[In the following interview, Dembo questions Oppen about his life and his poetry.]

In February 1931 Poetry, under the acting editorship of a young man highly recommended to Harriet Monroe by Ezra Pound, issued an “Objectivist” number. As that young man, Louis Zukofsky, tells it, the term “Objectivist” was little more than a response to Miss Monroe's insistence that he produce a movement and a label to go with it. And Zukofsky is here generally supported by three other poets to whom the term has been applied, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi. According to Reznikoff, the main reason a group formed at all was economic, and The Objectivist Press, which grew out of Oppen's To Publishers, was organized simply to facilitate publication of its members and their friends. The fact remains that Zukofsky did write an essay for the February Poetry issue entitled, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” in which, albeit elliptically, he developed the poetics of “sincerity and ojectification” and took Reznikoff's work as his example. The following year he brought out, under the imprint of To Publishers, An “Objectivists” Anthology, which had as its preface “‘Recencies’ in Poetry,” a further elaboration of principles. Although reaction to both of Zukofsky's endeavors was for the most part bafflement (and, on the part of Yvor Winters, outright indignation), the conceptions were formulated with sufficient clarity for Samuel Putnam to devote an issue of his New Review to “The New Objectivism” (July 1931). …

George Oppen has actually done most of his work since the late 'fifties. After publishing Discrete Series in 1934, he gave up poetry to become a political activist and did not begin writing in earnest again until his return from Mexico, where he had fled with his family in 1950 to escape harassment by the McCarthy committee. Far from being a political poet, then, Oppen felt that political action and poetry were to be kept separate and that under certain conditions the former took precedence over the latter. When he returned to poetry, he demonstrated a profound interest in both the philosophy and psychology of “sincerity,” a conception that recurs in all four interviews and is one of the main features of an objectivist outlook. Oppen's world is one in which the poet phenomenologically defines objects by defining his experience of them, and his poetry is the rigorous definition of feelings that exist after the failure of discursive knowledge and the evaporation of sentiment. For Oppen, as for Zukofsky, seeing, the act of pure perception that results in joy or awe, is one of the primary faculties of the poet and of men in general in an incomprehensible and terrifying world. New Directions has recently published Oppen's meditative poem, Of Being Numerous, which draws together the themes of the two preceding volumes, The Materials (New Directions-San Francisco Review, 1962) and This in Which (New Directions-San Francisco Review, 1966). This growing canon, with its philosophic subtlety and poetic intensity, reveals no minor talent, and Oppen, I believe, will eventually gain the recognition he deserves.

[Interviewer]: I'd like to begin with some facts about your life, Mr. Oppen. You've lived many years in New York City, haven't you?

[Oppen]: Yes, although I spent my boyhood in San Francisco. I was born in New Rochelle. My father, having married a second time, moved to California when I was about ten. I guess I was about nineteen when I left college, the University of Oregon, with Mary Colby, my future wife, and eventually hitchhiked to New York. A young instructor by the name of Jack Lyons had given me Conrad Aiken's anthology of modern poetry. It was my discovery that there was such a thing as modern poetry other than what I had been writing. I could say there was nobody at college with whom I could discuss modern poetry—but now I'm not so sure. I think I was afraid that somebody would tell me something about it and I didn't want to be told.

Anyway, we got to New York and started looking for people like Sherwood Anderson and even Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, who still have a kind of importance to me. Mary and I happened to be walking past the Gotham Book Mart one day before going to a party and we dropped in to waste some time. I saw Exiles, 3, edited by Ezra Pound, and he was one of the names I knew I was looking for. And I stood there and read the first poem which was called “Poem Beginning ‘The’” by Louis Zukofsky, and went on to the party where someone said, “Oh, you're a poet. We have a friend who's a poet; you should meet him; his name's Louis Zukofsky.” I said, “He wrote ‘Poem Beginning “The,”’” and they said, “That's true, but you're the only person in the world who knows it.”

Unfortunately, you're still in the minority.

That's possible, that's possible. Let's see, then. When I was twenty-one, Mary and I went to France to begin what was called To Publishers for reasons which I forget; it became The Objectivist Press. We printed An “Objectivists” Anthology, Pound's ABC of Reading, and so forth, but financially the undertaking became impossible. The books were paperbacks and the New York bookstores refused them. The customs officers made trouble, too. Louis did the editing and we did the printing. All that The Objectivist Press meant was that people paid for their own books.

Why was it called “Objectivist”? Was there any sense of movement?

That was Louis' term, as far as I know. When we sat down to write a statement on the book covers, Charles Reznikoff, who had legal training, produced at the right moment his statement: “The Objectivist Press is an organization of poets who are printing their own work and that of others they think ought to be printed.” It was a little beyond the fact because there were differences of opinion on what should be included.

Were there any criteria for what got published?

