SOURCE: An interview in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, July-August, 1985, pp. 11-14.

[In the following interview, originally published in 1975, George and Mary Oppen discuss philosophy, politics, and poetry.]

This conversation took place in 1975 at the Oppen residence on Polk Street in San Francisco.

[Interviewer]: Mr. Oppen, you are known to be among the handful of poets who consistently decline invitations to read their work in public. May I ask why?

[George Oppen]: Of course, the primary reason is that I don't absolutely have to, and that if a poet possibly can make his living outside poetry, well, it's obviously a certain broadening of experience. In addition, I feel very strongly—not as a theory or an exhortation to anybody else, but for myself—that the poem is supposed to be on the page.

I don't think that audiences have a right to examine the personality of the poet. It's a falsification. In fact, it's dangerous to the poet to hear himself reading. He knows that he can do it with his voice, he knows that he can do it with his personality, but it's very difficult to be sure of the page.

[Mary Oppen]: It seems to me that many people who want to be poets have this latent in them, or it captures them: the ability to perform. And that ambition sometimes, it seems to me, overrides the necessity of finding within themselves what it is they want to say. They get carried away; they become performers.

[George Oppen]: But there can be a sense of … it's difficult to describe … a sense of the word falling so solidly, so exactly where you want it to fall, that it will do what your voice really can't do. Of course, what one is trying to do is to express meanings which can only be expressed with the aid of music, so that one has a temptation to rely on the voice. It isn't exactly wrong. Ginsberg, and that whole movement, made a tremendous contribution by bringing their own voices, their actual personalities into the reading. I'm not quarreling with those who do. But my own sense of the thing happens not to be that.

And I have another reason, too. It's just a personal sense of drama. My sense of my own drama is really related to David with his homemade slingshot. I enjoyed reading tremendously when I was totally unknown. I knew I would wow 'em. But cast as Goliath, you see, I know what happened to Goliath. I can practically feel the stone on my head when I show up as the guy who won a Pulitzer for reasons unknown.

Could you expand a bit on your comment that for a poet to make his living outside of poetry affords him a broadening of experience?

[George Oppen]: Well, the independence, to a degree, from acquiring the favor of audiences and critics. I think we could make this sound very, very clear. But it's a very cruel thing to say, because there are people who, for various reasons, aren't able to make a living in any way not so arduous as to make it impossible to write poetry.

With that in mind, how do you see the teacher/poet? The poet who teaches classes, say, in creative writing or American Literature while trying to work out his or her own poetry?

[George Oppen]: I don't feel I have much right to answer this. I've simply never done it. I've appeared in a number of places and talked to classes, theoretically teaching I suppose, but what I taught was me. Which is relatively easy, though one couldn't do that for a whole semester I suppose. I don't know what teaching would be. It requires a broadening, which is good for one's character. I'm not sure that I tend to be very broad in that sense, having started in the embattled years when Modernism was an issue.

[Mary Oppen]: Well, until recently there was no such thing as the artist/teacher in the institutions. It's a fairly recent development. I don't think we really know yet.

[George Oppen]: It's even possible that the antonyms are ‘teaching’ and ‘learning.’ But again, we arrive at the necessity to make a living in a way not so arduous as to make it impossible to write poetry. Do you remember the name Haldeman-Julius? The Little Blue Books? Julius was a European Socialist who came to this country in the early part of the twentieth century and turned out a library of miniature paper books. They sold for five cents and were very small. They could fit inside a schoolbook, which was a godsend. It's possible that I owe everything to this; certainly all the education I possess. Anyway, he also wrote a story—I think it was the only story written and published by him. It was of a man like himself, an Italian immigrant, who came to this country to escape poverty. He got a job, more or less a sweatshop job, but was determined not to lose his culture or his cultural interests. So out of his very small salary he saved and saved for six months, or a year, in order to go to the opera. And went, with tremendous excitement. And fell asleep. He was tired. And so the story ends as a story of despair.

It is a question of class, finally. And the people we knew made every kind of solution. Williams, Stevens. Reznikoff, who planned very carefully. And also was probably a bit short on sleep.

[Mary Oppen]: Williams could somehow manage with very little sleep. He was an active doctor in his community and wrote between patients.

And yourself? Do you have a system that you employ?

[George Oppen]: I have a technique. I paste. I make corrections by pasting. Without this it would be impossible for me. I would spend all my time typing if I retyped the poem. What I do is I paste in the correction or change until the sheet becomes so thick it is no longer malleable. Then I copy it out straight. So that it may be two hundred versions, three hundred versions. I precisely lack Williams's sense of his own personal grace and the sureness of his own mannerisms. Nor do I want them.

