scholarly journals Formalism as Mysticism: Reading Jewish American Poets Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff

Caliban ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Xavier Kalck
Keyword(s):  
Jewish American ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
Charles Reznikoff ◽  
American Poets

The Objectivists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jaussen
Keyword(s):  
Second Generation ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Charles Reznikoff ◽  
Lorine Niedecker ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Many ◽  
First And Second Generation

The Objectivist poets were a group of first- and second-generation modernist writers who emerged in the USA during the 1930s. The writers most commonly associated with the movement are Louis Zukofsky (who first used the term ‘objectivist’ to describe poetry), Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Charles Rakosi, the British poet Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker (other poets, such as William Carlos Williams, however, were published under the banner of ‘objectivist’). Most objectivist writing was characterized by an attention to specific particulars and the belief that poems could be material or social objects. Beyond these broad tendencies, however, each writer associated with the movement offered different definitions of ‘objectivist,’ and developed divergent writing practices. Consequently, the term has historical, critical, and evolutionary implications, referring both to specific literary publications, a core of poets whose relationships and affinities continued beyond the early 1930s, and the many subsequent attempts by poets and critics to use ‘objectivist’ as a critical concept.

The Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2011; The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde, Ruth Jennison, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Alex Niven
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Second World

Abstract In The Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon offers a distinctive revisionary account of American poetry written in the wake of the ideological retreats of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden around the time of the Second World War. Nealon argues that American verse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was profoundly influenced by an unfolding context of capitalist development and crisis, in ways that have not been fully accounted for in orthodox accounts of recent literary history. Ruth Jennison’s The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde seeks similarly to highlight the centrality of leftist critiques of capitalism in modern American poetry. Her focus is the Objectivist group of poets, in particular Louis Zukofsky, a Jewish-American Marxist often regarded as the major successor to Pound in the interwar years. Jennison applies the theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the 1930s work of Zukofsky and his circle.

Objectivity and Objectivities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benoît Turquety
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
Charles Reznikoff ◽  
History Of

This chapter defines what the concept of “objectivity” meant for Straub and Huillet and the history and recurrence of the term in modern literature. It details the history of the Objectivists, a group of formally radical, leftist, and mainly Jewish poets who emerged in 1930s America under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and whose major representatives include Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff. They received little attention in their time and only marginal attention decades later, but their working methods and philosophies are strikingly similar to the cinematic practices of Huillet and Straub.

Oppen, George (1908–1984)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Shoemaker
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
New Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
Actual Time ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Black Mountain

George Oppen was an innovative poet associated with the Objectivist movement in American poetry. Early in his poetic career, he appeared in both the ‘Objectivist’ number of Poetry magazine (1931) and An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932), both edited by Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978). After a twenty-five year period of silence, Oppen re-emerged in the early 1960s, producing new work that took up a challenging stance toward the American scene of the time. He became an important influence on a number of younger American poets, including members of the Beat and Black Mountain schools. His volume Of Being Numerous (1968) addressed the ongoing war in Vietnam and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Throughout his work, he sought to use poetry as a ‘test of truth,’ or at the very least a ‘test of sincerity,’ which he defined as follows: ‘there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction’.

Handmade by Poverty: Worker Correspondence, Objectivist Poetics and the Pathos of the Readymade

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 1089-1107 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON COOPER
Keyword(s):  
Free Verse ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Charles Reznikoff ◽  
Found Poetry ◽  
Literary Left ◽  
The Way ◽  
Radical Left

Worker correspondence was a form of found poetry employed by radical left writers during the 1930s. Readers' letters to publications such as New Masses and the Daily Worker were reworked with end stops and presented as free verse. This essay examines the practice of worker correspondence as a form of readymade, a consciously avant-gardist collision of politics and “high” culture. This examination is put forward as a reflection on current thinking on the literary left of the Depression decade and – along the way – suggests points of contact with the Objectivist poetics of George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document