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Michael Davidson (ed),with a preface by Eliot Weinberger, Carcanet, £14.95, ISBN 1857546318

As the New Collected Poems makes clear, George Oppen was a political poet for whom the integration of political and poetic activity was deeply suspect. In a 1963 interview he declared that “the poet, speaking as a poet, declares his political non-availability”; and indeed for twenty-five years he had made himself poetically unavailable for the sake of politics. Returning to poetry in 1959, he wrote that “Maybe I admire myself more however for . . . simply not attempting to write communist verse. That is, to any statement already determined before the verse. Poetry has to be protean; the meaning must begin there. With the perception”. This immediacy, poetry’s protean response to perceptions derived not from ideology or programme but from experience, became axiomatic for Oppen.

Working to achieve clarity through unmediated perception, Oppen’s
poetry was alert to the autonomy of objects, their “discreteness”. It also recognised that they come to being in relation to each other – that they “explain each other” – by their relatedness. Oppen believed that the poem should work to replicate the thing-ness of the material world, “the pure joy / Of the mineral fact”.

For Oppen, human individuals also shine in their own autonomy, but
only achieve being through relation to each other and the object world. This combination of autonomy and relatedness informs his love poems, both for his wife Mary and his daughter Linda. But this raises an interesting question. How do such conceptions of autonomy and separateness relate to his own political ideas? How do they relate practically to his work organising collectives in rent strikes or campaigning for the Communist Party?

The notes to his 1968 volume Of Being Numerous describe it as expressing “Oppen’s lifelong concern with unity in diversity, with achieving autonomy while living among others”. In an earlier version of that poem, “A Language of New York”, Oppen describes violence and war as historically inevitable, written into the human ethical constitution. Out of this sense of fatalism, and of the futility of trying to change public discourse, he refuses to argue – since at the “end of an era [. . .] one may honorably keep / His distance / If he can” from the entanglements of political discourse. This refusal to use poetry to campaign for social change seems paradoxical. Certainly, many of the poems have explicitly political content; “Of Being Numerous” describes as “atrocious / Insanity” the expression of a “casual will” in helicopters which drop napalm on Vietnam and concludes “We must cut our throats”. But the objectivist principle of recognising the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the world as it is experienced forecloses more explicit imperatives. It does not allow the poet to demand the rectification of the world’s deficiencies, because it refuses to absent itself from the present by imagining an alternate future. That is the prophet’s role, not the poet’s. No Oppen poem is as demanding as this 1965 letter to his sister June: “I mean of course that 99 percent of the people should agree with me, and then they should act in the most rapid possible way to stop all action in Vietnam pending public discussion”. For Oppen, getting “agreement” was not a task of poetry.

Throughout the New Collected Poems, we see Oppen explaining what the task of poetry is. As often as he lamented the Depression, the Second World War, or Vietnam, he laboured to define poetic method itself. By “poetic method” I mean not only his own craft, but its basis in modes of perception articulated by phenomenology. For Oppen the poet is open to the world through seeing, just as the “little hole in the eye” makes the human body permanently open to the world. In a masterpiece like “Route”, reminiscence of wartime France and excoriations of “our” madmen who “have burned thousands / of men and women alive” are aligned with speculations on truth, perception, and that “limited, limiting clarity” his poetry wants to achieve. For Oppen, the limitations of oppositional politics were apparent in the emptiness of Communist rhetoric, the predatory realism of Stalinist art, and the disintegration of Left resistance to the Vietnam War. But his habit of writing ars poetica complicates his thinking. If art is meant to honour the world, rather than its own representational power, why does his poetry keep reiterating its own principles?

Oppen might have argued that his poetry is an object, not a representation. He frequently corrected a misunderstanding of Zukofsky’s coinage “Objectivist”: the term did not mean “the psychologically objective in attitude” but “the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem.” Objectivist “meant, of course, the poets’ recognition of the necessity of form”. One practical example of this objectification is his manuscripts themselves. Oppen built his poems as palimpsests, pasting layer upon layer of revisions until the paper became thick and rock-like, a three-dimensional object rather than a plane. The New Collected Poems includes a description of this working process, and photographs of the manuscripts now housed at the University of California at San Diego. These reworkings of the poem surface to include all previous versions as weight or thickness reveals the concentration and labour added to the sheet of typescript, as well as the need to create a poetic surface which also contains the depth of all previous endeavour. Just as the earth’s mantle is itself a palimpsest of mineral life and death, so the poetry would be built up with the history of its own engagements and mutations.

Oppen’s own history – and the cultural and political history of the time in which he worked – are well told in Michael Davidson’s introduction and Eliot Weinberger’s memoir. Born in 1908 in New Rochelle, Oppen rejected the “noise of wealth” and his bourgeois heritage as a young man. He and his wife Mary hitchhiked across the US, and in 1928 sailed from the Great Lakes to New York City, where they settled in Brooklyn. Mary Oppen’s interesting autobiography Meaning: A Life makes apparent how completely they shared the risks, adventures and commitments of their itinerant and artistic life.After forming To Publishers, with Louis Zukofsky as editor, they moved to France where they printed the Objectivist Anthology and William Carlos Williams’ Novelette and Other Prose there. The Oppens met with Ezra Pound in Rapallo, Italy and recognised in his anti-Semitic “madness” a new and dangerous current in Europe. They returned hastily to New York in 1933, where they formed a new collective, The Objectivist Press. Charles Reznikoff, whose work Oppen ardently admired, wrote the copy for the dust jackets which described the Objectivists as “an organization of writers who are publishing their own work and that of others whose work they think ought to be read”. Oppen frequently returned to that statement as the real common denominator of Objectivism: ownership of the means of production, independence, and (in that “ought”) prescription.

The Objectivist Press published Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series, in 1934. But Fascism and the Second World War brought his early and influential poetic activity to a halt. A lifelong pacifist, Oppen was drafted to fight in France, where he was nearly killed. Returning to the US, he settled with his family on the West Coast, but in the 1950s – fearing their membership of the Communist Party would lead to prosecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee – he and Mary moved with their daughter to Mexico
City. It was only in 1958 that Oppen began to write again, as the family contemplated returning to the US, which they did finally in 1961. He wrote the following year that “in fact I wrote no poetry for 25 years. Don’t know if I was right. But I was right not to write bad poetry – poetry tied to a moral or a political (same thing) judgment”. His return to poetry with the publication of The Materials in 1962 and This in Which in 1965 was followed by official recognition when Of Being Numerous won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. In 1972 came the fragmented, open forms of Seascape: Needle’s Eye. Primitive, his last book, was published in 1978, three years after he and Mary had travelled to Israel at the invitation of the mayor of Jerusalem. Oppen’s letters often allude to his own Jewish heritage, and his frequent and agitated recollection of the Second World War reflects not only the trauma of warfare but also the horror of the Holocaust; he describes in 1971 “Burying my dogtag with H / For Hebrew in the rubble of Alsace” in fear of being captured by the Germans. However, he found his identity as a “now patriarchal // Jew most strange // to myself”, and often commented on the difference between his poetry and Reznikoff ’s sustained reflections on Judaism. Oppen was also becoming strange to himself in old age. Increasingly affected by Alzheimer’s in the early 1980s, he died in 1983.

Throughout his life, Oppen’s poetry was understood through the tenets of Objectivism. Oppen said that he and Zukofsky shared the belief that poetry was “‘a test of truth’”, or at least “‘a test of sincerity’—that there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction”. That moment of conviction is intense, but not blooded with Platonic fury. For Oppen, the dialectical motion and violence implicit in testing should be finished before the poem begins. But do anger, disturbance, erotic excitement not also produce a believable truth, a meaning?

Oppen once said that “Blake is more important to me than Williams, and several philosophers may be more important to me than Pound”. Those several philosophers include Heidegger, Simone Weil, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard. The complex simplicity of Heidegger’s diction, his meditations on unconcealement or disclosedness of beings as the meaning of truth and the achievement of Dasein, are obvious influences on Oppen’s poetry. In “On the Essence of Truth”, Heidegger describes a form of perceptual engagement very familiar to Oppen’s readers: “To engage oneself with the disclosedness of beings is not to lose oneself in them; rather, such engagement withdraws in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are.” That engagement which also withdraws, allowing beings to disclose themselves in their autonomy, is the aim of much of Oppen’s writing. Engagement is not just a condition of perception, but of being itself. As the poet explains, “There are certain things, appearances, around which the understanding gathers. They hold the meanings which make it possible to live, they are one’s sense of reality and the possibility of meaning. They are there, in the mind, always”.

