The “Objectivists” and Their Publications

Mark Scroggins

 

The notion of the “Objectivists” as posse of four – Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, and Rakosi (with Williams, Niedecker, and Bunting as occasional outriders) – is largely a retrospective construction of literary history, dating from L. S. Dembo’s 1968 series of interviews with Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, and Rakosi, and their 1969 publication in Contemporary Literature as “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet: Four Interviews.” It is clear, as the contents of the February 1931 “Objectivists” 1931 issue of Poetry magazine and the 1932 An “Objectivists” Anthology (both edited by Zukofsky) indicate, that the term “Objectivist” was originally intended as something quite other than a name for a given half-dozen poets.

            The original “Objectivists” issue of Poetry can be viewed at the Poetry Foundation (minus the contributors notes). The contents of both the “Objectivists” issue and the anthology are as follows:

 

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 37.1 (February 1931): “Objectivists” 1931
Carl Rakosi
Before You
Orphean Lost	237
Fluteplayers from Finmarken	238
Unswerving Marine	239
Before You	240
Louis Zukofsky
"A" Seventh Movement: "There are different techniques"	242
Howard Weeks             What Furred Creature	246
Robert McAlmon
Fortuno Carraccioli: A Satire	247
Joyce Hopkins1
University: Old-Time	251
Charles Reznikoff
A Group of Verse2
I. "All day the pavement has been black"	252
II. "From my window I could not see the moon,"	252
III. "Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies"	252
IV. "Rooted among roofs, their smoke among the clouds,"	252
V. "What are you doing in our street among the automobiles,"	252
VI. "Of our visitors—I do not know which I dislike most:"	253
Norman Macleod
Song for the Turquoise People	253
Kenneth Rexroth
Last Page of a Manuscript3	254
S. Theodore Hecht
Table for Christmas	255
George A. Oppen             1930's4
I. "Thus / Hides the / Parts—"	256
II. "The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom,"	256
Harry Roskolenkier
Supper in an Alms-House	257
Whittaker Chambers
October 21st, 1926	258
Henry Zolinsky
Horatio	259
Basil Bunting
The Word5	260
Jesse Lowenthal
Match	261
From Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Emanuel Carnevali
Wakes – III	262
To One Reason	262
John Wheelwright
Slow Curtain	263
Richard Johns
The Sphinx	264
Martha Champion
Poem	265
William Carlos Williams
The Botticellian Trees	266
Louis Zukofsky
Program: "Objectivists" 1931	268-272
Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff	272-285
Symposium
Hymn, by Parker Tyler	285-286
Left Instantly Designs, by Charles Henri Ford	286-287
Note on the two poems above, by P.T. and C.H.F.	287
Note by the Editor, by L.Z.	287-288
In rebuttal, by P.T. and C.H.F.	288
The Horses of Her Hair, by Samuel Putnam	288-289
Three Poems by André Salmon — I, by René Taupin, trans. LZ	289-293
Notes6	294-295

 

*  *  *

 

