Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Editing Corpus Juris, Charles Reznikoff became obsessed with the stories of suffering preserved in published cases of the National Reporter System. Over many years he wrote Testimony, a long sequence of poems telling those stories. Reznikoff's manuscripts and annotated photocopies of the original cases show how he found literature in the law. 

By the term 'objectivist' I suppose a writer may be meant who does not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears; who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law; and who expresses his feelings indirectly by the selection of his subject matter and, if he writes in verse, by its music. Now suppose in a court of law, you are testifying in a negligence case. You cannot get up on the stand and say, "The man was negligent." That's a conclusion of fact. What you'd be compelled to say is how the man acted. Did he stop before he crossed the street? Did he look? The judges of whether he is negligent or not are the jury in that case and the judges of what you say as a poet are the readers. That is, there is an analogy between testimony in the courts and the testimony of a poet. 

-Charles Reznikoff¹

He was so unfashionable in his simple diction, his clarity, that he finally became fashionable. And he will survive even fashion. 

-Shirley Kaufman²

     When terrorists assassinated Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, state-supported pogroms against Jews immediately increased and persisted into the 1890s.³ Sarah Yetta Wolwovsky and Nathan Reznikoff grew up during this time of persecution and poverty, and fled to America in 1892, supporting themselves by sewing piecework in Brooklyn's Jewish ghetto, Brownsville.⁴ Charles Reznikoff, their first child, was born there in 1894.⁵
In his parents' final years, Reznikoff carefully recorded their Russian experiences. Gogol or Dostoevsky might have written these grim accounts. Reznikoff's mother remembered:

     The day after Easter I heard shouts and cheers outside. I ran into the yard and met our landlady and her daughter at the gate. Many men were running along the street. I had never seen any of them before.
     "What is it?" I asked our landlady. "A fire?"
     "No," she said, "they are going to ill the sheenies."
     "Oh," I said, "and you whose daughter I taught how to sew say this, you who are always telling me how much I did for you!"
     "I can't help it," she said, "but they are going to beat them up."⁶

     A subscriber to a Russian newspaper used to read aloud what was written about the Jews: how an enemy of Israel wrote that they were not a useful people but thought only about their Talmud and, for a living, robbed the Russians, and that was why the peasants were so poor. . . . My father said all this talk was a waste of time-the Jews were in exile and had to suffer.⁷

     There were now new troubles for the Jews of Russia. The Evening Journal had pictures of a mob rushing down a street with scythe blades-tied upright to poles-on which were stuck the bodies of babies or the peevish heads of bearded Jews. Immigrants, cousins, and second cousins and even strangers, stayed with my parents for a night or for weeks. Sometimes one came unexpectedly., before the letter he had mailed in Germany, walking heavily upstairs to our door in boots into which his trousers were tucked and wearing a round hat of Persian lambskin like a Cossack.⁸

     In 1912, at the age of eighteen, Reznikoff entered New York University's Law School. "NYU was a poor man's law school," he later explained.¹⁴ "Most of my fellow students were older than I and earnest (almost all worked during the day in factories or in law offices)."¹⁵

Reznikoff studied law at night while his days were spent helping his parents in the small millinery business they had established.¹⁶
      Reznikoff found his studies at refuge. "The noise of the street was far away-ten stories below; far away, too, the worry and noise of my parents' shop . . . ."¹⁷ Everyday life had meant expedience, drudgery, humiliation. Here was an ideal. Legal writing appealed to Reznikoff both 
intellectually and aesthetically: "the plain sunlight of the cases, the sharp prose, the forthright speech of the judges. . . . I soon saw the law in its elements as a beautiful order in which benefit balanced obligation and nothing was without its reason-or reasons."¹⁸ 
     Ironically, this very idealism caused Reznikoff to balk at practicing as an attorney. After he was admitted to the Bar in 1916, his father confronted him:

"Aren't you going to send out notices . . . [t]hat you have been admitted to the bar, you're ready to practice." I said, "But I'm not ready to practice." So I thought again and I thought, well . . . young lawyers won't get any clients. So I sent out notices and I had a number of cases right away-you know, the kind of cases that others wouldn't take because there's no money in it. I didn't know what to do . . . .¹⁹