Well, Louis put into An “Objectivists” Anthology people whom he liked or admired. He was, however, operating on a principle; there was some agreement among the poets. I think that all of us had considerable area of agreement, very considerable, but nobody signed a manifesto, and, as I said, certainly not everybody was of the same opinion. But there is no question that there was a relationship among these poets. The poets Louis liked all held a certain attitude toward poetry.

Just what was that attitude?

Let me see what we thought and whether I can generalize about it. I'll just put it in personal terms. What I felt I was doing was beginning from imagism as a position of honesty. The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity. But I learned from Louis, as against the romanticism or even the quaintness of the imagist position, the necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving form. That's what “objectivist” really means. There's been tremendous misunderstanding about that. People assume it means the psychologically objective in attitude. It actually means the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem.

Williams, in fact, speaks of the poem as object.

Right. And this existed in the context of the sloppy American imagism descending out of Amy Lowell and a thousand others. The other point for me, and I think for Louis, too, was the attempt to construct meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry—from the imagist intensity of vision. If no one were going to challenge me, I would say, “a test of truth.” If I had to back it up I'd say anyway, “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.

My book, of course, was called Discrete Series. That's a phrase in mathematics. A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule. A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems. I was attempting to construct a meaning by empirical statements, by imagist statements.

Each imagist statement being essentially discrete from the statement that followed or preceded it?

Yes, that meaning is also implicit in the word “discrete.” The poems are a series, yet each is separate, and it's true that they are discrete in that sense; but I had in mind specifically the meaning to the mathematician—a series of empirically true terms.

In any case, the “discrete” aspect seems to be reminiscent of the cubist approach, if I'm not being far-fetched—hard, sharp fragments of theme or experience joined mosaically rather than integrated organically.

I'm really not sure what troubles the cubists had, but I had trouble with syntax in this undertaking and, as a matter of fact, I still have trouble with verbs. It's not exactly trouble; I just didn't want to put it too pretentiously. I'm really concerned with the substantive, with the subject of the sentence, with what we are talking about, and not rushing over the subject-matter in order to make a comment about it. It is still a principle with me, of more than poetry, to notice, to state, to lay down the substantive for its own sake. I don't know whether that's clear.

Please go on.

A statement can be made in which the subject plays a very little part, except for argumentation; one hangs a predicate on it that is one's comment about it. This is an approximate quotation from Hegel, who added (I like the quote very much): “Disagreement marks where the subject-matter ends. It is what the subject-matter is not.” The important thing is that if we are talking about the nature of reality, then we are not really talking about our comment about it; we are talking about the apprehension of some thing, whether it is or not, whether one can make a thing of it or not. Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually does exist.

I realize the possibility of attacking many of the things I'm saying and I say them as a sort of act of faith. The little words that I like so much, like “tree,” “hill,” and so on, are I suppose just as much a taxonomy as the more elaborate words; they're categories, classes, concepts, things we invent for ourselves. Nevertheless, there are certain ones without which we really are unable to exist, including the concept of humanity.

I'm trying to describe how the test of images can be a test of whether one's thought is valid, whether one can establish in a series of images, of experiences … whether or not one will consider the concept of humanity to be valid, something that is, or else have to regard it as being simply a word.

What you're saying now seems to be a part of the view of reality that's presented in your poems: the belief that conceptual knowledge or generalization is inadequate or misleading in man's relation to reality. Your poetry seems to suggest that physical reality or the environment is mysterious and has to be, in a way, sensuously rather than rationally apprehended; the poet's response is the pure awareness of being, so to speak. In “Psalm” [This in Which], for example, you write, “In the small beauty of the forest / The wild deer bedding down—/ That they are there!” And this seemed to be characteristic; the poet does not respond intellectually or discursively, but as a “nominalist,” only to the physical tangibility or reality of the object he views.

Yes, if one knows what “physical” means or what it contrasts with. But responds by faith, as I admitted somewhere, and to his own experience. All the little nouns are the ones that I like the most: the deer, the sun, and so on. You say these perfectly little words and you're asserting that the sun is ninety-three million miles away, and that there is shade because of shadows, and more, who knows? It's a tremendous structure to have built out of a few small nouns. I do think they exist and it doesn't particularly embarrass me; it's certainly an act of faith. I do believe that consciousness exists and that it is consciousness of something, and that is a fairly complete but not very detailed theology, as a matter of fact. In “Psalm” I was constructing what I felt to be a pretty emotional poem out of those few little words isolating the deer. And I just said, in this poem, these little nouns are crying out a faith in “this in which” the wild deer stare out. [“The small nouns / Crying faith / In this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out.”]

What exactly is the faith? Is it in the world as world or is it in man's ability to know the world?

