George Oppen 1908-1983

George Oppen was poorly served by early collected and selected editions of his poetry. I could never get a toe-hold on his work through those publications. But the 2002 New Directions edition, The New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson, changed all that. Here were all the poems published as he had originally published them, with variants and unpublished work, an introduction and useful footnotes. It is a book that can easily and pleasurably read in its entirety, which I did.

Oppen was part of a small group of second generation modernists known as the Objectivists, after a 1931 issue of Poetry Magazine devoted to their work. The others were Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff and Basil Bunting. Ezra Pound was the connection between these poets and Zukofsky wrote essays defining Objectivism, though the term itself (like all such labels) was disputed from the start. The Wikipedia article on Objectivist Poets states: “the elements of this approach included: a respect for Imagist achievement in the areas of verse libre and highly concentrated language and imagery; a rejection of the Imagists interest in classicism and mythology” Carl Rakosi is quoted as saying that if Reznikoff was an Objectivist then Zukofsky isn’t and never was an Objectivist. Niedecker was a latecomer, though her poetry more than anyone else’s exemplified the Objectivist aesthetic. Zukofsky and Oppen were life long friends. Both men were Marxists.

Oppen was active as a writer and publisher in the early thirties but he soon abandoned poetry altogether for political reasons and joined the Communist Party. He worked in the defense industry and was drafted in 1943, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He was overrun in battle and had to hide out in a foxhole with a couple of buddies who were killed, and he himself was seriously injured. 30 years later he would still write about the incident (Some San Francisco Poems, in Seascape: Needle’s Eye, 1972):

 It is impossible the world should be either good or bad
If its colors are beautiful or if they are not beautiful
If parts of it taste good or if no parts of it taste good
It is as remarkable in one case as the other

                                                                        As against this

 We have suffered fear, we know something of fear
And of humiliation mounting to horror

This world above the edge of the foxhole belongs to the
            Flying bullets, leaden superbeings
For the men groveling in the foxhole danger, danger in
            Being drawn to them

These little dumps
The poem is about them

Our hearts are twisted
In dead men’s pride 

Dead men crowd us
Lean over us

In the emplacements

The skull spins
Empty of subject

The hollow ego

 Flinching from the war’s huge air

 Tho we are delivery boys and bartenders

 We will choke on each other

 Minds may crack

 But not for what is discovered

 Unless that everyone knew
And kept silent

Our minds are split
To seek the danger out

From among the miserable soldiers

And from the same volume, from Of Hours:

No man
But the fragments of metal
Tho there were men there were men                        Fought
No man but the fragments of metal
Burying my dogtag with H
For Hebrew in the rubble of Alsace

 Or, from the poem and book Of Being Numerous (1968)

I cannot even now
Altogether disengage myself
From those men

With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,
In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies
Of blasted roads in a ruined country,

Among them many men
More capable than I—

Muykut and a sergeant
Named Healy,
That lieutenant also—

How forget that?” How talk
Distantly of ‘The People’

Who are that force
Within the walls

Of cities 

Wherein their cars

Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak.

In the fifties he and his wife fled to Mexico because of the anti-communist witch hunt then in progress. In 1958 he began writing again: “…spurred on by a vivid dream in which he finds himself looking into his father’s files and discovers one labeled, ‘How to prevent Rust in Copper.’ He awoke laughing, knowing full well that copper does not rust. Upon hearing this dream later, his therapist reportedly said, ‘You were dreaming that you’re going to rust.’ And Oppen reflected, said ‘thanks’ and ‘went home and bought a ream of paper, and started to write’” (Collected Poems, Introduction, p.xxi, DAVIDSON) (Karl Rakosi also abandoned writing in the thirties, though not for political reasons. He became a social worker. One day he was contacted by a graduate student who had discovered his Objectivist writings in England and wanted to know what kind of work he was doing. Rakosi writes of trembling in his driveway as he read the letter. He, like Oppen, began to write again, and lived to the age of 99, no longer an obscure poet.)

