“Talking Hebrew in every language under the sun”: Emma Lazarus, Charles Reznikoff, and the Origins of Documentary Poetics

Perhaps the first prose poem in English appeared in one of the most conventional venues available: the March 1887 issue of The Century, postbellum America’s leading magazine of thought and letters, hardly an outlet for poetic experiment. The opening lines to John Vance Cheney’s “In the Lane,” from the same issue, better represent the magazine’s genteel aesthetics: “And art thou then, my heart, too old / Ever to leap with love again.” Yet there it is, sandwiched between “Memoranda on the Civil War” and an article on “The Coinage of the Greeks,” signaling its debt to Charles Baudelaire’s posthumous, formally innovative, and still-untranslated Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose: Emma Lazarus’s seven-poem sequence, “By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose,” examining Jewish exilic history and culture from the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 to the present.¹ Among the last poems published in Lazarus’s lifetime (she would die of cancer that November), this sequence, alongside her movement toward an historical, document-based poetics, represents an overlooked prehistory to the experimental poetics of the first decades of the twentieth century.

These “Little Poems in Prose” are among the earliest examples of the suite of formal practices that, associated with modernism, have come to be called documentary poetics.² This sequence suggests an alternate genealogy for the form that does not flow from the experiments of Ezra Pound’s early Cantos or the influence of photographic and filmic documentary on poets like Muriel Rukeyser in the 1930s, but precedes and ultimately converges with these histories. “By the Waters of Babylon” reveals not the adaptation of poetic form to grapple with ethnic experience, but the independent innovation of key modernist practices precisely through that encounter. Witnessing this enables us to imagine ethnic literature beyond narratives of identity, to discover how even a poem with no or minimal ethnic content, such as Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, might yet be “about” ethnic or immigrant experience once we take into account the development of the forms which shape it.

Such readings are necessary. As Dorothy Wang argues, scholarship suffers from a “double-standard in poetry studies” in which “[f]orm, whether that of traditional lyric or avant-garde poems, is assumed to be the provenance of a literary acumen and culture that is unmarked but assumed to be white.”³ The result, as she puts it, is that “[c]ritics are more likely to think about formal questions—say, poetic tone and syntax—when speaking about [John] Ashbery’s poems but almost certainly to focus on political or black ‘content’ when examining the works of Amiri Baraka” (Wang, Thinking Its Presence, xx).⁴ Lazarus’s development of a document-based poetics in the final years of her life, as she increasingly grappled with Jewish history, immigration, language, and a racialized religious difference, roots the emergence of poetic innovation not in a belated influence of ethnically-unmarked writing onto ethnic verse, but through the encounter with life as an ethnic and religious outsider in the United States.

Tracing the parallels between Lazarus’s late experiments and the emergence of Reznikoff’s document-based poetics from his engagement with biblical translation and Jewish history suggests a new framework for reading modernist documentary poetry. Reznikoff was, with Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, one of the founders of the Objectivist circle of poets; his works combine the avant-garde influence of Pound’s Imagism and engagement with found texts with social views in sympathy with those of Depression-era leftist modernists. An American modernist deeply engaged with questions of Jewish and immigrant experience, his experimental magnum opus, Testimony, contains no Jewish figures or themes. Testimony emerges as an ethnic poem through its formal characteristics, not its content. As with Lazarus, Reznikoff’s documentary poetics emerge from Jewish intellectual and literary practices: traditions of biblical reception, translation, and hermeneutics. This process in turn reveals how the innovation of a central and pervasive practice of modernist poetics might itself be read as emerging from the experience...