Court Poetry
Testimony was, initially, a prose retelling of stories that Reznikoff had discovered while working on court records. In these stories, Reznikoff discovered something of the story of America between 1855 and 1915 both in its diversity and its violence. Tellingly, he chose to omit the judgements, focusing on the stories themselves.
Over the following forty years, Reznikoff worked on turning these stories into an extended found poem that finally ran to some 500 pages over two volumes. He aimed to present the stories in as near as possible the words of the participants, and the result was a poetry almost entirely stripped of metaphor and of authorial personality and emotion. In this sense, Testimony can be read as the great monument of Objectivist poetry.
The poetic mode developed in the making of this work was to prove invaluable when Reznikoff started work on Holocaust, which was based on courtroom accounts of Nazi concentration camps. He also adopted this style for many of his poetic retellings of stories from the Old Testament.
Read more about this topic: Charles Reznikoff
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