At the requests of Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, Louis Zukofsky decided to act as temporary editor of the February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine. Notable writers included within the issue are William Carlos Williams (admittedly the most tame of the submissions), Charles Reznikoff, Zukofsky himself, and translations of Charles Rimbaud.
All the other poets included, however, are nothing to sneeze at, each bringing verse with such beautiful intensity and such wild rawness into the issue that you are able to glean something unique, puzzling, and new from each submission.
Because each poem leaps frantically around and experiments with form and language, each appear drastically different from the one beside it. Which, I think, is why Monroe and Pound asked Zukofsky to create the issue to provide a sense of cohesion for the newly budding Objectivist poetic.
Zukofsky includes two essays (or because of their length, may be considered “commentaries”) on the subject of objectivism and its elusive definitions and techniques. The first commentary is called “Program: Objectivists,” and other than the beginning epithet doesn’t offer much clarification on the subject.
The next essay, also by Zukofsky, uses Charles Reznikoff’s poetry as an exemplar of the two qualities of Objectivism: sincerity and objectification. His critical analysis of Reznikoff delivers a better sense of what Objectivism entails.
Considering all the poetry contained within the issue in conjunction with the two essays, I concluded Objectivism to essentially be a distillation of and merger between Symbolism, Surrealism, and Imagism to form a single poetic technique and philosophy. Objectivist poetry is not meant to simply be “pretty bits” as Aestheticism (subset of Surrealism) or Imagism can sometimes seem to be, but rather of things that “matter” [1]. What this means is that although the poems appear incoherent at times or merely for the sake of aesthete or stream-of-conscious strangeness or oddity, they’re actually producers of an elevated meaning (akin to Symbolism). The poems have the appearance and the spectacularity of Surrealism, the hard-nosed attention to detail, often times focusing on the “anti-poetic,” of Imagism, but also carry the magnitude of original meaning proffered by Symbolism [2].
Zukofsky attempts to outline two characteristics or principles of Objectivist process and poetry, but his prose occasionally deviates into cryptic language and poetic example, making it difficult to acquire concrete definitions. It seems, however, from that very first epithet combined with his analysis of Reznikoff’s poems that Objectivism’s aim is aim in and of itself. Objectivist poetry is an attempt to put focus (“sincerity”) onto a thing, aiming your eye and words in such a way to bring about a “consciousness of the ‘objectively perfect'” from the thing (“objectification”) [3]. This abstract “thing” can be an actual object, a word, a memory, an event, but is more often than not the poem itself.
Through the poem’s structure, how the words and lines pair together to become a specific sound or “melody,” transforms the poem into a completely new object of truth, factual observation, and prophetic reflection. This is why these seemingly “pretty bits” actually matter quite a lot. These things look like Imagist poems or Dadaist artwork, where they find poetry in the “anti-poetic” and juxtapose details and images to create an inner dissonance or confusion. But Dadaism, and sometimes Imagism, tend to lay things out “as is” without intervention. Objectivism has more manipulation within it, guiding the freedom of Surrealism into a higher sense of seeing (the aim or focus of finding the objectively perfect) while still allowing the poem “to go where it wants to.”
To get a better sense of what focusing a poem into a completely new object entails, here is part of Zukofsky’s poem “A” within the 1931 issue. Notice how Zukofsky takes leaps and bounds in association away from the beginning “Horses:” while still returning to images of a horse and its components. The new object (the poem itself) is created by focusing these associational leaps (sincerity) into a single structure and melodious landscape (objectification).
