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by Brad Haas
GEORGE OPPEN
New Collected Poems
Edited by Michael Davidson
New Directions, 2002
George Oppen is one of the great poets of the 20th century,
whose influence is far reaching among practicing poets of the avant garde.
He is a model for melding stylistics with a moral imperative, that imperative
being the sincere observation of the objects surrounding us. As his
most famous sequence begins:
There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’. (163) 1
If we recognize Oppen’s poems as ‘things’ in their
own right, to see them is to know ourselves better. The appearance
of New Collected Poems, then, is an occasion of extreme importance
as well as a cause for celebration.2
New Directions
also published the previous edition of Oppen’s Collected Poems,
which appeared in 1975.3 That volume
had been standard issue for many years, having gone into multiple printings,
but it became apparent that it was horribly out of date, and that Oppen’s
work deserved better treatment. CP did not contain Primitive,
Oppen’s last collection, which was published by Black Sparrow in 1978.
There was also the problem of the setting of Oppen’s first book, Discrete
Series (1934), which was not set one poem to a page as in the original
Objectivist Press edition. Having several poems on one page caused
problems for readers, as not all the poems had proper titles; how was one
to tell where a poem ended and where another one began? This was
a practical, let alone aesthetic, flaw.
NCP makes amends.
It returns Discrete Series near to its original glory. The
poems are printed one poem to a page, but the page size is quite large,
and the poems are pushed to the left margins, so they are perhaps somewhat
dwarfed compared to the treatment they received in the Objectivist Press
edition (a smaller book with larger and bolder type).4
Still, this is a vast improvement. NCP also collects all of Oppen’s
books through Primitive, with the exception of the small private
press book Alpine, which was not ‘included as a separate book, since
most of its poems appear in other forms among Oppen’s later poems.’ (xxxvii)
While this reasoning is understandable, it does not seem to coincide with
some of the other editorial decisions Davidson has made.5
Aside from
gathering Oppen’s work, the book feels very different from the old CP in
that it has introductory critical apparatus. I can remember
purchasing my copy of the CP in the University district of Seattle.
While waiting for a friend to pick me up, I sat in a café and read
about a quarter of the book, with nothing but the short dedication to set
me on my way: ‘For Mary / whose words in this book are entangled / inextricably
among my own’. That was a primary, although ignorant, experience
with the poetry, but it was enough to make me want to investigate further.
The consequence of NCP will be to rob the reader of that primary (dare
we say ‘primitive’?) exposure to Oppen’s unique work. Michael Davidson
has provided an introduction that places Oppen in context, poetically and
culturally. There is an outline of his life and his publishing, as
well as an explanation of his writing techniques, and a note on the text.
In addition to this, Davidson has provided end notes which introduce each
volume collected in the book, as well as keys to the major references and
appearances of the poems. These accouterments are handy indeed.
While readers might robbed of the feeling of trailblazing into foreign
territory, they are possibly won over instead of deterred by dense forests
and thickets. The fact is, a basic poetry class teaches you how to
read a sonnet, but if you try to read Oppen with those rules, his work
won’t make sense. By including the introductory material and notes,
Davidson elevates the entry level; it should allow a much wider audience
to appreciate what Oppen accomplished. He was, after all, not an
elitist; he never intended his poems to impede understanding, but to create
it.
Both the preface
by Eliot Weinberger and the introduction by Davidson stress how Oppen is
different from his predecessors. The early critics writing of the
modernist epoch tended to see the Objectivists as mere late and relatively
unimportant followers of Pound. The subsequent history of poetry
has shown otherwise. Davidson describes how Oppen deviated from what
the High Modernists practiced in at least three important ways. At
first the Objectivists were seen as a second generation Imagism, but as
Davidson writes:
Oppen was impatient with what he perceived as a gap between
Imagist theory and the material world it proposed to present. “The
weakness of Imagism,” Oppen writes in a note, “[is that] a man writes of
the moon rising over a pier who knows nothing about piers and is disregarding
all that he knows about the moon.” This was his complaint about Pound
in general, a poet Oppen much admired, but whose knowledge of history,
he felt, came from books, not from experience. (xxix)
Oppen wanted a more direct poetry that required a
contactual relationship with reality rather than the book learning he perceived
in Pound, which, to Oppen, separated Pound further from the world he was
trying to change:
The experience of the 1930s convinced him that the aesthetic
strategies of his modernist predecessors were no longer adequate to deal
with the social trauma of increased modernization. Yes, poems had
to strive for a level of clarity and objectivity, but not as a way of escaping
history through mythic universals or distancing personae. Rather,
history had to be recreated within the poem, subjected to a language free
from instrumental uses – a language “Geared in the loose mechanics of the
world…” (xv)
Oppen, as well as his fellow Objectivists, needed
to develop new aesthetic strategies that would allow them to ‘deal with
the social trauma of increased modernization,’ yet in a way that did not
stray into ‘mythic universals or distancing personae’ utilized by Pound,
Eliot, Yeats and Joyce. Even tho the era of meta-systems had not
been played out, and would not for some time, Oppen took as his lesson
from the High Modernists what not to do:
For Pound and Eliot, the problem of value in a world of
fact was solved by containing quotidian reality in repetition, amassing
cultural fragments toward an eternal dynastic edifice. Oppen chose
to solve the problem not by adding more fragments to an already debased
architecture but by refusing to build altogether – or at least by paying
more attention to its building materials. We may see his gesture
both as a refusal to speak in the face of political pressure, whether from
the Stalinist censors or McCarthy’s investigative committee, and as a refusal
of the metaphysical lure of totality. (xxx)
The introductory material laudably shows that Oppen
was able to springboard from the innovations of Pound and Eliot, but also
was able to use their innovations to avoid what he perceived to be their
pitfalls. In doing so, Oppen is regarded as an innovator in his own
right. It should be cautioned, however, that exposing this fact is
not license to eradicate the importance and influence of the High Modernists
on 20th century avant garde poetry as a whole.
