With few exceptions, poets are not likely to become household names in America, and that was certainly true for Reznikoff and his cohorts. Still, they persevered because they had no choice: Poetry was everything — their muse, their task, their very life. Reznikoff would eventually become the most important member of the Objectivist group, partly because he had a knack for rendering the New York City landscape and partly because he did not shy away from Jewish material.

My hunch is that the night and fog of the Holocaust must have presented enormous challenges to a Jewish-American poet like Reznikoff. There were literally hundreds of ways of getting this mind-numbing material wrong. Outrage may be an appropriate response to the horrors but not if one wants to write an effective poem; sentimentality is an even greater trap. So what Reznikoff did was let the records of the tribunal at Nuremberg and of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem do the talking.

As a result, Holocaust, originally published in 1975, comes to us as a "found poem," an extended exercise in rearranging material into a poetic form. In Reznikoff's case, this meant extensive editing (Reznikoff was interested in the "stories" at the center of his sources) and arranging his line breaks into effective breath units. In "Reznikoff and his Sources," Janet Sutherland compares a typical run of Reznikoff's lines with their original source. Here is Reznikoff:

One of the S.S. men caught a woman with a baby in her arms.
She began asking for mercy: if she were shot
The baby should live.
She was near a fence between the ghetto and where Poles lived
And behind the fence were Poles ready to catch the baby
And she was about to hand it over when caught.
The S.S. man took the baby from her arms
And shot her twice.
And then held the baby in his hands.
The mother, bleeding but still alive, crawled up to his feet.
The S.S. man laughed
And tore the baby apart as one would tear a rug.
Just then a stray dog passed
And the S.S. man stooped to pat it
And took a lump of sugar out of his pocket
And gave it to the dog.

And here is how the original source at the Eichmann trial reads:

The place we were hiding in bordered with the Aryan part and there was a fence there. [S.S. officer] Kidash caught a woman with a baby in her arms of about eighteen months. She held the baby in her arms and began asking for mercy, that she be shot first and leave the baby alive.

From behind the fence there were Poles who raised their hands, ready to catch the baby. She was about to hand the baby over to the Poles. He took the baby from her arms and shot her twice, and then took the baby into his hands and tore him as one would tear a rag. (Italicized words are those Reznikoff chose.)

In many cases Reznikoff creates what looks for all the world like a discreet modernist poem:

He was still lying there
and the officer who was shooting would pass those he shot
and, if he saw or heard a sign of life,
would fire a second shot.
In a few minutes after the lad was shot,
He came to
And, when the officer went past, the lad held his breath
So that the officer would think he was dead.
He was just lying there
and then there was another group of five,
and then a third.

All shot.

Holocaust works on a principle of radical understatement. Reznikoff consciously leaves out all traces of editorial commentary. Why so? Because the poet believes it is for the reader, rather than Reznikoff, to say what Holocaust means and what its message might be.

A final word about publisher David R. Godine and the important books his Black Sparrow Press makes available. He has been a longtime champion of Reznikoff's work. For this, we can feel grateful because Holocaust has been out of print for more than three decades. Godine makes this important work available to a new generation of readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.