     Reznikoff continued to help his parents in their business, which began to prosper in the booming economy of the First World War.²² It was for him the course of least resistance, one which allowed him to concentrate on writing poetry, a passion his family agreed to tolerate. "I found that working for my father, well, your mind was free. Shipping 

was nothing, it was no strain on your mind, even selling was nothing. . . . Hours are nothing-it's the mental energy that I wanted. So I never went back to the practice of law.²³ 
     Marie Syrkin met Reznikoff in 1927, when he was thirty-three. At that time, she recalls, "no longer a salesman, he was receiving a regular allowance of twenty-five dollars a week from the family concern for labors past. Now he could devote himself wholly to his poetry."²⁴ The stock market crash cut short this arrangement. Reznikoff's parents lost almost everything.²⁵ For the first time in his life, Reznikoff was forced to go out and look for a job. This would have been particularly difficult in 1930 if the neglected law degree had not suddenly proved useful. The American Law Book Company had offices in Brooklyn,²⁶ and Reznikoff found "a berth"²⁷ there on the editorial staff of the legal encyclopedia Corpus Juris. He did not expect to enjoy the work, which "was superficial for the most part and dull; poorly paid and it deserved no more. However, it offered me a living."²⁸
     Nonetheless, he gradually discovered a fascination with certain cases he was required to analyze. Extracting the point of law may have been "dull" for Reznikoff the lawyer, but Reznikoff the poet found other sources of interest.

Once in a while I could see in the facts of a case details of the time and place, and it seemed to me that out of such material the century and a half during which the United States has been a nation could be written up, not merely from the standpoint of an individual, as in diaries, nor merely from the angle of the unusual, as in newspapers, but from every standpoint-as many standpoints as were provided by the witnesses themselves.²⁹

     Reznikoff knew better than to share his literary discoveries with his employers, those journeymen who "had manufactured successfully many thick volumes, which almost every good lawyer in the country owned -or looked into."³¹ Certainly he was never tempted to write poetry on company time. If anything, he performed his duties too conscientiously,

painstakingly examining the minutiae of a case and phrasing his analysis . . . "accurately" according to his own standards. With no gift for easy generalizations, he would ponder fine points slowly and cautiously. Trying to aid him in his laborious perplexities, a well-disposed head at Corpus Juris once admonished him kindly: "When I hire a carpenter, I don't want a cabinet maker." Though this particular chief liked him and gave him ample leeway, the day came when a less sensitive superior decided that Charles would never write up cases at the speed and in the style required.³²

     As recently as 1988, law and literature was labelled by one Harvard Law Review writer as "a newly fashionable area of legal scholarship."³⁶ Certainly every issue of Current Law Index now contains numerous 

citations under the heading "Law and Literature."³⁷ Although it may be "newly fashionable,"

[the] field of law and literature is not new. Nineteenth-century English lawyers wrote about depictions of the legal system by Shakespeare, Dickens, and other famous writers. Wigmore thought lawyers should read the great writers to learn about human nature. Cardozo's paper "Law and Literature" analyzed the literary style of judicial opinions. But only since the publication in 1973 of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination has a distinct, self-conscious field of law and literature emerged.³⁸

-Quotations from literature and the limitation of literary style add grace to legal writing.

-Legal writing can be studied as a legitimate branch of literature.

-Literature provides social criticism to broaden the lawyer's outlook, or direct criticism of the legal system as a healthy chastisement.

-Theories of language and of morality are equally vital to law and to literature.

-Literature often portrays the world of law schools, law firms, and courtrooms.

-Actual crimes have often inspired great literature.

writings.⁴¹ One explanation may be that Testimony does not fit neatly into any of the categories listed above. The vast genre of fact-based crime and courtroom stories are entirely different in method and purpose from Reznikoff's adaptations.
     An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser is the classic fictional elaboration of a published case.⁴² The businesslike summary of Grace Brown's murder by her lover, Chester Gillette, comprised scarcely two pages in the appellate court opinion. Dreiser's treatment, where the faceless murderer of the case became the subject of a full-length portrait, exceeded 800 pages. Dreiser's artistic mission involved building up details of personality and circumstance which would allow the murderer to appear as a unique individual, capable of engaging the reader's sympathy.
     Reznikoff was not interested in arousing sympathy for an individual. The discouragements - even meagerness - of his own life led him to distrust that glamorization of individuals practiced by virtually all novelists. Dreiser's first task had been to replace the impersonal, undelineated Chester Gillette of the Northeastern Reporter with the exquisitely sentient Clyde Griffiths of his imagination. Reznikoff particularly valued the impersonal, almost anonymous quality of the protagonists in printed cases.⁴³ He had begun to see the National Reporter System as a repository, an archive of human voices representing the experience of millions, but buried in law offices and law libraries where no one ever thought of listening to them. His purpose in Testimony would be the humble one of allowing those voices to be heard.

