Objectivist Poets - Early Publications

Early Publications

The first appearance of the group was in a special issue of Poetry magazine in February 1931; this was arranged for by Pound and edited by Zukofsky (Vol. 37, No. 5). As well as Rakosi, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, George Oppen, Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams, the issue included work by a number of poets who would have little or no further association with the group: Howard Weeks, Robert McAlmon, Joyce Hopkins, Norman Macleod, Kenneth Rexroth, S. Theodore Hecht, Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, Whittaker Chambers, Jesse Lowenthal, Emanuel Carnevali (as translator of Arthur Rimbaud), John Wheelwright, Richard Johns and Martha Champion. An appendix (Symposium) featured texts by Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford, with a note by Zukofsky, a text by Samuel Putnam and Zukofsky-translated poems by André Salmon and René Taupin.

The issue also contained Zukofsky's essays Program: 'Objectivists' 1931 and Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff, a reworking of a study of Reznikoff's work originally written some time earlier. In this second essay, Zukofsky expands on the basic tenets of Objectivist poetics, stating that in sincerity "Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody", and that objectification relates to "the appearance of the art form as an object". This position echoes Pound's 1918 dictum (in an essay, "A Retrospective", in which he is looking back at Imagism) "I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity".