George Oppen, NEW COLLECTED POEMS (Carcanet)
I don’t know the poetry of George Oppen well. I almost don’t know it at all. I’ve only had the more than 400 page Collected Poems for three or four weeks, and I’ve only read half of it, and since reading a book of poetry entails a bit more than just turning the pages to get to the end to see what happens, this almost amounts to not having read it at all.
While I waited around for the book to arrive (smoking, drinking, loafing) I prepared myself a little. I’m also not much of an expert on the Objectivists (of whom Oppen is/was nominally one) but I did a bit of brushing up, which served at least to remind me how in the past I’ve often found that stuff kind of dry, but my tastes are changing (albeit slowly) and perhaps it’s time to have another look. Which I haven’t yet. My somewhat limited refresher course also reminded me (in more detail than before) of Oppen’s personal history.
And “life” -- in inverted commas here, but
out there it doesn’t have inverted commas, it simply has factories and conveyor
belts and long hours and not enough money and all those life things – is
hanging all around George Oppen’s poems. As the first poem posits, by way of
Henry James (and I quote it here in full, because it says it all, and is,
anyway, quite beautiful):
The knowledge
not of sorrow, you were
saying, but of boredom
Is ----
aside from reading speaking
smoking ----
Of what, Maude
Blessingbourne it was,
wished to know when, having risen,
“approached the
window as if to see
what really was going on”;
And saw rain
falling, in the distance
more slowly,
The road clear
from her past the window-
glass ----
Of the world,
weather-swept, with which
one shares the century.
What goes on goes on outside the window. It’s weather, but a weather that stands for every kind of ray of sun and blast of wind that rocks or soothes a life. And it’s the century, our time. We share it. And it matters. And this underpins Oppen’s poetry, but it’s not an easy poetry to read, for me, and it almost certainly won’t be easy for anyone wholeheartedly unused to reading a poetry that denies our expectations of conventional poetics and gives us, instead, fragments, disassociated phrases, sometimes part-utterances ….. but which also, in spite of that, often (very often) gives moments of pure beauty, elegance, recognition, wisdom. It’s sometimes hard to relinquish the quest for total comprehension in favour of a few seized moments of great pleasure or revelation, but I swear it’s worth it. When I think of how often reading and “getting” a whole poem can be a very much less than pleasant reading experience, I’m thankful for a few lines that give pleasure and add something to my world.
One can read one of these poems and it might feel like a cold and unforgiving gemstone: it looks great, feels great, but it’s not exactly yielding anything up to you. You’re very much outside it and separate from it. But it’s okay to read a poem more than once, and largely these poems have that about them that suggests you do that. Attempt One wasn’t altogether bad, even if perhaps you didn’t get much from it in the way of meaning but there was some reading pleasure; Attempt Two may yield something else. And as readers, we can work a little, can’t we? A poem with only a couple of dozen words in it, and the first time it resisted you, but you liked it enough to read it again -- And again -- And again several days later -- For example:
This land:
The hills, round
under straw;
A house
With rigid trees
A family
laundry,
And the glass of
windows
I admit I still can’t make anything very
interesting out of that “round under straw” bit. I may be being blind and
dense. But for the rest, each time I read this poem, I see a picture in my
mind’s eye but, more importantly, I sense a celebration (if that’s the right
word, which it perhaps isn’t) of the very ordinary washing flapping on the
washing line, and those windows, which one can look in to, and out of. And
think and imagine. “Rigid” is an interesting word in the middle of the poem,
don’t you think? And it doesn’t matter if I’m right or if I’m wrong, because it
really doesn’t. I’m not being marked on this.
Civil war photo:
Grass near the
lens;
Man in the field
In silk
hat. Daylight.
The cannon of
that day
In our parks.
Which is, I think, and to be frank, damn fine.
It is the air of
atrocity,
An event as
ordinary
As a President.
A plume of
smoke, visible at a distance
In which people
burn.
“An event as ordinary as a President.” Wow!
Eric -- we used
to call him Eric --
And Charlie
Weber: I knew them well,
Men of another
century. And still at Sheepshead
If a man carries
pliers
Or maul down
these rambling piers he is a man who fetches
Power into the
afternoon
Speaking of
things
End-for-end,
butted to each other,
Dove-tailed,
tenoned, doweled – Who is not at home
Among these men?
who make a home
Of half truth,
rules of thumb
Of cam and lever
and whose docks and piers
Extend into the
sea so self-contained.
(This review was previously published in The North)