[Mary Oppen]: But what you do have is an ear that is apparently inexhaustible.

[George Oppen]: Inexhaustible. I happen to have that. I can read the same line five hundred times and it doesn't jangle or jingle. I still hear what I want it to be, even though it's not there. Tolstoy, you remember, described the apparently irrelevant necessities for an artist. An opera singer must have a musical sense, but in addition the lungs of a glass blower. I happen to have a characteristic without which I couldn't have written a line. I continue to hear it. It's like tuning a piano. So again, it's necessary to remember that a poem, I would say by definition, undertakes to say what can only be said with the help of music.

How does the impulse to begin that process manifest itself in your experience? What sets you off? An idea? A line?

[George Oppen]: Not an idea. I start with something in my mind for which I have no words at all, and hardly hope to find the words. I have no words when I begin. Or sometimes a word, which turns out to be the wrong word. But I do know what it is. It's essentially a sense of place. Yes, of place. And as I say, I have this characteristic that I can write it wrong a thousand times and the sense of that existence of something is still there. There is a destiny that shapes our poems, rough-hewn as they are. But I don't begin with words.

You mention keeping the impulse. Does that explain why, for example in the poem “Debt,” and then later on in the poem “Rationality,” there seem to be … well, they seem to be almost the same poem.

[George Oppen]: They are the same poem, yes. That's why I call it “Debt.” It was the poem I couldn't write. It was about working. The carpenter working in factories—which meant a great deal to me. And suddenly that meaning disappeared. I was writing it too late.

It was also a defense of the mechanic sense. Mechanics; empiricism; as against the various mysticisms and solipsisms. It was a defense of the rational. The excitement of the young worker. I mean, the thing's made! You do it the way you're supposed to, and there it is!

And I think the tragedy of the rational is also there. I meant it to be. The destruction of the man.

[Mary Oppen]: Yes, but when a workman wasn't alienated, when he still made the object, it was … when you make it, you're proud!

[George Oppen]: Yes. And then, there it is! You can't believe it. It looks as though someone else had made it. And the strange thing is—we could use that word Objectivism which haunts us so much—that if it's perfect, you're not in it at all. Which is also a tremendous experience. It may be a more emotional experience than the mark of the maker which is often talked about. Because you did do it, and yet it's not oneself. It's closer to giving birth than the other concept, I think.

And of course, as is the case with the quality of the craftsmanship on, say, contemporary office buildings, the panelling for instance, no one notices the quality precisely because it is perfect. If it were flawed, perhaps they would.

[George Oppen]: The sentimental bourgeoisie believes—and I remember my father on this point particularly—that the craftsman has a certain manual knack and that he, the bourgeois, has a higher intelligence, but there's something about his hands that just won't work. Whereas of course it's not the hands; it has nothing to do with the hands. It has to do with intellectual capacity. The fact is that in spite of all the admiration for the primitive these days, the human mind was not capable of thinking in tenths of a thousandth.

Oh, of course there are many things about mechanization which seem close to being fatal at this moment, that's entirely clear. But several other things are clear. First, that this kind of craftsmanship which is admired depends absolutely on very low paid workmen. It cannot exist otherwise. And the second is that what's happening is not the disappearance of the hand, but that more and more of the world's matter is being converted into mind.

Could you expound on that?

[George Oppen]: Well, it is the story of our evolution, isn't it? We're assuming an evolution—a lump of matter which in some way became vegetative life, which in some way became. … And we can even add the present overcrowding of the world which is precisely this. And the shortage of raw materials which is precisely this.

[Mary Oppen]: You could also take the literacy of the world. You could take note of how many people had gone to college compared to a hundred years ago. Development of thought. No matter how we disparage our universities or how we disparage our problems of unemployment, nevertheless there is a possibility within this population on earth now that did not exist before, and it's mind. The development of mind.

[George Oppen]: We imagine the most primitive man facing, almost in despair, a mineral universe. And now we see a mineral universe shrinking for its life from the onslaughts of mind.

A question of entropy?

[George Oppen]: Yes, it's a question of entropy. A question of direction.

In the face of this distillation process, what do you make of the onslaught of boredom, and of the apparent need among the developed societies of our day to live intensely; to live a kind of revolutionary fervor?

[George Oppen]: The use of the word ‘boredom’—that, too, is part of our history. The first poem in the Discrete Series describes the mood of boredom, and the sense of the world which occurs in the mood of boredom. I wrote that in 1929 and it happens that this was the same moment that Heidegger was speaking of the mood of boredom as a philosophic concept in his acceptance speech at the University. Since I don't know German I couldn't have read it. It hadn't even been translated.