"It's a lie!" she cried. He struck her in the face with his newspaper, and 
then with his straw hat;
and she struck back with a fish she had just bought
and then with the pocketbook she still held in her hand.
The steel clasp scratched his face and it began to bleed.
As she left the store,
he shouted after her that she should not come back
and his house was closed to her forever!
He went upstairs to the rooms where they lived
and gathered up all her clothing he could find
and cut and slashed it with knife and scissors.⁴⁴

The complainant denied the charge, and charged her husband with lying. He struck her in the face with his straw hat and with a newspaper. She struck him, first with a fish which she had just been buying for breakfast, and then with a pocketbook which she held in her hand, and whose steel clasp scratched his face and drew blood. The parties were separated. The complainant left the house, and defendant shouted after her, and sent word to her by his son that she could not come back again. She went to her father's house. Three days afterwards the husband said to the son, who was working for him in his store, that he must decide whether he would go with his mother or stay with him. The son decided to go with the mother, and left. The husband then sent word to the wife to take away her clothing, but, before delivering it to her, mutilated each piece of it thoroughly with a knife or scissors, or other sharp instrument, so that a large number of costly female garments of all kinds were utterly destroyed, and in that condition sent to the wife.⁴⁵

desperately concrete, and perfectly demonstrated by the fact that the antagonists cannot spare time to locate proper weapons.
     The poet limited the remainder of the episode, as he told it, to the husband's shouted curse and his vindictive action. For the sake of concision, Reznikoff dispensed with surrounding circumstances and exact chronology. The phrase "this house is closed [to] you forever!" actually appeared on the previous page of the printed case in a letter written weeks earlier,⁴⁶ and the husband ruined his wife's clothing at a later date. Reznikoff "saw" this symbolic destruction committed immediately and offered it to the reader in the starkest possible language. One thinks of the archaic horrors of the Old Testament, a recurrent frame of reference for Reznikoff.⁴⁷ He both appropriated and altered the original wording without scruples. Reznikoff's conscience was devoted to the one aim of accurately representing the particular emotions he had discovered. "One reason for using the case books is that a case is in the public domain. No one has a right to it, but everyone can use it."⁴⁸ Nor was privacy an issue. Reznikoff either changed or omitted the names of the parties.⁴⁹ He hoped to avoid any tone of gossip anecdote.
     A remarkable handwritten formula survives among his papers. Few poets can ever have articulated their creative procedure so explicitly as Reznikoff here described how he set to work on Testimony:

The Method of Revision
1.      Write all seemingly good lines
2.      Examine every word to remove all possible latinisms and 
        unnecessary words
3.     Examine the meaning of the sentences in their order
4.     Examine the rhythm of the lines
5.     Examine the rhythm of the whole
6.     Then revision by contemplation⁵⁰

     Reznikoff developed these principles of "revision" over many years. In 1934, shortly after leaving the American Law Book Company, he published a small volume called Testimony⁵¹ under the imprint of the Objectivist Press, a collective of avant-garde writers.⁵² "I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases-not a great many as law reports go-and found almost all that follows."⁵³ He rendered excerpts from some fifty cases into short paragraphs of prose in this first attempt. It strikes one as an interesting collection of documentary fragments. However, none of the pieces approaches the unified, authoritative impact of the individual poems in the later two-volume Testimony, published in the mid-sixties. (See Appendix 1, the bibliography of Reznikoff's works.) 
     After this first show of enthusiasm, Reznikoff set aside his intention to rewrite the National Reporter System. His wife said that in the 1940s and 1950s he had "a modest, by our standards adequate, livelihood"⁵⁴ doing freelance editing and translating. In her memoir, his wife hints that her teaching income was more stable, but that Reznikoff wished to do his part. He once proposed to "devote himself wholly to writing lucrative fiction, 'a best-seller.'⁵⁵ Samuel Butler could have advised him: "The older I grow the more convinced I become of the folly and credulity of the public; but at the same time the harder do I see it is to impose oneself upon that folly and credulity."⁵⁶
     Needless to say, nothing came of the best-seller. Three tentative verse treatments of actual cases appeared in a 1941 collection of self-published poetry.⁵⁷ Two of these poems reappeared in the volume of selected verse published by New Directions in 1962.⁵⁸ But not until the mid-1960s did Reznikoff return with enthusiasm to the Testimony he had envisioned thirty years before.⁵⁹ Now in his seventies, he found himself living in the America of race riots, war protests, and assassinations. How apposite the harsh tone of his daily reading must have 