Oppen was championed by the next generation of Modernists who rejected Eliot and embraced Pound, Williams and Zukofsky (whose poem A was setting a new standard for obscurity and pointlessness). Oppen and Zukofsky were good friends but apparently Oppen felt that Zukofsky was intentionally obscure and had contempt for the reader. Oppen’s poetry is also difficult but he adheres to the Objectivist label in that his poetry, cryptic and partial as it is, refers to the real sensible things of this world and locates in art the particularity of human experience that politics can never really engage. I love that it was a dream that called him back from building furniture. His poems are not by any means apolitical; but they are specific, personal and rooted in aesthetic principles. Zukofsky is also rooted in aesthetic principles but his poems are abstract, solipsistic and consist of the kind of language games Joyce so enjoyed, only without his scope, humanity or humour.

Oppen wrote a review for Poetry Magazine in 1962 of Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Charles Olson’s Maximus from Dogtown. In the fifties Olson and Creeley were the Pound and Eliot (by conscious design) of the post war avant-garde. I can’t imagine two poets less alike, but their alliance was a fertile and enduring one and makes them the Batman and Robin of the avant-garde. Oppen was a gracious man and Olson was at the height of his influence at the time. Here are some excerpts of the review (POETRY, Vol. 100, Apr.-Sept., 1962, pp. 330-332) of Olson:

….But, granted once and for all that Olson is worth reading if anyone at all is worth reading, the problem remains for the reviewer and for any reader that it is impossible to confront Olson’s poems without first of all acknowledging the audible presence of Pound in them. Not that Olson has not openly and handsomely acknowledged the debt to Pound in the text of the poems, but if we look to poetry as a skill by which we can grasp the form of a perception achieved, then nothing can so deaden the impact of poetic discourse as to be uncertain which of two men is speaking, to half-hear other words paralleling the words we read. It was hardly necessary to visit Mexico to write:

And so she sprinkled water on the head of the child, crying
“Ciao-coatl! Ciao-coatl!”
with her face to the west

The link between Rapallo and the Valley of Mexico lays waste a lot of country between. And in such passages as this:

The death in life (death itself)
is endless, eternity
is the false cause

The knot is other wise, each topographical corner
presents itself, and no sword
cuts it, each knot itself is its fire

etc.—it goes on for several lines of rather painstaking analogy—the verse itself seems to be doing nothing. The point to be made is not that such lines as these last are characteristic of Olson—they are not—but to refer again to this poet’s surprising susceptibility to influence (the echo of Rilke is unmistakable in context)

 [….]the fact must remain that to encounter Olson’s work, in spite of the currency of the phrase, is simply not an encounter with a new poetry. The question finally becomes not only how new is the voice, but how fresh therefore is the vision, and with it the materials of which the poetry makes use or which it has available to it.

I have, of course, left out his praise for other of Olson’s work which seems faint indeed alongside the general, devastating and true indictment of the quoted words. These words are also a reminder that while Oppen may be a hero of the post modern avant-garde, he shares little with them besides their politics, and even that was tempered by experience.

Ford Maddox Ford in The March of Literature constructs two lists, one of writers who have read, and one of writers who have lived. (He acknowledges some did both). Oppen is a writer who has lived. He was one of many middle aged men who put their hatred of fascism on the line and went to fight in Europe. (Samuel Fuller comes to mind). He traveled and worked for a living, followed his beliefs where they took him and in the end returned to poetry. He died of Alzheimer’s disease.

I will end this post with poem 29 of Of being Numerous and the admonition (echoing Pound’s remembrance of T.S. Eliot) that you READ him:

My daughter, my daughter, what can I say
Of living?

I cannot judge it.

We seem caught
In reality together my lovely
Daughter

I have a daughter
But no child

And it was not precisely
Happiness we promised
Ourselves;

We say happiness, happiness and are not
Satisfied.

 Tho the house on the low land
Of the city

Catches the dawn light

I can tell myself, and I tell myself
Only what we all believe
True

And in the sudden vacuum
Of time…

…is it not
In fear the roots grip

Downward
And beget

The baffling hierarchies
Of father and child

As of leaves on their high
Thin twigs to shield us

From time, from open
Time