[Mary Oppen]: When Heidegger speaks of boredom he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one's mind begins to reach beyond. And that is a poetic moment; a moment in which a poem might very well be written. But for a child who says he's bored, well there's some lack of connection between his feelings, his emotions. Usually there's manifestation almost immediately of anger, fury, violence. Because it can't be tolerated, this boredom.

[George Oppen]: But boredom can be a sense of the world. The sense of the expanse. Which is a penetration; the first penetration, probably. Of course, it can also be frivolous. It can also be the desire to be distracted from precisely that sense. Playing cards, for example. The nature of cards is that they narrow the thing down to these little cardboards in front of you.

Distracted from distraction by distraction.

[George Oppen]: Yes, right. Mary hates cards. I've never met anyone who hated them as much as Mary. She hates competitive undertakings. Mary in a fury over some woman who worshipped poets and was taking over, not Mary, but me, in the living room. She won a game of pick-up-sticks or something.

[Mary Oppen]: Scrabble. I'd never played the miserable game before, but it became clear that I was being challenged. So I did it and won. I never played again.

Is the writing of poetry a political act, do you think?

[George Oppen]: It changes the world, doesn't it?

[Mary Oppen]: It probably is the most important way to change the world. Philosophy, after all, doesn't carry the impact, although it may carry the generic idea of the poetry of the period. But the poetry is what carries the emotion and what carries the senses and what makes it communicable from one era to another. At least we say that. Of course we don't know if it's the same reaction.

[George Oppen]: The voice is in it. Somebody's voice. And not in philosophy. Pound, who said something like, “The truth of the poem is that one person, at least, felt this.” Which is an important political act, to say what you want and what you don't want. On the other hand it is also true that there's a great deal of philosophizing in poetry by people who haven't realized what the philosophers managed to say. Look at the popularity of the word ‘meditation,’ as against things that Hegel will say. It would be extremely important to know what has been thought, and to erect a standard of clarity.

I think the proposition is this, or rather these: the phenomena of “representiality”—whether or not they misrepresent—and what could be taken as a crude empiricism, more or less from Hegel, that it is impossible to doubt the existence of one's own consciousness. Which means that consciousness in itself and of itself contains the principle of Actualness. The fact that consciousness by itself carries this principle; the principle that something is actual.

[Mary Oppen]: That something is.

[George Oppen]: That's the great marvel, you see. People imagine philosophy as a choosing between positions, or arguing a position, but as all philosophers agree, the central fact is the fact of Being. And that, of course, is an inflection of Descartes.

[Mary Oppen]: We have a son-in-law who's a philosopher and teaches philosophy, and he had a little parakeet which he taught to say, “Cogito Ergo Sum.” Another thing he taught it to say was, “Publish or perish.”

[George Oppen]: The little bird didn't, though.

[Mary Oppen]: No. He died.

Is there an acid test for great poetry?

[George Oppen]: What the poem must have is the thing itself. To carry its own meaning. Of course, what happened was that there was a period—the sixties, I suppose—in which the life style was important. And there was behind it an actual mission to speak of this life style and its possibilities. It had really quite a startling importance. Because there is a danger in lecturing out of philosophy without saying, “What does one want?” And that was the movement of the sixties: to redefine what it is that we do want. And this gave to the confessional and sometimes extremely loose poetry an importance which I think is really very great.

[Mary Oppen]: We wondered, twenty or thirty years ago, what were people going to do with time? with leisure? What were they going to do when affluence released people from the fourteen-hour day? I think we see now. We have a tremendous audience in the arts. Of course, what we want is a higher level in the arts, but how many people in any fifty-year period are great? We could make a list for our lifetime, and it would not be large.

Yet it would probably be one of the largest lists compared to any past set of fifty years.

[George Oppen]: Yes, absolutely.

[Mary Oppen]: That would of course come with the expanding population. I remember up at Oregon Agricultural College where I met George—this was back in 1926 …

[George Oppen]: Don't over-awe the people Mary.

[Mary Oppen]: … Sandburg was there with his guitar, singing and reciting his poetry. Well, this was tremendous! I didn't know poetry was being written in my lifetime! So I began to write poetry.

[George Oppen]: And there was the message: talk about yourself. It's the only way you know you're telling the truth. Say what you want; say what you don't want.

If the political climate is sympathetic to such candor. As it is not in whole blocks of nations east and south of us; as it was not in our own nation during the McCarthy days, during which you yourself experienced some difficulties, isn't that right?