seemed as he sat in the law library going through volume after volume of the Reporters and making notes in innumerable yellow pads. Several of these notesheets have been preserved.⁶⁰
     Next to his citations Reznikoff would record a striking phrase, a piece of dialogue, or an idea for the poem he intended to write: "Peo. v. Corey, 42 NE 1066 (murder of an Indian) . . . use the letter for his thoughts as he watched Indian and girl talk together . . . ."⁶¹ These notes amply confirm Reznikoff's statement that "I might go through a volume of a thousand pages and find just one case from which to take the facts and rearrange them so as to be interesting."⁶² 
     Reznikoff naturally took special notice of the hardships of immigrants. Most of the accounts he found described their working conditions, including this one from the New York Supplement concerning a twelve-year-old Italian girl who spoke no English: "Shortly after she commenced operating the machine the wheels became clogged with an ear of corn, and, in attempting to push the ear towards the knives, her hand was drawn in, one of her fingers was taken off, and the hand itself was considerably lacerated and injured."⁶³ Here is Reznikoff's verse description: 

Soon afterwards the wheels of the machine
became clogged with an ear of corn
and in trying to push the ear towards the knives
her hand was drawn in, one of her fingers torn off
and the rest of her hand mangled.⁶⁴

restores its human vulnerability. Further, Reznikoff's long, rhythmic lines seem to reflect the inexorability of the machine.⁶⁶
     People use dishonest language to protect themselves from other people's pain. Reznikoff regarded this habit as an intolerable self indulgence. Richard Posner found a similar example of "judicial style" written seventy-nine years later than Sciolina.

The sentence reads: "In August 1971, appellee's l7-year-old daughter was the victim of a rape and did not survive the incident." The rapists killed her; the words "did not survive the rape" [sic] are an unconscious borrowing of the standard phraseology for describing a medical procedure in the course of which the patient dies: "X was operated on for a massive tumor but did not survive the operation." No normal person says, "X was shot, and did not survive the incident"; he says, "X was killed." The Court shied away from stating the blunt truth bluntly.⁶⁷

We cannot even tell what effect is intended ultimately for this volume. It consists of many small vignettes drawn from law reports of cases tried in various states during the years in question. Each is a brief study of violence, disloyalty, or stupidity. There is no accompanying apparatus, no narrative, no lyrical or meditative commentary, no intrusion of the author whatever. 
. . . In the face of the obvious risks, I will say that the language of this book is not poetry at all, but prose printed in irregular lines, and rather lifeless prose at that.⁷⁰

That Whitman's bright America should be the wailing wall on which this horrendous mural is hung is a bit of cutting pedagogy: it teaches us that America is not exempt from the articles of history, and that, as Marlowe made, his wise Mephistopheles observe, "Where we are is Hell." And who we are also: our doctrine of the sacredness of the individual emerges from these sequences of violation null and void. What Reznikoff's America comes to is
     The bleating of calves
     kept overnight at a slaughterhouse
     to be slaughtered in the morning.
     In short, the condition of Mankind.⁷²

I confess that a little Testimony went a long way with me. Like any philistine I saw it in the main as chopped up prose. . . . In theory I understood the virtue of distilling the essence of a situation and offering it to the reader without aesthetic additives, but I could not help grieving over the hours he spent poring over lawbooks in distant libraries to which he went in all weathers.⁷³

next seven years, as he entered his eighties, Reznikoff completed two further volumes covering 1901-1910 and 1911-1915. These were unpublished at his death in 1976.⁷⁵ In 1978 and 1979 Black Sparrow Press produced the complete Testimony, incorporating all four original books and covering the period from 1885 to 1915.⁷⁶ It was a sumptuous two-volume text, which Reznikoff did not have the satisfaction of seeing, but his ego had always been engaged in his work to a remarkably small extent.

