Wednesday, Jan. 28: the Objectivists

(right-to-left) William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen

Moving forward from the 19th century to the 20th, we'll spend Wednesday's class getting familiar with the Objectivists, who represented America's first uniquely native poetic movement — that is, following from our discussion of Whitman, poets who wrote about contemporary American culture in an authentic American voice (hence poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound don't make the cut). The group was formally enshrined in a 1931 issue of Poetry, where Louis Zukofsky's introduction to a group of curated poems offers a multi-faceted definition for the movement:

An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars. 

Inspired by Pound's dictum, "Make It New," the Objectivists sought to make a clear break with poetry of the past. William Carlos Williams offered up his own slogans — "Compose. (No ideas / but in things) Invent! — while affirming that "The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic." Outside of the Objectivists, we find similar sentiments, demonstrating a move away from the over-complex poetics of Pound and Eliot: cf. Marianne Moore, who demands work written "not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!"

We'll consider a handful of poems from four major poets affiliated with the movement: Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen. If you're looking to do further reading down the line, you might want to check out work by Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting.

William Carlos Williams

• This Is Just to Say [MP3 / text alignment]
• The Red Wheelbarrow [MP3]
• Between Walls [MP3]
• The Cold Night [MP3]
• Complaint [MP3]
• Blizzard
• Danse Russe [MP3 / text alignment]
• To a Poor Old Woman [MP3]
• The Great Figure

Lorine Niedecker

• Poet's work
• Foreclosure [MP3]
• Three Poems
• Linnaeus in Lapland
• "A monster owl"

Charles Reznikoff

• Ghetto Funeral
• Night Piece
• Depression [MP3]
• A Group of Verse

George Oppen

• Discrete Series
• Street
• Primitive
• From a Photograph [MP3]
• Product