It might be argued that war was just as influential in Oppen’s objectivist thinking as phenomenology. War is the consummate reality which threatens the “Power and weight / Of the mind which / Is not enough, it is nothing / And does nothing // Against the natural world”. The impotence of the perceiving mind to resist war might be a cause of profound despair. But if a man can avoid despair, then “He sees in the manner of poetry”. “Blood from the Stone” is grim in its literalism about the objectification of the self in war. The body becomes an object, smashed, used, “like a brick”. This estrangement from the perceiving, autonomous, vulnerable ego of peacetime is similar to the estrangement from an emotive self required for objectivist practice. He wrote in 1962 that “There seems to me no problem for an artist more difficult than that of separating the brute ego, the accidents of the ego, from the self which perceives”. This artistic problem in peacetime is in fact a survival mechanism in war. The self must estrange itself from the horror it sees and hears, as “Survival: Infantry” remembers that “We crawled everywhere on the ground without seeing the earth again”. Industrial warfare might also have affected his desire to “capture” words one by one, to prize the individual, articles, pronouns, little names. Oppen rejects the mass production of meaning in the sentence or paragraph in bulks of jargon, just as he rejects a war which eats up human life in bulk. The trauma of human exchangeability leads to an imperative to “somehow see the one thing” in art.

Oppen’s privileging of perception is not, however, always so high-minded or politically informed. His “objectification” is not limited only to poetry, but also to his perceptions of women. The New Collected Poems includes many poems reflecting an archetypal male gaze. In the blazon of “She lies, hip high” or of the city ladies whose breasts “Pertain to lingerie”, the woman as object of his desire becomes a collage of parts. He fantasises about the breasts and “intimate / Nerves” of “The Zulu Girl” which “touched, would touch her / Deeply”, and probes women’s sexual and reproductive potency in “No interval of manner”. He also construes domestic interiors as feminized spaces; “the interiors / Are the women’s: curtained, / Lit, the fabric / To which the men return”. If labour is truth-telling and makes the world habitable, it is also a male occupation.Women restore men on their return from public labour. In “The Source”, “a woman’s body // Glows” in “some black brick / Tenement”, and is “The city’s / Secret warmth.” In a move typical of his poetry, such “feminine profusion” is opposed to the hardness of rock and construction, with their permanence and “impenetrability”.

It was not just manual labour which Oppen gendered, but also poetry. A poem responding to a dispute he was having with his friend Denise Levertov names the “feminine technologies” as “desire / And compassion”. As technologies for writing, these are treated with both admiration and scorn – in a later poem, the “Chorus (androgynous)” asks the audience to “Find me / So that I will exist”, to find its navel, nipples, hair on its belly. In a letter to Levertov, Oppen comments on this passage as a description of “the pitfall that has trapped every woman poet who has written in English: I am good (or I am bad); find me”. While the desire to come to existence by being perceived or “found” is, he says, a “root of poetry”, it also “traps”women in their vanity and their need to be seen and ethically confirmed by the male – a need reaffirmed by Oppen’s reversion to the blazon. Despite his admiration for Mary Oppen’s artistic work, Oppen seems not to have extended his demand for equality to poetic labour. How can we make his statement that “indeed a poet’s room / Is a boy’s room / And I suppose that women know it” accord with his politics? Oppen means to emphasize boy rather than man, but the gendering of the poetic vocation is clear, especially as women’s excitement by “the unbeautiful banker” rather than “a boy gasping / For breath over a girl’s body” makes their intuition of the immaturity of poets a sexual awareness.

Oppen’s philosophical rigour and personal probity make such limitations disappointing. But his poetry is a model for twentieth-century political engagement in poetry – not only in his own active participation in its most significant struggles, but also the difficulties of integrating political and poetic action. The New Collected Poems gives us the first opportunity to trace Oppen’s development and evaluate these exemplary limitations in their entirety. His desire to honour the simultaneous autonomy and relatedness of being is conveyed in small words of extraordinary power.