I am sufficiently interested in what has been said to have it published without any personal credit by the use of my name or for any fee. . . .
Of course, this is not true for one who is eager for fame or fee, but after all, he is only mortal, and neither fame nor fee can mean much to him when he is dead.⁷⁷

A man in his forties going
to work early in the morning
with his coat on his arm and a dinnerpail in his other hand
stopped for a moment
to watch two dogcatchers leave their wagon
trying to catch a stray dog. Among those watching were boys
who began to make fun of the dogcatchers
by barking like dogs.
One of the dogcatchers-a brawny fellow-angered,
singled out the man as he stood near the others smiling,
and struck him with his fist on the jaw
a blow that sent him to the brick sidewalk
where he lay unconscious with a fractured skull.⁷⁹

and simplicity of Reznikoff's diction. The bystanders are hoping for amusement from the dogcatcher, as the reader may be hoping for amusement from the poem. The blow cuts off these expectations, cuts them off unfairly, with the unfairness that runs through myths and fairy tales and Bible stories. Cain hits Abel. The dogcatcher hits the smiling workman.
     No more than the writer of Genesis did Reznikoff expect the reader to enjoy violent spectacles. As Santayana observed, however, "Art does not seek out the pathetic, the tragic, and the absurd; it is life that has imposed them upon our attention, and enlisted art in their service, to make the contemplation of them, since it is inevitable, at least as tolerable as possible."⁸¹ Reznikoff's pessimism was the farthest thing from brutality. If his vision of human life was more than ordinarily bleak, his tenderness had need to be more than ordinarily strong.

He was seventy and homeless,estranged from his wife who owned the farm.
He would visit her now and then
and beg her to share some of her property with him
for his support- 
visits wrangling and unpleasant
and bad for his wife who had heart disease.

His son was in a field nearby
stacking wheat-
for it was the harvest season-
and a boy, shortly before noon,
ran out to the field and told him
to come home at once:
his mother had fainted as a result of a meeting with his father
and was thought to be dying.
His son came at once 
and sent to town for a doctor.
His father had left the house
and gone down the public road, slowly, leaning on his cane.

The old man found a battered tin can-it had been opened- 
and top ragged and rusted,
and crept under a heavy, rank hedge on the side of the road
and cut his throat with the top of the can.
But he could not cut deeply enough to die quickly
and crawled to a well and drowned himself.

His son later went to the well
and found his father's body lying in the water.
At the funeral, his younger brother saw his grief and said to him,
"You need not be crying: you are glad of it- 
and I am damned glad of it, too."⁸²

In real life people are not able to express their deeper feelings adequately. And most novelists have their characters as inarticulate as they would be in life. "Oh, God!" they cry, at moments of crisis, "no" . . . endeavoring by these distraught monosyllables to convey storms of fear and woe raging in their hearts. It is the peculiar art of the tragic poet to translate these incoherent feelings into adequate words.⁸³

I think poetry deals essentially with feelings, the feelings of the man who writes it and the feelings of the reader, though it may fail in either direction. That perhaps is one of the distinctions between poetry and prose. The latter can be written admirably without evoking any feeling, but poetry is inherently an expression of feeling.⁸⁴

     [V]erse must have its hard stem of wood and its grimy roots⁸⁹

     Modern poets worship their own emotions and spend their lives pursuing self-expression: such is the legend. In writing Testimony, Charles Reznikoff effaced himself as thoroughly as any lawyer writing a brief. "His training in the law, whatever other use he may have made of it, exerted a decisive influence upon his conception of the role of the writer as an impartial and restrained witness to the life of his time. . . ."⁹⁰ So flamboyant a figure as Allen Ginsberg asserted, "I don't know any other poet who is so interested in what actually happened as Reznikoff."⁹¹ The heavy volumes of the regional reporters in their hundreds and thousands contained far more of "what actually happened" than any individual could possibly observe for himself in a single lifetime. "I was only a miner and refiner of the metal there," Reznikoff wrote.⁹² One also reads, in another context, the bolder and undeniably pertinent claim that "he could make music out of the legalistic, the driest, of this reading . . . as a savage can out of sticks and a hide."⁹³ Every law library in America contains the identical mountain of raw material which Reznikoff taught himself to mine and refine. His work shows all of us who use those libraries something new about the significance of the relics we handle.

