Just putting line breaks in something doesn't make it poetry

German miserabilist philosopher Theodor Adorno asked how it was possible to write poetry after the Holocaust, and Charles Reznikoff produced one of the greatest collections of poetry about the Nazi genocide by not writing anything at all. A master of found poetry, he pursued the avant-garde goals of driving out subjectivity and directly apprehending the world, while managing to document crime and suffering in central Europe and the USA.

Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn in 1894 of Jewish Russian parents. He studied journalism and later law and wrote reports for a legal publisher, but also wrote poetry, at first influenced by the decadent poets of the 1890s and the French Symbolists, and later by Imagism. He printed much of it himself, and made little money. He constantly worked and re-worked his poems, on one occasion demanding work back from Harriet Monroe's prestigious Poetry: A Magazine of Verse when the magazine refused to let him change it before publication; staying out of the magazine was preferable to a ban on tinkering.

He never made much money from his verse, and worked at a range of jobs from hat salesman to a spell as assistant to Albert Lewin, a Hollywood writer, producer, and director, who helped create such seductive and decadent movies as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). He always depended on unliterary day-jobs for his money and wrote in the evenings:

After I had worked all day at what I earn my living,
I was tired. Now my work has lost another day
I thought, but began slowly,
and slowly my strength came back to me.
Surely the tide comes in twice a day. (*)

But nonetheless, Reznikoff produced a large number of books of his poetry, self-published or from little publishers such as the Objectivist Press which he ran with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Offen, and others. He became closely linked with the Objectivists, who also included George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, the British Basil Bunting, and the legendary William Carlos Williams. They rejected sentiment, subjectivity, and vagueness of language (but were unrelated to the objectivism of Ayn Rand).

Williams wrote of the necessity of "ridding the field of verbiage": giving poetry a new form suited to its present role. He wrote: "the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. [...] This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse." (quoted by Peter Jones in Poetry Magazine). Zukofsky ranged from short poems to epics, from the four-word The:

The
The
desire
of
towing.

which appealed to boat-obsessed Scottish artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, (Jacket Magazine) all the way to his epic daybook entitled A.

In the 1940s and 50s, Reznikoff's published output declined as he concentrated on other tasks, but he was never idle. All of Reznikoff's interests - poetry, law, history, journalism - were combined in his book Testimony, which he had worked on for decades. Finally published in 1965, it turned old court reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries into verse. This:

"It's a lie!" she cried. He struck her in the face with his newspaper, and
then with his straw hat;
and she struck back with a fish she had just bought
and then with the pocketbook she still held in her hand.
The steel clasp scratched his face and it began to bleed.
As she left the store,
he shouted after her that she should not come back
and his house was closed to her forever!
He went upstairs to the rooms where they lived
and gathered up all her clothing he could find
and cut and slashed it with knife and scissors.

came from this:

The complainant denied the charge, and charged her husband with lying. He struck her in the face with his straw hat and with a newspaper. She struck him, first with a fish which she had just been buying for breakfast, and then with a pocketbook which she held in her hand, and whose steel clasp scratched his face and drew blood. The parties were separated. The complainant left the house, and defendant shouted after her, and sent word to her by his son that she could not come back again. She went to her father's house. Three days afterwards the husband said to the son, who was working for him in his store, that he must decide whether he would go with his mother or stay with him. The son decided to go with the mother, and left. The husband then sent word to the wife to take away her clothing, but, before delivering it to her, mutilated each piece of it thoroughly with a knife or scissors, or other sharp instrument, so that a large number of costly female garments of all kinds were utterly destroyed, and in that condition sent to the wife. (Streitwolf v. Streitwolf, 47 A. 14, 18 (N.J. Ch. 1900).)

(Example from Benjamin Watson, Legal Studies Forum, Volume 29, No. 1 (2005)). Reznikoff set out his principles and working methods in the following brief statement (Watson again):

The Method of Revision
1. Write all seemingly good lines
2. Examine every word to remove all possible latinisms and unnecessary words
3. Examine the meaning of the sentences in their order
4. Examine the rhythm of the lines
5. Examine the rhythm of the whole
6. Then revision by contemplation

The follow-up to Testimony was Holocaust, with texts taken from the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and from the Eichmann trial. You can listen to him reading from it at Penn Sound, a project of the University of Pennsylvania. Being taken from court testimony, not legal judgments, the poems present the evidence not the verdicts; facts, not commentary.

Once the commander of a camp had eight of the strongest among
the Jews
placed in a large barrel of water,
saying that they did not look clean,
and they had to stand in this barrel naked for twenty-four hours.
In the morning, other Jews had to cut away the ice:
the men were frozen to death.
In this camp - and in others also -
they had an orchestra of Jews
who had to play every morning and evening
and whenever Jews were taken to be shot.
In one such camp,
the orchestra had all of sixty men. (*)

Reznikoff died in 1976, a year after Holocaust was published. Despite mixed reviews for it, his popularity was on the rise, with the support of the prestigious Black Sparrow Press. His voice remains on filmmaker Abraham Ravett's recordings, reading other people's words.

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Many of the great modernist poets, from TS Eliot to William Carlos Williams, made use of quotes and samples in their writing. Eliot's The Waste Land included footnotes by the author explaining how "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" was from Dante's Inferno and "Why then Ile fit you" and "Hieronymo's mad again" from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Williams incorporated personal correspondence (including mail from Allen Ginsberg) and other prose in his epic poem Paterson.

More recent poets like Charles Bernstein (one of the pioneers of language poetry) have made equally creative use of found texts, seeking to question the idea of poetry as communication of meaning by pointing up the reuse and repetition of its linguistic building blocks. In the 1960s, Ronald Gross attempted to copy pop art with his pop poetry, taking text from advertisements and commercial writing:

An optional feature
designed to make
the Visible Woman
even more useful
as an educational toy
is the Miracle of Creation.
Understanding female biology
requires observation
of those parts
relating to gestation.

began his "The Miracle of Creation", text taken from a toy catalogue that seems strange and suggestive when removed from its colourful illustrations and given the full concentration of the poet or reader. Presumably, the text is describing the Visible Woman, an educational anatomical model (of the sort Damian Hirst later reproduced - BBC), and its optional add-on the Miracle of Creation.

Gross's writing, like Reznikoff's, is part of the genre of found poetry, where a writer (or collector) comes across a few sentences and decide it should be poetry; it has a long history. In 1936 Yeats edited the Oxford Book of English Verse and included a section of Walter Pater's prose description of the Mona Lisa broken up into separate lines (New Criterion).

More recently, Hart Seely collected the poetry of George W Bush's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (Slate). From a 2001 defence briefing comes this, which Seely entitled "Glass Box":

You know, it's the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—

Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

In 2009, former British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion was criticised from some quarters (see the Telegraph) for his poem An Equal Voice, made up of the testimonies of British soldiers. For this poem, he minimised signs of his intervention by choosing a regular line length:

War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.
Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust
reports, blueprints one day and the next –
with the help of a broken-down motor car
and a few gallons of petrol – marching men
with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,
horses straining and plunging at the guns,
little clay-pits opening beneath each step,
and piles of bloody clothes and leggings
outside the canvas door of a field hospital.

It looks like a column of text; like prose.