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Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds

Oren Izenberg

in Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 ... More

This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 publication of his Discrete Series, Oppen stopped writing poems and lived, starting in 1950, as a “known subversive” in Mexico. He would resurface in 1962 with the publication of The Materials. Focusing on the figure of Robinson Crusoe, this chapter offers an account of Oppen's poetic knowledge in relation to aesthetics and to the idea of a poetic politics. It also considers Oppen's reconceptualization of what it means “to know” and its relevance to the question of social recognition. It suggests that Oppen's return to poetry was contingent upon his conceptualization of the rigorous charity of his silence and his discovery of a way to make such silence audible.Less

Defying Social Science: George Oppen and Amiri Baraka

Peter Middleton

in Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After

Annual special issues of Scientific American enabled the public to learn about a scientific topic and sometimes to see that scientific knowledge was provisional, the subject of dispute within the ... More

Annual special issues of Scientific American enabled the public to learn about a scientific topic and sometimes to see that scientific knowledge was provisional, the subject of dispute within the profession itself. Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island responds to the divisions about nuclear energy revealed in two special issues on energy and ecology. The chapter offers a detailed close reading of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” in the context of a special issue of Scientific American on the city. Whether or not Oppen read the magazine, he responded to current debates among social scientists about how to solve the problems of the metropolis, especially their use of the calculative rationality that Heidegger deplored. In one article, Kevin Lynch claims that the city is a work of art. Oppen’s poem disagrees, and the chapter shows just how extensively he works to challenge the aesthetic vision of the city as art. The final section of the chapter places Amiri Baraka’s poem “Ka ‘Ba” in the context of the mostly liberal discussions of race science in Scientific American, and also discusses the wider debates about the persistence of eugenicist racial science in other scientific journals.Less

Poems, Poetry, Personhood

Oren Izenberg

in Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous ... More

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.Less

Materials

Peter Nicholls

in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

This chapter affirms that George Oppen's last few years in Mexico were difficult ones and his return to poetry is simply not attributed to the ‘rust and copper dream’, which in its partly humorous ... More

This chapter affirms that George Oppen's last few years in Mexico were difficult ones and his return to poetry is simply not attributed to the ‘rust and copper dream’, which in its partly humorous retellings never quite conveys the sudden focusing of his energies. It is also clear that Oppen's reading during the Mexico years had an important part to play in his return to writing, indicating that philosophical works came high on his agenda. This chapter also considers that Oppen's collection of poems in ‘The Materials’ discern traces of his engagement with Jacques Maritain's aesthetics, which finds ‘ontological simplicity’ of a very different kind from that evoked in ‘Creative Intuition’.Less

‘A metaphysical edge’: Seascape: Needle’s Eye

Peter Nicholls

in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

This chapter explains that after George Oppen Settled in San Francisco, he was fascinated anew by the city of his adolescence and especially by an acute sense of being at the edge of the continent. ... More

This chapter explains that after George Oppen Settled in San Francisco, he was fascinated anew by the city of his adolescence and especially by an acute sense of being at the edge of the continent. The move beyond the busy life of New York City was also a move toward new preoccupations. The tension he had previously explored between singularity and numerousness, a pre-eminently social tension, was projected into a new set of relations for which the ‘bare edge of the continent and simply space beyond’ became a powerful figure for the poem. This chapter also deliberates that Oppen found San Francisco to offer intimations of ‘a metaphysical edge’ which was, literally, the horizon, the bounding line between the sea and sky, the unlimited space. This inspiration became a key motif to his new collection of poems.Less

Beginning Again

Peter Nicholls

in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

This chapter reiterates that in 1960, George Oppen and his wife Mary settled in New York City after a period of nine years of political exile in Mexico. Oppen was the author of a slim volume of poems ... More

This chapter reiterates that in 1960, George Oppen and his wife Mary settled in New York City after a period of nine years of political exile in Mexico. Oppen was the author of a slim volume of poems entitled ‘Discrete Series’, with a then highly desirable preface by Ezra Pound. Only a few of Oppen's contemporaries would remember him as a poet, a consequence of what he would term in a later interview ‘my rejection of poetry for 20 or 25 years’. This chapter also emphasizes that his ‘silence’, lasting almost a quarter of a century, poses some difficult questions. For example, no one knows almost anything about his reading and intellectual interests during this period, the long abandonment of poetry coinciding with an almost complete lack of any other written materials, of notes or correspondence.Less