By the Waters of Manhattan: An Annual. Self-published, 1929.

By the Waters of Manhattan. New York: C. Boni, 1930.

Testimony. New York: Objectivist Press, 1934.

Going to and Fro and Walking Up and Down. New York: Futuro Press, 1941.

The Lionhearted: A Story about the Jews in Medieval England. Philadelphia: Jewish Pub. Soc'y of America, 1944.

The Jews of Charleston: A History of an American Jewish Community. Philadelphia: Jewish Pub. Soc'y of America, 1950.

By the Waters of Manhattan: Selected Verse. New York: New Directions, 1962.

Testimony: The United States, 1885-1890: Recitative. New York: New Directions, 1965.

Testimony: The United States, 1891-1900. Self-published, 1968.

Family Chronicle. London: Norton Bailey, 1969. Reprint. New York: Markus Wiener Pub., 1988.

Holocaust. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975.

The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff. Edited by Seamus Cooney. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Poems, 1918-1936. Vol. 2, Poems, 1937-1975. Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1976, 1977.

First, There Is the Need. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977.

The Manner Music. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977.

Testimony: The United States, 1885-1915: Recitative. 2 vols. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978, 1979.

Poems 1918-1975. Edited by Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1989.

Reznikoff's notes and manuscripts provide enough information to establish links between the following cases and poems, which comprise about one-third of the published total. 
 

* Reference Librarian, Gleeson Library, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California.

** "Reznikoff's Testimony" first appeared in the Law Library Journal (Vol 82)(1990) and appears here with the permission of Benjamin Watson. The author thanks Peter Meyer for suggesting the work which lead to the article; Gail Kinkennon and Marion Gin for research assistance; John Granger, Director of the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, Central University Library, University of California, San Diego, for cooperation in making the Reznikoff Papers available; Gary Phillips and Steven Phillips for research assistance in San Diego; John Martin of Black Sparrow Press for permission to reprint the poems; and Justice Gary E. Strankman for a critical review of an early draft of the essay.

1.  L.S. Dembo, The "Objectivist" Poet: Four Interviews [Charles Reznikoff], 10 (2) Contemporary Literature 193, 194-95 (1969)(reprinted as "Charles Reznikoff: A Talk with L.S. Dembo," in Milton Hindus (ed.), CHARLES REZNIKOFF: MAN AND POET 97-107 (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono,1984).

2.  Shirley Kaufman, Charles Reznikoff, 1894-1976: An Appreciation, Midstream, Aug./Sept. 1976, at 51, 51.

3.  Bernard Pares, A HISTORY OF RUSSIA 403-30 (New York: Knopf, 1953).

4.  Charles Reznikoff, FAMILY CHRONICLE (New York: Markus Wiener Pub., 1988)(1969). The year in which Reznikoff's parents emigrated is not explicitly stated, but can be inferred: Sarah Yetta was twelve years old in 1881; she was twenty when her father died [in 1889]; her father had been dead for "almost three years" when she arrived in America [in 1892], where Nathan had arrived a short time earlier. Id. at 30-31, 55, 74.

5.  Milton Hindus, "Introduction," to Milton Hindus (ed.), CHARLES REZNIKOFF: MAN AND POET supra note 1, 15-33, at 16.

6.  Reznikoff, supra note 4, at 64.

7.  Id. at 120-21.

8.  Id. at 212.

9.  Charles Reznikoff, POEMS 1937-1975, at 152-53 (Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1977).

10.  Id. at 154-55.

11.  Emory Elliott (ed.), COLUMBIA LITERARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 556-58 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See generally Ralph D. Gardner, HORATIO ALGER, OR, THE AMERICAN HERO ERA (Mendota, Illinois: Wayside Press, 1964).

12.  A collection of poetry in 1929, a novel in 1930, a volume of selected poems in 1962.

13.  Psalm 137:1 (BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER (1928).

14.  Sternburg, A Conversation with Charles Reznikoff, 2 Montemora 113, 113 (1976).

15.  Reznikoff, supra note 9, at 168.

16.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 38.

17.  Reznikoff, supra note 9, at 169.

18.  Id. at 168-69.

19.  Sternburg, supra note 14, at 114.

20.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 38.

