A poem I keep coming back to again and again is Charles
Reznikoff’s “During the Second World War, I Was Going Home One Night,” first published in 1969. I first encountered the poem from hearing it in
PoemTalk #56,
and later had the opportunity to study Reznikoff in my poetics seminar. The
reason that I find this poem so striking is that it seems like a kind of
proto-Language poem, in addition to being an Objectivist ars poetica, despite
(or perhaps through) the poem’s narrative structure. Also worth some attention
is a critical difference in the way Reznikoff performs the poem and the way it
exists on the page.
The poem details two brief encounters between the poem’s
subject, the “I” of the poem, and a fruit vendor, during and after WWII. On the
surface of the poem, we get a kind of subject-object relationship between the
two figures, with the poem’s narrator as subject, and the vendor an object in
his field. But looking more closely, it’s not just the poem’s subject trying to
comfort a vendor whose son was fighting in the war; the poem unfolds into an
intersubjectivity wherein the two men reciprocally provide support for each other.
In the second stanza, when the subject returns to the fruit store, he notes, “I
found myself once more in that street/and again it was late at night, dark and
lonely;” The description of “dark and lonely” is the affect of the subject—not
the vendor. We could also read the “again” to imply that not only was it late
at night again, but that the subject is feeling dark and lonely and again, i.e.
that he was in a similar mood the first time he visited. Pairing this with his
upbeat language in the presence of the vendor, and the fact that he returns to
the fruit store again, we might deduce that the companionship is bidirectional.
In this regard, the poem is different than some of Reznikoff’s other poems,
such as “Amelia,” where the poem is framed as a kind of detached observation of
a scene.
But the most interesting aspect of the poem, to me, is its
function as a commentary on language and the potential shape of the signifier.
Reznikoff structures the poem such that the subject is the enthusiastic and
more eloquent user of language. “You are sad…What is troubling you?” he first
asks the vendor, who replies, in what the subject later describes as a
“monotone”: “Yes, I am sad.” The uneven dialogue here, with the vendor speaking
in an almost robotic, affectless cadence, implies that the vendor either
doesn’t want to talk (because he is sad?) or, alternatively, that language is
not his chosen method of communication. We see several other examples of the
disparity in language use throughout the poem, including and especially when we
learn that the vendor’s son returned from the war unharmed:
his thin wrinkled face was grim
but not particularly sad. “How about your son?” I said.
“Did he come back from the war?” “Yes,” he answered.
“He was not wounded?” “No. He is all right.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Fine!”
I found interesting here Reznokiff’s use of, and lack
thereof, contractions to smooth dialogue. The subject, who is clearly
comfortable with language, uses contractions: “That’s fine”; the vendor does
not: “He is all right.” Again, this shapes the subject into a dynamic presence
and the storeowner into a kind of automaton, an affectless object.
The turn of the poem comes here, when the storeowner
responds to the subject’s bonhomie:
He took the bag of apples from my hands and groping inside
took out one that had begun to rot
and put in a good one instead.
The apple that the vendor gives the subject is itself a
non-lingual signifier, a sign that carries all of, if not more than, the affect/expression
of the subject’s ebullient discourse. It is language made concrete and
material. “Words are things, too,” said Charles Bernstein. It’s also a tangible
manifestation of Zukofsky’s famous “rested totality,” in that the apple serves
as a perfected, finished object that encapsulates the power of the poem. The
apple is an objectivist poem within an objectivist poem--rested totality inside
rested totality. (Interesting paradox:
two contingent totalities.) As such, the poem presents itself as a metapoem.
The dialogue and the poem are completed with the storeowner
having the last “word”:
He took the bag of apples from my hands again
and took out one of the smaller apples and put in a large
one.
The apples are expressive of complex, nuanced feelings, the
kind of feelings we generally fumble with language to define, not just tokens
of gratitude to the subject. The vendor seems to express more with his
statement (and revision) of the apples than the subject does with words,
causing the reader to question which of the men is the subject and which is object.
In this regard, the poem seems a kind of commentary on the limits of words and
the presence of alternative semiotics. Even though the poem doesn’t look
anything like a Language poem, I feel like it’s akin to Language poetry in this
regard: Reznikoff subtly makes language something real and concrete in a way
that causes the reader to ponder the material existence and physical
limitations of words. The apple as signifier does not point, in any constant
sense, to a fixed signified. We get the sense of the rough direction in which
it points, but it resists the transparency that can undo the selfsame function
in language. It’s not possible to read straight through the apple to some kind
of fixed referent: we must stop and consider it as a material thing, and in
doing so, consider how this reference is different than any other,
particularly—language.
(Phono)text
It was surprising to hear that in both recordings of
Reznikoff reading “During the Second World War…,” one from 1974 and one from 1975 (both available on Reznikoff’s PennSound page), he
reads an alternative version of this poem, one that amalgamates the two apple
exchanges into one.
In both readings of the poem, Reznikoff elides these lines:
He took the bag of apples from my hands and groping inside
took out one that had begun to rot
and put in a good one instead.
He then amalgamates the two exchanges into one, reading the
final two lines of the poem as:
He took the bag of apples from my hands and groping inside
took out one of the smaller apples and put in a large one.
So we get the first line of the first apple exchange in the
text, followed by the last line of the text. Given that he chooses to read the
poem the same way in both recordings, there must be some significance here. So
the question becomes: why change the poem?
One guess is that Reznikoff felt that the replacement of the
rotting apple was less expressive than corrective. The only way we could see it
as expressive is if the vendor was consciously going to sell the subject a
rotting apple. That wouldn’t make the vendor as sympathetic as otherwise
(though one could make the argument that it makes him a more complex character).
Another possibility is that Reznikoff is condensing the two exchanges into one
in the spirit of Imagist-Poundian minimalism. Perhaps he felt that the two
exchanges compressed into one kinetic expression yielded more force than the
repetitive iteration presented in the text.
Personally, I think that the text of the poem creates a much
more complex aesthetic. The version as performed makes the apple exchange into
a simple show of gratitude; the subject is given a bigger apple as a sign of
thanks. I think that the repetition of the process in the text of the poem
creates a complex, dialogic exchange and the conversion of a subject-object
relationship into an intersubjective encounter. The repeated process of trying
to select the right apple to express the giver’s intended feeling mirrors the
process of the subject trying to choose the right words—only it lays bare a
process that would otherwise be backgrounded, at best, and transparent, at
worst.
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