Charles Reznikoff had grown accustomed to publishing his own slim books for over a decade before he received a particularly startling bit of news in the February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine. “There is a learned article about my verse in Poetry this month,” he wrote to his future wife on the day it came into his unsuspecting hands, “from which I learn that I am ‘an objectivist.’” True to form, Reznikoff proceeded swiftly to other pressing news of the day: he had just received the last check from his publisher; he was agonizing over his new work; he concluded somberly, “I am about to diet.” That he would breeze into and out of the literary spotlight so nonchalantly should not surprise us. Like William Carlos Williams, Reznikoff thrived on tiptoeing across the high ledge of the present and the immediate, seldom allowing his imagination to lean against the abstractions implied in such labels as objectivism, imagism, or the like.

But then neither should his other news catch us off guard. There is something supremely logical about aligning his new objectivist status, his money troubles, and his upcoming dietary ambitions. Of all the modernist poets to navigate a path between the two poles of poetic form—the decadent and the ascetic—only that impresario of many faces, Ezra Pound, attained something of a balance. Like that of his friends Louis Zukofski and George Oppen, Reznikoff’s work is all or nothing: at times a crystalline model of precision, at others, the