21.  Milton Hindus, "Introduction,"  to Charles Reznikoff, BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN x (New York: C. Boni, 1930).

22.  Reznikoff, supra note 4, at 303.

23.  Sternburg, supra note 14, at 114.

24.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 38.

25.  Reznikoff, supra note 4, at 309.

26.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 41.

27.  Reznikoff, supra note 9, at 122.

28.  Id.

29.  Charles Reznikoff, TESTIMONY xiii (New York: The Objectivist Press, 1934).

30.  Kaufman, supra note 2, at 56.

31.  Charles Reznikoff, Dismissal 2 (unpublished manuscript in Charles Reznikoff Papers (box 17, folder 2), Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, Central University Library, University of California, San Diego) [hereinafter Papers].

32.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 45.

33.  Reznikoff, supra note 29, at [4].

34.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 45.

35.  Milton Hindus, CHARLES REZNIKOFF: A CRITICAL ESSAY 65 (Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1977).

36.  Paul Gewirtz, Aeschylus' Law, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1043, 1043 (1988).

37.  The 1989 annual, part A, contains nineteen citations under this subject heading. CURRENT LAW INDEX 528 (1989). In addition, related materials is listed under the headings "Law in literature" and "Lawyers as authors."

38.  Richard Posner, Law and Literature: A Relation Reargued, 72 Va. L. Rev. 1351, 1352 (1986) (footnotes omitted).

39.  Harold Suretsky, Search for a Theory: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings on the Relation of Law to Literature and the Humanities, 32 Rutgers L. Rev. 727 (1979); David R. Papke, Law and Literature: A Comment and Bibliography of Secondary Works, 73 Law Lib. J. 421 (1980).

40.  An online search of the MLA International Bibliography for "Reznikoff" retrieved fifty records concerning Charles Reznikoff (Sept. 25, 1990). See also Linda Simon, "An Annotated Bibliography of Works About Charles Reznikoff: 1920-1983," in CHARLES REZNIKOFF: MAN AND POET, supra note 1, 411-440 (citing eighty items; unfortunately, many citations are incomplete or inaccurate).

41.  Indexes checked through August 1990.

42.  People v. Gillette, 83 N.E. 680 (N.Y. Ct. App. 1908). Other famous examples are E. Poe, Politian (1835), based on Beauchamp's Trial (1826), reprinted in Loren J. Kallsen (ed.), THE KENTUCKY TRAGEDY 165-320 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963); Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD (1924) (written ca. 1890), based on United States v. Mackenzie, 26 F. Cas. 1118 (1843) (No. 15, 690); Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee, INHERIT THE WIND (New York: Random House, 1955), based on Scopes v. State, 289 S.W. 363 (1927); Truman Capote, IN COLD BLOOD (New York: Random House, 1966), based on State v. Hickock and Smith, 363 P.2d 541 (Kan. 1962); Norman Mailer, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), based on Gilmore v. Utah, 429 U.S. 1012 (1976).

43.  See Baritz, The Historian as Playwright, 195 Nation 340, 340 (1962). Reznikoff clipped this article and underlined the sentence, "No historian, to my knowledge, has yet attempted plotlessness, though it would be neither impossible nor undesirable." Papers, supra note 31, box 19, folder 1.

44.  Charles Reznikoff, 1 TESTIMONY 183-84 (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978).

45.  Streitwolf v. Streitwolf, 47 A. 14, 18 (N.J. Ch. 1900).

46.  Id. at 17.

47.  See supra notes 12-13 and accompanying text.

48.  Sternburg, supra note 14, at 117.

49.  "Note: All that follows is based on law reports of the several states. The names of all persons are fictitious and those of villages and towns have been changed." Reznikoff, supra note 44, at [9].

50.  Papers, supra note 31, box 19, folder 2.

51.  Reznikoff, supra note 29.

52.  Sternburg, supra note 14, at 117. For a discussion of objectivist literary theory, see Randolph Chilton, "Charles Reznikoff: Objectivist Witness," in CHARLES REZNIKOFF: MAN AND POET, supra note 5, at 199-223.

53.  Reznikoff, supra note 29, at [v].

54.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 53.

55.  Id. at 51.

56.  Samuel Butler, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH 379 (1944) (1903).

57.  Charles Reznikoff, GOING TO AND FRO AND WALKING UP AND DOWN 49-56 (New York: [Futuro Press], 1941).

58.  Charles Reznikoff, BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN 74-75 (New York: New Directions, 1962).

59.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 63.