[George Oppen]: Yes.

Is that, then, where the vision stops? Is that the limit of the power of poetry to change the world?

[George Oppen]: There is a conflict. A thing like the McCarthy period, or for that matter Russian Communism, refuses to hear what any one person actually does want. And certainly it is the function of poetry to say what happiness is, or what happiness could be; what our desires really are. On the Left and on the Right you get a prescription of what you should want. It's an issue to be raised openly as to what extent we can be a part of an entity called humanity.

I've made this point over and over again, trying to argue it quite rigorously and possibly failed. I have also tried to make it while talking in universities, apparently without being understood. I've wanted to make the point that the issue of Socialism, or Communism, which likes to present itself as a ‘pork-chop’ issue; a very tough-minded, economic issue, and calls upon us to fight a revolution for this matter of a better life, of higher wages (and there's great pride in this system that this is a pork-chop issue and not to be confused with philosophy, and certainly not with metaphysics). However, you see, the argument won't hold as a pork-chop issue. The proposition that we should have a revolution in order to earn a dollar an hour more in wages is simply nonsense. This is not a bargain anyone would accept. What is in peoples' minds, I think most obviously, in China—and it would be in my mind if I were a Chinese peasant—is that it is worth sacrificing your life, and sacrificing a whole generation, or three or four generations, in order to feel that there will be a time when you do not sell your children. … In which humanity may be … may become … what it should be. And this is purely metaphysic. It's a concern beyond the period of one's own life. It's a desire as to the destiny of humanity. It cannot be argued in simply trade-union terms. No, there is something we want humanity to be, or to become, and this is the impulse of revolution. The impulse of trade-unionism is something else.

[Mary Oppen]: There's an Omega point. A disappearing of everything into mind. And I'm not sure if I give myself to that. It's again, what do we mean by mankind? What is the eventual outcome of all this striving?

Could this universal rushing toward that proverbial Omega point explain why there is so much outstanding poetry being written in the world today?

[George Oppen]: It's entirely possible, yes.

Among your contemporaries, which poets had a particular influence on your work?

[George Oppen]: First, and with a box drawn around it, Charles Reznikoff. No longer such an outrageous statement as it was not so long ago. But to me, Reznikoff is the poet among the moderns. I brought my manuscript to Reznikoff to look at. And he read it, and he picked out one line. He said, “George, this is the only line that sings.” That line happened to be three words quoted from Ben Jonson. I was pleased, nevertheless.

[Mary Oppen]: Just recently Marie Reznikoff negotiated with Black Sparrow for all of Charles's papers.

[George Oppen]: This is the prose thing I wrote that will be on the cover.

“… a girder
still itself among the rubble.”

That line of Reznikoff's, in the poem of which it is a part, and line upon line of his perfect poems have been with me for the forty-eight years since I first came upon them. If we had no other poetry, I think that we could nevertheless live by virtue of these poems; these lines, these small, precise, these overwhelming gentle iron lines and the images of all that is and our love and pride and our small life, which is immeasurable, as these lines which are still themselves among the rubble.

There are some who would insist those terms are suited to describe your own work.

[George Oppen]: I learned from Reznikoff. And from Zukofsky. I learned from a lot of people whom I wouldn't follow.

We arrived in New York, and had discovered simultaneously modern poetry in Oregon. Sandburg and those people. And it was on the strength of that that we lit out together, hitchhiking. It was dramatic doings because I was underage and Mary wasn't. We were both the same age, but there was that law then, remember. We began with that populism and that image. The image clearest, I guess, in Sherwood Anderson, of the person absolutely alone on these fields, wondering how you begin.

So that what is ascribed as a Williams influence on me is … actually I knew that populism and that tone before. When I encountered Williams's work I recognized it as being beyond the Vachel Lindsays and so on, but that was not the beginning for me. What I learned from Williams was precisely what you're not supposed to learn from Williams: I learned the importance of form.

[Mary Oppen]: And also there was, as Sherwood Anderson said, “We wanted to know if we were any good at it.”

[George Oppen]: Yes. I quoted that to Hugh Kenner. The conversation was very, very interesting. He said (and in fact I've quoted him several times; I thought it was marvelously brilliant and enlightened), he asked about the gap in my career—the change to politics—and he interrupted me to say, “In brief, it took twenty-five years to write the next poem.” Which is absolutely so.

It's when the person writing is frightened by the poem that the poem may have begun. The poem is more than the person, you see. Otherwise, why? Why write it?