The chronology of the Objectivist movement is brief. In late 1930, Louis Zukofsky, the poet who coined the term “Objectivist,” wrote Ezra Pound that he was preparing a critical article on the poetry of Charles Reznikoff but, in order to analyze the poetry, had become involved in trying to define two terms: sincerity and objectification. Pound, familiar with Zukofsky’s work, had already convinced editor Harriet Monroe to allow Zukofsky to edit an issue of Poetry. Zukofsky then appended his article, entitled “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” to the February, 1931, issue—the “Objectivists” issue—with an eye to providing what he later called a “standard” for his contributors. His primary example of the language of Objectivism was Reznikoff’s one-line poem “Aphrodite Urania”—“The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water.” The poem strongly suggests in its sound the movement to which it refers.

Reznikoff was a product of the Jewish community in New York. Born in Brooklyn in 1894, he earned a law degree but practiced only briefly. For a few years in the 1930s, however, he worked at a legal publishing firm, where he helped condense and summarize court records for inclusion in legal reference works. Although he had begun to publish in the teens (he self-published some of his own work with hand-set plates beginning in the 1920s), his reading and writing in legal publishing had a profound effect on much of his later poetry. He began to see that court testimony uniquely documented a comprehensive cultural history, and from court records he extracted and further condensed stories and vignettes (published as his prose book Testimony 1934) and transformed them and additional records into poems that filled two volumes when published some thirty years later. He came to appreciate the straightforward, unornamented prose of court testimony, which used metaphor sparsely if at all. The tools he developed in such writing served him well when he wrote Holocaust, based closely on courtroom accounts of the Nazi death camps.

Reznikoff had an apparently intuitive eye for the “historical particulars” that Zukofsky valued. He incorporated into even his earliest poetry details of daily life in New York—from street lamps to domestic tragedies—that he saw during his long walks through the city. He wrote drama and fiction, including fictionalized history, but seldom criticism. In the 1930s, he worked for a time in Hollywood but returned to New York and made a living as a free-lance writer, translator, and researcher until his death in 1976. Reznikoff’s work speaks of a significant project—one in which history shapes language, language in turn shapes history’s readers, and poetry marks out the most artfully shaped language of the lived historical moment.

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Modern American Poetry
(http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/reznikoff/reznikoff.htm)
Biography, photos, and critical/historical essays about Reznikoff's work.

Milton Hindus, Charles Reznikoff: A Critical Essay, 1977

Milton Hindus, ed., Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, 1984

Sagetrieb 13 (1994) (special issue on Reznikoff)