An "Objectivists" Anthology, ed. Louis Zukofsky (Le Beausset, Var, France; New York, PO Box 3 Station F: To, Publishers, 1932)
Louis Zukofsky
Preface: "Recencies" in Poetry [datelined "The Gotham Book Mart, New York, Aug. 1931"]	9-25
Dedication [to Ezra Pound]	27
I.
quotation from René Taupin	31
Basil Bunting
Attis; Or, Something Missing [section III]	33-35
Mary Butts
Corfe	36-39
Frances Fletcher
A Chair	40
Robert McAlmon
Historical Reminiscence	41-42
George Oppen
1930's ["White.  From the"]4	43
Ezra Pound
"Gentle Jheezus sleek and wild"	44-45
Words for Roundel in Double Canon	45-46
Carl Rakosi
A Journey Away [9 sections]	47-52
Kenneth Rexroth
Prolegomena to a Theodicy	53-78
Fundamental Disagreement with Two Contemporaries	79-86
Charles Reznikoff7
Rashi	87-91
from My Country, 'Tis of Thee	92-97
William Carlos Williams
I. "I make really very little money."	98
II. "It is a living coral"	98-101
III. This Florida: 1924	101-104
IV. Down-Town	104-105
V. "On hot days"	105
VI. "The pure products of America"	105-108
VII. A Morning Imagination of Russia	108-111
Louis Zukofsky
"A"
First and Second Movements: "Come, ye Daughters"	112-120
Third and Fourth Movements: "Out of the voices"	121-128
Fifth and Sixth Movements: "And I:"	128-152
Seventh Movement: "There are different techniques"	152-155
II.
Forrest Anderson
Arrangement from "Land's End"	159
T.S. Eliot
Marina	160-161
Frances Fletcher
Carmen et Error (Ovid in Exile)	162
Robert McAlmon
Child-Blithely	163
Carl Rakosi
Parades	164
Kenneth Rexroth
The Place for Yvor Winters	165-168
Charles Reznikoff
The English in Virginia April 1607	169-170
R.B.N. Warriston
I. "No, not your beauty—"	171
II. "For handsome others"	171-172
III. "Hope so intricately"	172
IV. "Seriously, with pain"	172
William Carlos Williams
The Jungle	173
On Gay Wallpaper	173-174
3. "Nothing is lost; the white / shellwhite"	174-175
In the 'Sconset Bus	175-176
All the Fancy Things	176-177
The Red Lily	177-178
To	178-179
The Avenue of Poplars	179-180
Portrait of a Lady	181
Full Moon	182
Louis Zukofsky
–"Her Soil's Birth"	183
Prop. LXI	184
Madison, Wis., Remembering the Bloom of Monticello (1931)	184-185
III. Collaborations
Kenneth Rexroth
Prolegomena to a Theodicy [abridged by LZ, Aug. 29]	189-192
Jerry Reisman.—L.Z.
After Les Collines (G.A.) [Guillaume Apollinaire]	193
R.B.N. Warriston
Bora Bora [arranged by L.Z.]	194-195
William Carlos Williams
March [in V sections, "Re-written by L.Z. / Feb. 16, 1930"]	196-200
IV. Appendix, Reprinted from Poetry (Chicago) February 1931
Louis Zukofsky
Program: "Objectivists" 19318	203-205
Acknowledgments	209-210

 

*  *  *

 

The goals of the Objectivists’ two publishing programs⁹ – To, Publishers and The Objectivist Press – are perhaps best summed up in the statement of purpose Charles Reznikoff composed for the dust wrapper of The Objectivist Press’s first publications:  “The Objectivist Press is an organization of writers who are publishing their own work and that of other writers whose work they think ought to be read.” Zukofsky was salaried editor for To, Publishers, which was largely bankrolled by George and Mary Oppen; books published by The Objectivist Press, whose editorship was collective, were underwritten directly by their authors (except for Williams’s Collected Poems, which was funded by subscription). 

 

Books published by To, Publishers

 

William Carlos Williams, A Novelette and Other Prose (1932).

Ezra Pound, Prolegomena 1: How to Read, Followed by The Spirit of Romance, Part 1 (1932).

Louis Zukofsky, ed., An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932).

 

Books published by The Objectivist Press

 

William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems 1921-1931, with an introduction by Wallace Stevens (1934).¹⁰

George Oppen, Discrete Series (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, Jerusalem the Golden (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (prose), with a preface by Kenneth Burke (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, In Memoriam: 1933 (1934).

Charles Reznikoff, Separate Way (1936).

 

Louis and Celia Zukofsky revived The Objectivist Press imprint in 1948 to publish Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry, and for a while the Zukofskys corresponded on Objectivist Press letterhead which advertised their 30 Willow Street, Brooklyn address as the Press’s location.