The Oxford English Dictionary and George Oppen’s Discrete Series

Craig Dworkin

in Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

Chapter 3 focuses on George Oppen’s first two books, the lost 21 Poem (discovered in 2017) and Discrete Series (published in 1934). Considered by critics to be inscrutably gnomic, unrelated, and ... More

Chapter 3 focuses on George Oppen’s first two books, the lost 21 Poem (discovered in 2017) and Discrete Series (published in 1934). Considered by critics to be inscrutably gnomic, unrelated, and discontinuous (indeed, “discrete”) a reconstruction of Oppen’s source text—the Oxford English Dictionary, which had been completed to much celebration in 1928 just as Oppen was writing his poems—reveals his exhaustive inclusion of even the specialist definitions of certain key words. In addition to establishing continuities among the putatively discrete poems, the chapter offers fresh historical readings of modern mechanism (automobiles and elevators) that populate his poems and that served in turn, for William Carlos Williams, as the figure for the poems’ own lexical machinations. Furthermore, the logic of the signifier that structures the dictionary reveals an unexpected self-portraiture at work, across Oppen’s œuvre, in certain figures of glass enclosures and windows.Less

From Avant-Garde to Hegel

Peter Nicholls

in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

This chapter states that George Oppen finished ‘Of Being Numerous’ early in 1966 and in mid-February of the following year the he and his wife moved to San Francisco, a relocation which would have a ... More

This chapter states that George Oppen finished ‘Of Being Numerous’ early in 1966 and in mid-February of the following year the he and his wife moved to San Francisco, a relocation which would have a significant impact on the form and content of the poetry of his later years. The new volume appeared at the end of March 1968 and Oppen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in May of the following year. He was now 60 years old and a poet with a secure reputation, but none of this curbed his desire to reckon with the new youth culture around him. This chapter also confirms that while distaste for contemporary avant-gardism had made itself felt in ‘Of Being Numerous’, another event earlier in 1969 had incited Oppen to think through issues involved.Less

‘Out of the Whirl Wind’: Myth of the Blaze and Primitive

Peter Nicholls

in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

This chapter explains that the collection of poems written between 1972 and 1975 that George Oppen called ‘Myth of the Blaze’ was never published as a separate volume and first appeared as a sequence ... More

This chapter explains that the collection of poems written between 1972 and 1975 that George Oppen called ‘Myth of the Blaze’ was never published as a separate volume and first appeared as a sequence in the 1975 ‘Collected Poems’. One remarkable long poem from the collection, ‘The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem in Praise of the Paths of the Living’, puts into play most of the principal themes of Oppen's late work. In doing so, it also develops the network of ideas provisionally assembled in ‘The Romantic Virtue’, pitting an impoverished language against the theatric vision of traditionalism and locating a certain promise of survival in the image and its account of actuality. This chapter also confirms that Oppen's long poem is dedicated to Mickey Schwerner who was one of three Civil Rights workers killed by Klan members in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964.Less

A Dream We Dreamed Each Separately

Peter Campion

in Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry

This chapter considers four Modernist poets (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, and George Oppen), with particular attention paid to their adaptation and combination of lyric and ... More

This chapter considers four Modernist poets (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, and George Oppen), with particular attention paid to their adaptation and combination of lyric and epic, and in light of Hannah Arendt's writing on poetry and history.Less

Introduction

Peter Nicholls

in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

This introduction provides a brief summary of the life of George Oppen, who acquired perfect modernist credentials at the very beginning of his career. At age 25, George Oppen was a prime mover in a ... More

This introduction provides a brief summary of the life of George Oppen, who acquired perfect modernist credentials at the very beginning of his career. At age 25, George Oppen was a prime mover in a publishing venture that issued works by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky, and his own first book of poems, ‘Discrete Series’. This introduction further explains that there were many kinds of beginnings in Oppen's career. In his writings, published and unpublished, Oppen rarely situates concerns in relation to particular modernist poets and poems, but at the same time it is a modernism broadly conceived that provides him with a constant instigation to begin again.Less

Poetry and Prayer

Jahan Ramazani

in Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres

Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and ... More

Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.Less

Song and Story

James Longenbach

in The Resistance to Poetry

This chapter begins with looking at the poems by Charles Bernstein called “Poem” and “Johnny Cake Hollow” to illustrate how a poem that stakes its claim exclusively on sound will only travel so far ... More

This chapter begins with looking at the poems by Charles Bernstein called “Poem” and “Johnny Cake Hollow” to illustrate how a poem that stakes its claim exclusively on sound will only travel so far as a poem of what and why. It then considers George Oppen's “Debt,” and argues that the Objectivist movement in poetry was not about focusing language on objects but about the achievement of form. Oppen was one of the twentieth century's most dazzling makers of lines. Reading him, it is impossible not to be aware of how, in the strategic absence of meter and rhyme, line becomes the crucial means by which a poet controls stress, intonation, and speed.Less

