Charles Reznikoff's poetry has not only influenced the direction and shape of American-Jewish poetry but it has, in effect, created the possibility of such a poetry. In a recent interview Kenneth Koch asked Allen Ginsberg the following question: "Could you tell me briefly which 20th-century poets have influenced your work"" It is, of course, a standard query, one that poets like to dodge. Ginsberg's reply, however, is instructive: "Most recently, enormously, Charles Reznikoff, for his particular focus on sidewalks, parks and subways of New York." It is Reznikoff's work--rather than, say, Karl Shapiro's--that has provided a shaping force to the urban Jewish imagination, that brought Jewish concerns and Modernist technique into a juxtaposition. Indeed, it is hard to think of another American-Jewish writer in any genre whose work so spans the nightmare of our century or whose vision divides so neatly between tightly wrought Imagist poems about the...