Xavier Kalck
Présentation
(2026) American Objectivist Poetry Across the 20th Century
Offering a new introduction to an important yet often overlooked group of 20th century American poets, this book re-examines their work as a group while giving special attention to their individual trajectories.
Objectivist poets' contribution to American literary history is no longer secret, but the nature of that specific contribution remains surprisingly unclear, and in need of serious revision. Through a range of perceptive close readings, this book offers a detailed assessment of this group-Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky-from the 1930s Modernist era to the New American Poetry of the 1950s, all the way to the experimentations of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In doing so, it presents a new critical history of 20th century American poetry and how to engage with it.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/american-objectivist-poetry-across-the-20th-century-9781350419483/
(2025) Reading Charles Reznikoff The Plain Sunlight of His Verse Edited by Xavier Kalck, Fiona McMahon, and Naomi Toth
https://libraries.clemson.edu/press/books/reading-charles-reznikoff/
Reading Charles Reznikoff explores Reznikoff’s unique position as a modernist writing spare verse, rich with urban detail, but also as a paragon of found text poetry who created lasting works of testimony, and as a Jewish American poet whose translations and adaptations from scripture and biblical commentary verge on the prophetic.
This collection of essays explores Reznikoff’s verse and its contemporary poetic and critical legacy in five movements. The first looks at how history and politics are woven into Reznikoff’s work, namely Reznikoff’s complex relationship with Jewish American identity in the 20th century. The second section turns to documentary poetics and to Reznikoff’s practice of composing from historical as well as legal documents, in the context of modernist concerns over realism as well as contemporary ones over memory and appropriation. The third section delves into the concept of verse—Reznikoff’s word for the lyric—showing how Reznikoff’s rhythms compose an abstract yet accurate vernacular portrait of America. It places Reznikoff among his fellow poets, known as the Objectivists, and in relation to larger issues pertaining to the rhythmic fabric of free verse and the aesthetic vocabularies of the spare and the ordinary. The fourth opens onto issues of translation, and Reznikoff’s work’s journey through Mexican, Polish and French contexts, illustrating Reznikoff’s ongoing transnational relevance. The volume concludes with a foray into some of Reznikoff’s afterlives, in the work of Paul Auster—an early champion of Reznikoff’s method—and through the history of Reznikoff’s complex engagement with the African American experience, the representation of injustice and testimony as a dialogical means of witnessing intended to foster a sense of community.
See the documentary film on Reznikoff created by the editors.
(2024) Living and Seeing Charles Reznikoff. Directed by Xavier Kalck, Naomi Toth, and Fiona McMahon.
Living and Seeing Charles Reznikoff, 2024
Directed by Xavier Kalck, Naomi Toth, and Fiona McMahon.
Featuring Mark Scroggins, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Fredman, Jena Osman, Dara Barnat, Sarug Sarano, Carlos Soto Román, Ranen Omer-Sherman, and Ariel Resnikoff.
Dernières actualités
(2021) Pluralism, Poetry and Literacy: A Test of Reading and Interpretive Techniques. New York: Routledge.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Drawing from Medieval and Renaissance studies, analytic philosophy and pragmatism, Jewish studies, as well as ecocriticism and environmental humanities, this book demonstrates the consistent relationship between pluralism and literacy through the prism of poetry by confronting the history of interpretive practices with examples from American poets Robert Lax, Larry Eigner, Louis Zukofsky, Gary Snyder and Theodore Enslin. Divided into four areas of investigation—the meditative, the analytic, the diasporic and the ecological reader—it is an invitation to turn to premodern reading practices related to spiritual exercises as well as modern reading practices devoted to the critical pursuit of analytical knowledge. This study further reflects on the textual models of Jewish diaspora as another form of dialog between sacred and secular interpretive practices, before examining a final variation on this distinction by looking at the separation between contemplative and investigative perspectives on reading and writing nature.
REVIEWS & INFORMATION:
(2020) La poésie américaine entre chant et parole : l’héritage objectiviste. Paris : Honoré Champion.
À la façon d’une enquête, ce livre se propose de faire découvrir au public français les chemins que prend le poème américain au XXe siècle, depuis les « motz el son » des troubadours qu’invoquait Ezra Pound, pour trouver un équilibre précaire, de la guerre du Vietnam jusqu’au 11 septembre 2001, entre chant et parole. De Larry Eigner à John Taggart, en passant par Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Jerome Rothenberg et Armand Schwerner, mais aussi Michael Heller, Theodore Enslin ou Robert Lax, sans oublier Cid Corman, David Ignatow, Harvey Shapiro, ou encore Hugh Seidman, on y parcourt un formidable archipel d’œuvres singulières, dont le point commun se révèle être leur rapport à l’héritage « objectiviste », incarnation du modernisme à partir duquel ils se situent.
https://www.honorechampion.com/fr/11290-book-08535356-9782745353566.html
(2019) “We Said Objectivist.” Lire les poètes Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky. Paris : Sorbonne Université Presses.
Obscurs et limpides, déroutants de simplicité ou décourageants de complexité, tout et son contraire semble avoir été dit des poètes américains « objectivistes », dont on retient aujourd’hui cinq noms, Lorine Niedecker (1903- 1970), George Oppen (1908-1984), Carl Rakosi (1903-2004), Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) et Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978). Parce qu’ils ne commencèrent à publier que dans les années vingt ou trente, on les qualifia de modernistes tardifs. Redécouverts après-guerre par une nouvelle génération de lecteurs, après parfois plus de deux décennies d’oubli, ils devinrent alors des précurseurs. Tous si profondément ancrés dans une nouvelle tradition nationale, comme le notait déjà Serge Fauchereau, en raison notamment de leur double parrainage, proches d'Ezra Pound comme de William Carlos Williams, et s'adressant à un lectorat d'abord américain, leurs trajectoires n'en demeurèrent pas moins foncièrement marginales. Juifs, fils d'une immigration récente, ou comme Niedecker, isolée dans le Wisconsin rural, ils n'ont appartenu à la scène littéraire qu'un bref instant au début des années trente, puis seulement à la toute fin de leurs vies. Poètes, ils furent travailleur social, charpentier, menuisier, enseignant, militant communiste, traducteur, psychothérapeute, éditeur, femme de ménage ou soldat. Riche de nombreuses analyses détaillées, cet ouvrage se veut une introduction raisonnée aux conflits et aux contextes spécifiques qui marquèrent les œuvres de ces auteurs, ainsi qu'aux enjeux de poétique contemporaine qui en découlent.
(2017) George Oppen’s Poetics of the Commonplace. New York: Peter Lang.
Few poets have been as adamant about the uselessness of their art in the face of history as American poet George Oppen (1908–1984), and yet, few poets have been as viscerally convinced of the important role of the poem in restoring meaning to our words. Oppen came to maturity between two world wars, at the time of the Depression, and gave up poetry just when he had embraced it. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, his new work seemed to many poets and critics to represent the epitome of poetic virtue in dark times. Whereas Oppen wrote of the lost sense of the commonplace, his readers found in his poetry the means to reclaim the poet’s role within the community.
George Oppen’s Poetics of the Commonplace offers the first survey of the critical consensus which has now built up around the poetry of George Oppen, after over two decades of substantial interest in his work. It proposes a comprehensive perspective on Oppen and the criticism devoted to Oppen, from the Objectivist strain in American poetry to the thinkers, such as Heidegger, Levinas, Marx and Adorno, which critics have brought to bear on Oppen’s poetry, to pave the way for the consideration and exemplification of a new methodology which sheds a critical light on the ideas and practices in contemporary poetics, through well-researched close readings.