, spending time reading old court decisions in law libraries, and writing hundreds of poems from those decisions in the verse form he had come to find most suitable for the work. In 1965, New Directions-San Francisco Review jointly published a book containing some of these poems. In 1968, Reznikoff self-published another portion. In 1978, shortly after Reznikoff’s death, the two volume Black Sparrow edition was published. Its full title is Testimony – The United States (1885 - 1915) Recitative. It includes all poems from the two collections published in the 1960s, plus all others in verse that Reznikoff wrote. It does not include the 1934 Testimony prose poems.

As discussed above, the two volume Black Sparrow edition, the only complete edition of the verse Testimony poems, is exceedingly difficult to find. Even harder to find is the volume of Testimony prose poems, published in the 1934 (pictured below). Currently, it is available only in about 50 U.S. libraries, of which less than a handful are located on the west coast. Jumping back to the verse poems, the only realistic option at present, aside from a library, is the 1965 New Directions/San Francisco Review edition of Testimony. It contains between about one-quarter to one-third of the poems found in the complete two-volume edition; a hardcover reading copy can be had via the Amazon.com used book option for about $20.