Criticism has
moved far along in its appraisal of Oppen. Much time has passed since
1934, when Stephen Rose Benét wrote that reading Oppen’s ‘writing
is like listening to a man with a speech impediment.’6
We don’t perceive Oppen and the other Objectivists as lesser versions of
Pound any longer. In some cases it seems to the contrary, as if Pound
and Eliot never existed, and that American avant garde poetry started with
the Objectivists… it is good to see that Davidson makes it clear several
times, while pointing to Oppen’s objections to aspects of Pound’s project,
that Oppen also had a great respect for the elder poet. But it does
surprise me that Weinberger, someone who provided Basil Bunting – one of
Pound’s most faithful proponents – a large amount of space in his wonderful
little magazine Montemora, would write that Oppen’s was ‘a poetry
that might not be for the masses, but one that did not loathe them.’ (vii)
This, at a point where Weinberger is pointing out the rejection of the
previous generation’s politics, seems, perhaps unintentionally, a back-handed
way of saying that the poetry of the High Modernists ‘loathed’ the masses…
It would be a shame if this rehashed the cliché descrying the High
Modernists as ‘elitists.’ Astute poets of the 1920s and 30s could
not possibly be apolitical. While they took decidedly different sides,
the fact is that both extremist positions, the right-wing and the left,
had one common goal in mind: to make the modern condition better.
They disagreed, however, on how to achieve those better conditions.
The High Modernists (exclusive of the Bloomsbury group) did not loathe
the masses, but they did become very frustrated with a populous that seemed
intent on staying ignorant. Pound’s program was ultimately romantic;
it strove for change, tried to share a vision of a better world, of a paradiso
terrestre… If Pound truly ‘loathed the masses,’ then he would
not have spent the time trying to give them his vision. The plain
fact is: the sincere reader of Oppen (or Zukofsky, Olson, Bunting, etc.)
cannot circumvent Pound (let alone the other modernist giants) no matter
what bias the reader brings to bear on the work. Basil Bunting, in
his poem ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos,’ calls them ‘the Alps’:
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them. 6
It is not my assertion Davidson and Weinberger try
to efface the memory of High Modernism from the annals of literary history.
On the contrary, they for the most part project a fair picture of the influence
of the older generation on Oppen. It seems, however, a propitious
juncture for such a divagation, an opportunity to stem an apparent anti-Modernist
trend in the current poetic climate.
But back to
Oppen: while Pound’s project proved a cautionary tale, it provided a model
of sincere energy and the tools to move forward into the unknown.
As Davidson points out, Oppen decided against writing a program akin to
Pound’s. Instead, he began – intentionally or not – an antithetical
and equally massive project: silence for twenty-five years. When
finally he began to write again, he developed a powerful and personal idiom,
yet one that does not strike the reader as overly sentimental. Instead
we perceive a sincere and intense attention to what is known.
Light grows, place becomes larger or deepens, the familiar
Becomes extreme (331)
And it is through the intense and scrupulous attention
to the known that the unknown begins to become fathomable.
This is where the introduction is pushed to the rear, and necessarily becomes
the backdrop against which the poems can be seen. For at its base,
this is not a book of criticism, but a collection of poems.
In addition
to all the poems from CP and Primitive, NCP also provides a number
of uncollected and unpublished poems, ninety-one poems that will excite
anyone who has read all of Oppen’s poems and wished there were more.
There are. Oppen’s corpus was never large, and much like Basil Bunting’s
Complete
Poems, it was a matter of quality rather than quantity.