Well, that the nouns do refer to something; that it's there, that it's true, the whole implication of these nouns; that appearances represent reality, whether or not they misrepresent it: that this in which the thing takes place, this thing is here, and that these things do take place. On the other hand, one is left with the deer, staring out of the thing, at the thing, not knowing what will come next.

Yet you do say in “A Language of New York” [This in Which] that the world “if it is matter / Is impenetrable.”

Ultimately, it's impenetrable. At any given time the explanation of something will be the name of something unknown. We have a kind of feeling—I described doubts about it—but we have a kind of feeling that the absolutely unitary is somehow absolute, that, at any rate, it really exists. It's been the feeling always that that which is absolutely single really does exist—the atom, for example. That particle of matter, when you get to it, is absolutely impenetrable, absolutely inexplicable. If it's not, we'll call it something else which is inexplicable.

Is that what you meant when you said in “A Narrative” [This in Which], “Things explain each other, / not themselves”?

That's it.

There's a passage in “Of Being Numerous” that seems to sum up your attitude. Let me quote it:

The power of the mind, the
Power and weight
Of the mind which
Is not enough, it is nothing
And does nothing
Against the natural world,
Behemoth, white whale, beast
They will say and less than beast,
The fatal rock
Which is the world—[#26]

That's right. Then, having said that, I went on to something I called “the lyric valuables” somewhere else [“From Disaster” in The Materials]. I suppose what I'm saying really is that there is no life for humanity except the life of the mind. I don't know whether it's useful to say that to anyone. Either people will have discovered it for themselves or else it won't be true for them.

Well, exactly what do you mean by “the life of the mind” in this sense?

I mean the awareness … I suppose it's nearly a sense of awe, simply to feel that the thing is there and that it's quite something to see. It's an awareness of the world, a lyric reaction to the world. “Of Being Numerous” ends with the word “curious” partly as a joke on Whitman, but also because men are curious, and at the end of a very long poem, I couldn't find anything more positive to say than that.

Then by “life of the mind” you mean something intuitive, not something analytical.

Yes, or just my word “faith.” I said life of the mind and perhaps I spoke a little carelessly. I was anticipating, as its opposite, all the struggles for happiness, all the search for a morality of altruism, all the dependence on the poor to confer value—and eventually the poor might one way or another disappear. I was anticipating the whole discussion of “the good,” of an ethic, and leaping ahead. I don't mean that there isn't anything to do right now, but I was thinking about a justification of human life, eventually, in what I call the life of the mind.

I don't quite follow you. Are you suggesting that “the life of the mind” replace social values?

Not “replace,” no. There have been certain bases for a purely humanist or secular ethic which have worked—in the first place, the presence of the poor makes possible an ethic of altruism. That is, to want a good job and whitewall tires and a radio and so on is the very symbol of bestiality, isn't it? But if one can go and find that there are people in the South who don't have these things, then a good job and whitewall tires and a radio become positively spiritual values. I don't mean to mock the kids who went to Mississippi; they were heroic and they were doing what needed to be done. But the ethic isn't permanent and it isn't going to answer the problems. However one names that problem—the outcome of the process of humanity—it won't solve it.

One's afraid of the loss of an ethic because, of course, one does have ethical feelings. One does object to the war in Vietnam, for instance. One has trouble coming to terms with these things. We don't actually know if human life is operable without an ethic. There's the wonderful business of Socrates' defense of himself, with the beautifully worked out, entirely rational principle that one behaves ethically because one has to live in society after all and if one injures society, he will be acting against his own interest. For the sake of this doctrine he was about to drink the hemlock—which is a kind of contradiction that my poems often raise. Why do we do it? My last book tries to say that there is a concept of humanity, there is something we want humanity to be or to become, and this would establish the basis of an ethic. But that's pure metaphysical sentiment. It can't be done the way Socrates was doing it.

I'm beginning to see what you mean by sincerity. Your obligation is to your feelings alone. If it so happens that they are ethical, so much the better.

So much the better, or at least so much the more ethical. But of literature surely we both know that a student having once experienced the meaning of sincerity is hooked; he will know what literature is though he may have only that one quotation to prove it all his life long. And out of the same emotion, the same compulsion, one says what he thinks is true, not because he would like it to be true, still less because he thinks it would be good for the reader. I'm just reporting my experiences in life, including the one that when they drop enough jellied gasoline on children, you can't stand it anymore. I'm just stating a fact about what you can and cannot stand. If it didn't bother one to burn children, why say it does? I don't understand inventing an ethic; I'm just trying to understand what the ethic is, how long it can last. An ethic is a funny thing: when it's gone, it's gone and you can't mourn it. You can only talk about what you actually feel.

There is a difference between an ethic that is gone and one that is merely unfulfilled, though. Napalm may represent the failure of an ethic, the failure of a people to meet an ideal, but does it represent the actual passing of a value? We feel guilt in violating it.

