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The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, edited by Seamus Cooney. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 460 pp. $45.00 (c); $21.95 (p). When Charles Reznikoff was born in 1894 in Brownsville, the Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn, his parents, Satah Yetta and Nathan, recent immigrants from Russia, wished to name him after his maternal grandfather, Yehezqel WoIvovsky. Sarah Yetta asked the Jewish doctor, who was also an anarchist, for the English equivalent of the Hebrew "Yehezqel" (Ezekiel), and the doctor replied, "Call him Charles." Reznikoff felt throughout his life that his given name created a dynamic gap between Hebrew and English, a void he dedicated himself to filling. This symbolic space between "Charles" and "Ezekiel," English and Hebrew, American culture and Jewish culture, marks the unstable territory where Reznikoff's poetry can be found - in company with the cultural endeavors of many other Jewish intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth centuty. In a gemlike poem Reznikoff catches the emotional tenot of the quandary in which he and others found themselves: How difficult for me is Hebrew: even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion. (p. 58) Wanting him to adapt to the new land, Reznikoff's mother insisted that he speak English at home, even though the family language was Yiddish. Likewise, he was sent to public school father than to the Jewish heder, which was conducted in Hebrew. Like many children of recent immigrants, Reznikoff felt estranged from the languages and traditions of his ancestors, although he was in close enough proximity to them that a"return" of sorts was still possible. The "return" did not take the shape of Zionism, as it did for many Jews of his generation; instead, he was drawn to the history of Jewish survival in the dias- pora. Writing about Jewish history was more than an issue of identification-although he admitted the importance of an ethnic identity; what moved him most in Jewish history were the tenacity and inventiveness that made survival possible and the compassionate virtues that arose out of religious and ethical confrontations with adversity. "The Jews typify," he said, "perhaps more than any other people, constant and often victorious struggle against a hostile environment and hostile elements within itself, a struggle which has constantly evolved Jews that are symbols of the admirable" (Tom Sharp, "Reznikoff's Nine Plays" in Milton Hindus, ed., Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984], pp. 272-3). Having identified a subject matter, an American Jew of Reznikoff's generation who wanted to write modern poetry in English had few models. Eschewing Yiddish, Reznikoff chose not to follow the radical Yiddish poets of New York City, and Emma Lazarus seemed a distant, old-fashioned example. The most prominent Jewish poet when Reznikoff began publishing was James Oppenheim (1882-1932), who wrote a vatic, exclamatory verse, deeply indebted to Whitman and Freud. Although championed by critic and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, Oppenheim was as distant in temperament and style from Reznikoff as one could imagine. Rather than look to contemporary Jewish poetry, Reznikoff found a serviceable model for verse in English in the lesser-known (at that time) Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement. Imagist verse was spare and versatile, not freighted with social and cultural associations from which Reznikoff might feel excluded; it was a seemingly objective style that did not prescribe a particular subject matter or a self-conscious poetic voice. …

When Duncan returned in 1972 to Caesar’s Gate (1955), a book of poems written mainly in 1949 and 1950 (with collages by Jess), he resurrected an earlier work that he had all but repudiated.1 The new Caesar’s Gate has received little critical attention, which is unfortunate because it tells much about Duncan’s state of mind while he was working on his crucial late book, Ground Work: Before the War? In 1970 he suffered the loss of Charles Olson, the poet whom he regarded as the standard-bearer for his generation. At the same time, Duncan, like Whitman during the Civil War, regarded the ravages of the Vietnam War as an attack upon his own person—identifying with the national body and its fateful implication in an imperial war wreaking havoc on Southeast Asia and the United States alike. Another casualty of the war, his profoundly nurturing fellowship with Denise Levertov entered a destructive maelstrom, provoked by disagreement over the proper relationship among poetry, protest, and war. Even more intimately, the Vietnam War provided the occasion for a long-buried source of grief in Duncan’s life to rear its head: contemplating the war caused the homosexual poet to mourn the loss of a son he never had. Reaching more than twenty years into the past to the beginnings of the cold war, Duncan revived the forgotten book Caesar’s Gate as part of the work of moving beyond his Black Mountain period (which had ended with Olson’s death); he engaged the earlier, unresolved encounter with thanatos exuberantly, intuiting that it would lead him to a poetry of maturity.

Notes on Contributors.Acknowledgments.Chronology.Introduction.1 Wars I Have Seen: Peter Nicholls (University of Sussex).2 Pleasure at Home: How Twentieth-Century American Poets Read the British: David Herd (University of Kent).3 American Poet-Teachers and the Academy: Alan Golding (University of Louisville).4 Feminism and the Female Poet: Lynn Keller (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Cristanne Miller (Pomona College).5 Queer Cities: Maria Damon (University of Minnesota).6 Twentieth-Century Poetry and the New York Art World: Brian M. Reed (University of Washington).7 The Blue Century: Brief Notes on Twentieth Century African-American Poetry: Rowan Ricardo Phillips (SUNY, Stony Brook).8 Home and Away: US Poetries of Immigration and Migrancy: A. Robert Lee (Nihon University, Tokyo).9 Modern Poetry and Anti-Communism: Alan Filreis (University of Pennsylvania).10 Mysticism: Neo-paganism, Buddhism, and Christianity: Stephen Fredman (University of Notre Dame).11 Poets and Scientists: Peter Middleton (University of Southampton).12 Philosophy, Theory in U.S. Modern Poetry: Michael Davidson (University of California, San Diego).Index..

Poet's Prose is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to American prose poetry and has been recognised as a pioneering study in contemporary American poetry. Many recent American poets have been writing prose; Fredman has set out to determine why and what it means. Three central works of American poets' prose are discussed in detail: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley's Presences, and John Ashbery's Three Poems. In these chapters, Fredman both demonstrates how to read these difficult works and examines their philosophical seriousness. In a final chapter and a new epilogue, he discusses the newest trends in contemporary poetry, the 'talk poems' of David Antin and the prose of the Language poets, in which poet's prose forms an important aspect of the 'theoretical poetry' now being written.

(1994). Ezra Pound and Italian fascism. History of European Ideas: Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 818-819.

What do American poets do to get situated as poets? How do they find their bearings or prepare a place for themselves in America, neither wholly inside nor wholly outside European tradition? Although these questions are large and maybe unanswerable, they provide an important context for thinking about an inherent similarity in the stance toward tradition of William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot.