Charles Reznikoff's 'Testimony': Ethics and the Reader

This chapter examines the distillation of hundreds of legal cases into Objectivist serial poems in Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. It argues that the privileging of facts and absence of emotional and normative discourses in Reznikoff’s poetic language should not be read as an ethical or artistic limitation, but as an instance of the modernist interest in ethical searching made necessary by the decline of agreed moral rules. It focuses on Testimony’s catalogue of death and injury caused by violence or industrial accident, especially to children and animals, and argues that its vivid realization of events and suffering constitutes a poetics of witnessing. Through their form and content, especially their stark imagery, the poems solicit the hermeneutic ethical engagement of their readers.