Charles Reznikoff (August 31, 1894 – January 22, 1976) was an American poet best known for his long work, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915), Recitative (1934–1979).

[citation needed] The multi-volume Testimony was based on court records and explored the experiences of immigrants, black people and the urban and rural poor in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[citation needed] When Louis Zukofsky was asked by Harriet Monroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, he contributed his essay, Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.

[1] His father established a family business of manufacturing hats,[citation needed] and Reznikoff briefly worked there as a salesman in his 20s.

[citation needed] He spent a year studying journalism in graduate school at the University of Missouri,[1] where Reznikoff realized he was interested in writing more than reporting news.

This appears to have been inspired by a family story of his grandfather, an unpublished Hebrew poet whose manuscripts were destroyed after his death, for fear of their falling into Russian hands.

Over the following forty years, Reznikoff worked on refashioning these stories into an extended found poem, which finally ran to some 500 pages over two volumes.

In 2013, the band Joan of Arc, with the help of the experimental performance group, Every House Has a Door,[2] created a musical/theater piece based on Reznikoff's Testimony.

In a 2016 interview Mitski cited Reznikoff as an influence on her music, and praised his poetic precision and ability to "create a striking image in people’s brains".

[4] Reznikoff is mentioned in Yannick Haenel's novel Tiens ferme ta couronne (2017), published in English as Hold Fast the Crown.