60.  Papers, supra note 31, box 12, folder 4. These notes are the principal source for identifying the original cases on which Reznikoff based the poems in Testimony. See Appendix 2, Table of Cases, infra p. 666. 

61.  Id. The poem based on People v. Corey, 42 N.E. 1066 (1896) appears in Reznikoff, supra note 44, at 180.

62.  Sternburg, supra note 14, at 117.

63.  Sciolina v. Erie Preserving Co., 7 A.D. 417, 419, 39 N.Y.S. 916, 917 (1896). 

64.  Papers, supra note 31, box 17, folder 2 (poem not included in the published Testimony).

65.  Sciolina, 7 A.D., at 423-24, 39 N.Y.S. at 920.

66.  Kathryn Shevelow has studied Reznikoff's use of poetic devices in Testimony: "'Music'-by which [Reznikoff] means meter, assonance, alliteration, parallelism, and repetition-charges these poems with emotional power." Shevelow, History and Objectification in Charles Reznikoff's Documentary Poems, Testimony and Holocaust, 1 Sagetrieb 290, 293 (1982).

67.  Posner, supra note 38, at 1391 (citing Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U.S. 469, 471 (1975) (footnotes omitted).

68.  Syrkin, supra note 5, at 61.

69.  Carruth, The Tide Comes In (Book Review), 195 Nation 312 (1962).

70.  Carruth, A Failure of Contempt (Book Review), 107 Poetry 396, 396-97 (1966).

71.  See Dickey, The Thing Itself (Book Review), 19 Hudson Rev. 146, 151-52 (1966); Book Review, 3 Choice 311 (1966).

72.  Cynthia Ozick, Against the Grain (Book Review), Congress Bi-Weekly, May 9, 1966, at 18. The verse of Reznikoff's that Ozick quotes is in Reznikoff, supra note 44, at 45.

73.  Syrkin, supra, note 5, at 64.

74.  Id.

75.  See Cooney, Editor's Note to Reznikoff, supra note 44, at [7].

76.  Editor's Note: This set was in print and available from Black Sparrow Press at the time this article was first published in 1990.

77.  Papers, supra note 31, box 17, folder 2. These statements appear in a two-page unpublished draft of prefatory material for Testimony.

78.  Shevelow, supra note 66, at 291.

79.  Charles Reznikoff, 2 TESTIMONY 195-96  (Santa Barbara:  Black Sparrow Press, 1979). This poem is based on State v. John, 72 S.W. 525 (Mo. 1903).

80.  See supra, notes 44-45 and accompanying text.

81.  George Santayana, THE SENSE OF BEAUTY: BEING THE OUTLINE OF AESTHETIC THEORY  221 (New York:  C. Scribner's Sons, 1896).

82.  Reznikoff, supra note 79, at 163-64. This poem is based on State v. McAnarney, 79 P. 137 (Kan. 1905).

83.  David Cecil, SIR WALTER SCOTT 47-48 (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1933).

84.  Dembo, supra note 1, at 196.

85.  "America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view of life. It could not be otherwise. The sense of tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic societies. . . ." Robert Warshow, THE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE: MOVIES, COMICS, THEATRE AND OTHER ASPECTS OF POPULAR CULTURE 127 (Garden City, New York:  Doubleday, 1962).

86.  See generally ARISTOTLE'S POETICS (O. Hardison ed., 1968); Philip Sidney, AN APOLOGIE FOR POETRIE (1595); Richard Benson Sewall, THE VISION OF TRAGEDY (New Haven: Yale University Press, New ed., 1980).

87.  BENÉT'S READER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA 862-63 (3rd ed. 1987).

88.  See supra note 40 for critical sources.

89.  Charles Reznikoff, THE LIONHEARTED: A STORY ABOUT THE JEWS IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND  64 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944).

90.  Hindus, supra note 5, at 23.

91.  Allen Ginsberg, "Reznikoff's Poetics," in  CHARLES REZNIKOFF: MAN AND POET, supra note 5, 139-150, at 148 (1984). 

92.  Papers, supra note 31, box 10, folder 1. This sentence was cancelled from the preface to the 1965 Testimony.

93.  Reznikoff, supra note 89, at 172.