Some of the poems in these sections are excellent, standing up with the
best work Oppen chose to include in the CP in 1975. Others are not
so good, and these show that Oppen was able to discriminate, and chose
only work he knew to be good, and which adhered and complimented his corpus
as a whole. Still, there are many poets who wish they
could write poems as good as Oppen’s ‘seconds.’
As a teaser,
I have chosen two uncollected poems in their entirety that I feel show
distinct modes in Oppen’s work. The first, a profound little nugget
at once introspective and depersonalized, is worthy of Borges:
[THE OLD MAN]
The old man
In the mirror
Startles
Me
But the young man
In the photograph
Is stranger
Still. (329)
Oppen felt that he had always been old, never young
spirited. This is borne out by his first book of poems, Discrete
Series, which emerged from the poetic womb fully realized. At
the start of ‘The Old Man,’ he seems surprised that old age has caught
up with him, but by the end, the ‘young man / In the photograph / Is stranger
/ Still.’ It seems that he could never, either when he was younger,
or now that he is older, understand the idea of ‘youngness,’ so that the
‘young man’ in the photograph is still a mystery, still elusive, still
a stranger to him. And thus, seeing that photograph of himself, and
seeing his youthful self as an unknown, is, of course, strange to him.
It is understandable that Oppen did not collect this poem, for it is difficult
to suggest a place for it among his books; yet as a stand-alone poem, and
one that gives insight to Oppen himself, it is very good. It is an
example of a poem that is both personal, verging on the solipsistic, yet
remaining an effective piece of verse.
The second
poem is equally personal, but has a much wider application. ‘Any
Way But Back,’ was written between 1972 and 1975. In his note on
the poem, Davidson writes: ‘A shorter version, included in a letter to
an unknown recipient, includes the comment: “I wrote this poem (tentatively)
as poem to close the new book..”’ The book, as Davidson points out,
was apparently Myth of the Blaze, the section of new poems included
in the CP, and in that case, this would have been the poem to close both
the section and his CP as a whole. The poem shows Oppen working with
his own history, noticing what he has in his ‘back yard.’ It tells
of a journey the Oppen family made from the east to live in California,
when George was very young. That journey, it seems to me, is made
in several ways: it is the journey to California, to a new life.
In looking on this from the present, it is also a recognition of the journey
Oppen has made in his life and writings: the journey from the affluence
of his youth, to the the modest lifestyle he chose instead out of conscience;
the journey from old ways of making poetry to a new sensibility – and in
this sense it is also the journey of his work, this reminiscence showing
a young Oppen with a desire to write, but not knowing ‘whom to write to.’
These things, in retrospect, have worked out. Much of what was unknown
at the beginning – including ‘whom to write to’ – is now known. Even
this poem, left aside when Oppen collected his work in 1975, now seems
an appropriate accounting of his linear journey, from beginning to end,
East to West as the track of the sun, always forward:
ANY WAY BUT BACK
I have a superstition of destiny. Those poets who have
lacked that superstition have died young
A superstition concerning families
Which is to say the future
Issuing from a dining room
And the old fashioned bulk
Of a family home.
Well, a madman.
Scenes
Still lucid
A child carried by the trains of nineteen-eighteen
From New York to California
Three thousand miles
Of rails
A journey, day’s act
Redeemed ‘outside all systems
Of redemption’
Its meaning formed in the veins
Of sympathy across the fields
To the gullies and the fences in the fields
And along the public aisles
In the train to the hushed doors
Of the diner
And the waiters
The men in the club car
Wild noise and grit
On the observation porch
And I did not know, when I was a child, whom to write to –
Handymen, servants, the primitive dead –
The book is my own. And, in a way, a deliberate surrender –
Those poems, the superstitious poems
To write the words down (342)
______________________________
Notes:
1. All page numbers cited in text
refer to pages in New Collected Poems by George Oppen. New
Directions, 2002.
2. From here on abbreviated as NCP.
3. From here on abbreviated as CP.
4. The rare Objectivist Press edition
of Discrete Series is virtually unobtainable for the general reader.
There was a new edition in 1966, however, produced by Mother /Asphodel
in a very interesting format. It is in black printed mustard colored
wrappers with nice quality laid vellum paper, printed in dark blue/violet
ink. The type is bold and the poems sit very well on the page.
This is the best setting of the poems outside of the first edition – a
very attractive little book. While copies can be found occasionally
on the secondhand market at reasonable prices, it does omit the Preface
by Ezra Pound which is included in NCP.
5. For a fuller discussion of this
issue, see my article ‘The Textual Dilemma of Oppen’s Alpine,’ also in
this issue of FlashPoint.
6. Review cited in George Oppen:
Man and Poet. National Poetry Foundation, 1981, p. 464.
7. Basil Bunting. Complete
Poems. Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 114.
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