The Future of Us

Bonnie Costello

in The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others

This chapter argues that recent poetry is catching up with both Auden and Oppen after a long silencing of the civil tongue. American poets are reclaiming a civic voice for their twenty-first-century ... More

This chapter argues that recent poetry is catching up with both Auden and Oppen after a long silencing of the civil tongue. American poets are reclaiming a civic voice for their twenty-first-century art and experimenting with old and new ways of saying “we” inclusively. Many contemporary poets want to acknowledge and arouse a feeling not only for the universal or “the common” but for “everybody” in a compressed world, and not just as subject matter but as a physical, economic, social, historical, and political presence. They want urgently to address human disparities, injustices, displacements, indifferences, etc. that have arisen in a hierarchical, corporate, remotely connected but socially divided, and global reality. They seek to reorient us to this urgent social condition at the very level of language, often wrenching us out of the habitual “I” position into more collective orientations.Less

‘Just Rehashed Surrealism’? The Writing of Barrett Watten

in Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal

This chapter examines the works of American poet Barrett Watten in relation to surrealism. It discusses Watten's early account of surrealism as a defence of the self and suggests that his serial poem ... More

This chapter examines the works of American poet Barrett Watten in relation to surrealism. It discusses Watten's early account of surrealism as a defence of the self and suggests that his serial poem Complete Thought indicates the presence of the Surreal-O-bjectivist nexus. This chapter also compares surrealist poetics with Watten's commitment to the integrity of his ‘materials’ and offers a reading of George Oppen's poetry collection The Materials.Less

‘Energy is Eternal Delight’: Blake and Ecopoetic Action

Linda Freedman

in William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Gary Snyder’s ecopoetical reading of Blake married Blake’s energetic principle with anarchist politics and a deep appreciation of Zen Buddhism and contrasted it with the deadening impact of fossil ... More

Gary Snyder’s ecopoetical reading of Blake married Blake’s energetic principle with anarchist politics and a deep appreciation of Zen Buddhism and contrasted it with the deadening impact of fossil fuel technology on the earth. Michael McClure equated Blakean delight with animality and biological unpredictability which he used to oppose the uncompromising rigidity of political ideology and systemic control. Latent in the history of the earth, animal sensuality, and continually shifting systems of biological reorganization, McClure and Snyder perceived Blakean delight as the energetic lifeblood of the world. The outrage to Blake’s thinking is not as strong as first appears. Blake opposed the idea that you could learn anything from the natural world but he enjoined his readers to marry vision with action. Juxtaposing Snyder and McClure with George Oppen shows how broadly Blake inspired poets who wanted to fight the real and pressing problems of their day.Less

The Other Hand

James Longenbach

in The Resistance to Poetry

This chapter explores the meaning of “or” in poetry. In Latin, which had several different words for “or,” the word aut was used to express an ultimatum: either X or Y. The words sive or vel were ... More

This chapter explores the meaning of “or” in poetry. In Latin, which had several different words for “or,” the word aut was used to express an ultimatum: either X or Y. The words sive or vel were used to express a more equivocal set of alternatives: either X or Y but possibly both. George Oppen specialized in the latter kind of “or,”—an “or” that presents a choice without necessarily forcing us to make it, an “or” that leaves us suspended between alternatives whose juxtaposition seems neither dismissible nor completely satisfactory. Hamlet's “or” makes distinctions only to make the choices between alternatives seem simultaneously more urgent and more difficult to make. The sound of this kind of “or” is the sound of thinking in poetry—not the sound of finished thought but the sound of a mind alive in the syntactical process of discovering what it might be thinking.Less

Three Short Epilogues

Steve Mentz

in Shipwreck Modernity: "Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719"

The first epilogue considers a resonant phrase, “the bright light of shipwreck,” from George Oppen’s 1967 poem, “Of Being Numerous.” The second dives down after The Bookfish, a seventeenth-century ... More

The first epilogue considers a resonant phrase, “the bright light of shipwreck,” from George Oppen’s 1967 poem, “Of Being Numerous.” The second dives down after The Bookfish, a seventeenth-century illustration of a North Sea codfish with a tiny book in its belly, published and perhaps caught near Cambridge. The final epilogue, “Seven Shipwrecked Ecological Truths,” suggests directions for future inquiry and scholarship.Less