 

Notes (added by JTW)

¹ Pseudonym for LZ and/or Irving Kaplan; in the contributors notes, LZ states that Joyce Hopkins is from Berkeley, CA where his good friend Kaplan lived. Aside from the title, this poem consists, of a single found line—“Dis in napa now trailing the sterilized.”— apparently taken straight from Kaplan. See 14 Dec. 1931 letter to EP for an explanation and possible interpretations of this poem (EP/LZ 120-121).

² This selection of Reznikoff poems, as well as “The English in Virginia” included in An “Objectivists” Anthology, would all be subsequently published in Jerusalem the Golden (1934) by The Objectivist Press.

³ This poem is the last section of the long, Prolegomena to a Theodicy, which would be included complete in An “Objectivists” Anthology.

⁴ “1930’s” was apparently Oppen’s earlier or working title for what would become Discrete Series, whose first three poems are those that appeared in the “Objectivists” Poetry issue and An “Objectivists” Anthology. The bibliographical notes for these poems in Oppen’s New Collected Poems (2002) are mixed up.

⁵ In Bunting’s Complete Poems (111-112), this poem is Ode I.15: “Nothing / substance utters or time,” plus “Appendix: Iron,” which was subsequently separated out as an individual poem, Ode I.16: “Molten pool, incandescent spilth of.”

⁶ Aside from brief notes on contributors, LZ notes that “A poem by Horace Gregory, arriving too late to be included this month, will appear in a later issue [“A Tombstone with Cherum,” appeared in the following issue of Poetry 37.6 (March 1931): 306-307]. The editor regrets the delay; also the limitations of page-space which prevent his presenting contributions by Helen Margaret, Herman Spector, John W. Gessner, William Lubov, B.J. Israel, Chrystie Streeter, Sherry Mangan, Donal McKenzie and Jerry Reisman. The editor also regrets the omission of a blank page representing Ezra Pound’s contribution to this issue—a page reserved for him as an indication of his belief that a country tolerating outrages like article 211 of the U.S. Penal Code, publishers’ ‘overhead,’ and other impediments to literary life, ‘does not deserve to have any literature whatsoever.’ Mr. Pound gave over to younger poets the space offered him.” In his contributor’s note, LZ remarks: “His poem ‘A’—in process—includes two themes: I—desire for the poetically perfect finding its direction inextricably the direction of historical and contemporary particulars; and II—approximate attainment of this perfection in the feeling of the contrapuntal design of the figure transferred to poetry; both themes related to the text of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion” [Scroggins notes that "figure" is almost certainly a mistranscription of "fugue," which would be easy for a typesetter to mistake in LZ's handwriting].

⁷ Reznikoff’s contributions in the first section of An “Objectivists” Anthology are a short play, Rashi, that originally appeared in Nine Plays (1927) and an excerpt from “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” an early version of the prose Testimony published by The Objectivists Press in 1934, which would in turn be reworked and considerably expanded as verse (or what Reznikoff called “recitative”) and published eventually in four books beginning with Testimony: The United States 1885-1890: Recitative (New Directions, 1965). Further sections of “My Country, ‘Tis of Three” also appeared in 1932 in Contact edited by WCW and Robert McAlmon: 1.1 (Feb 1932): 14-34, 1.2 (May 1932): 99-108.

⁸ This is a severely truncated version of the two statements that appeared in the Poetry “Objectivists” issue, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931” and “Sincerity and Objectification,” including the crucial statements on poetics. From the former is included the opening paragraphs through the list of recommending reading and from the latter the two definitional paragraphs on “sincerity” and “objectification.”

⁹ The publishing history of these two presses is examined in detail by Tom Sharp, “The ‘Objectivists’ Publications,” Sagetrieb 3.3 (Winter 1984): 41-47.

¹⁰ According to WCW himself, this volume was largely chosen and edited by LZ (I Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Edith Heal, New Directions, 1977: 52). Despite the title, the collection does include a number of earlier poems.