Right. Again, I think I did work it out some in Of Being Numerous on the basis of pure metaphysics. We care about the idea of what's going to happen to humanity, including after one's death. I think in some other poem I argued it out; it's a little difficult to go through it tactfully in prose. Young people, even people of thirty, have an uninterrupted memory of twenty years of life and their life expectancy is much more than that, an infinity, more or less. They can reasonably expect to live longer than they can imagine. At a certain time of life, that ceases to be true. People know the most distant date on which they will die, and it does not seem far off. If they knew the world was going to end within that length of time, I argue, they would not bother to live their time out. There are other situations any of us could imagine in which people would not be willing to live, would find it impossible to live, without some concept of sharing in history or humanity—something which is happening after their death. Socrates obviously did because he drank the hemlock. I'm still not inventing or trying to be good for anyone. I'm trying to say how or why it is that one does live.

But you feel that you yourself have a commitment to an ethic. You are not just an observer.

Since I have a commitment to it, then I do something about it. If I didn't have the commitment, I wouldn't—the commitment being a sentiment, a something, a “gene.” We simply have an ethical motivation and we must deal with that fact; if we didn't have it, it wouldn't be a problem.

Then you're an observer of your own feelings, which are inherently ethical. The idea of sincerity really seems to be the crucial one here. Well, perhaps we can go on to a different kind of subject. I was wondering whether you had any special ideas on prosody. I know that in an early essay Zukofsky talked about “objectification” in prosodic terms.

Yes. Well, I do believe in a form in which there is a sense of the whole line, not just its ending. Then there's the sense of the relation between lines, the relation in their length; there is a sense of the relation of the speed, of the alterations and momentum of the poem, the feeling when it's done that this has been rounded. I think that probably a lot of the worst of modern poetry, and it would be true of some quite good poetry, such as Creeley's, uses the line-ending simply as the ending of a line, a kind of syncopation or punctuation. It's a kind of formlessness that lacks any sense of line measure.

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines. The meaning of many lines will be changed—one's understanding of the lines will be altered—if one changes the line-ending. It's not just the line-ending as punctuation but as separating the connections of the progression of thought in such a way that understanding of the line would be changed if one altered the line division. And I don't mean just a substitute for the comma; I mean with which phrase the word is most intimately connected—that kind of thing.

Do you agree at all with Williams' notion about “breaking the back of the iambic pentameter”?

I don't subscribe to any of the theories that poetry should simply reproduce common speech, and so on. My reason for using a colloquial vocabulary is really a different one. It may be touched by populism as Williams' is, but in general I don't agree with his ideas on the subject.

What do you mean by populism in this sense?

Williams likes to name those objects: wheelbarrow, white chickens, etc. I, too, have a sense—I hesitate to say it because I have no way of defending it—of the greater reality of certain kinds of objects than of others. It's a sentiment. I have a very early poem about a car closed in glass. I felt that somehow it was unreal and I said so—the light inside that car. Shall I read it? It's very short.

By all means.

In fact a lot of the poems talk about that sort of thing.

Closed car—closed in glass—
At the curb,
Unapplied and empty:
A thing among others
Over which clouds pass and the
                              alteration of lighting,
An overstatement
Hardly an exterior.
Moving in traffic
This thing is less strange—
Tho the face, still within it,
Between glasses—place, over which
                    time passes—a false light.

[Discrete Series]

There is a feeling of something false in overprotection and over-luxury—my idea of categories of realness.

That's very interesting. It reminds me of another poem in which the light is illusory but does not seem to be false, the poem called “Forms of Love” in This in Which.

I suppose I would have to say to you at this point the terrible word “love,” which seems to me to have a category of reality too. The car is detached from emotion, from use, from necessity—from everything except the most unconscionable of the emotions. And that lake which appears in the night of love seemed to me to be quite real even though it was actually fog.

But only two lovers—because of their heightened state of mind or heightened sensitivity—would have thought that the fog was a lake.

Yes, I think that's true. Certainly I was assuming that in the title.

So the vision was actually a form of love.

That's right.

I notice you quote Kierkegaard in “Of Being Numerous” 16, and I wonder if his view of life has in any way influenced you.

I liked the passage I used very much, although out of context it's a little different. I was very moved by the passage, but I don't think Kierkegaard in general has been very important to me.

You also cite Heidegger and Maritain elsewhere.

They have been very important to me. Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, not any other work though. Ideas like Heidegger's have been important to me for a long time, as early as the first poem in Discrete Series. It says, “The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom / Is … Of the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century.” The word “boredom” is a little surprising there. It means, in effect, that the knowledge of the mood of boredom is the knowledge of what is, “of the world, weather-swept.” But these phrases I use here to paraphrase the poem are phrases from Heidegger's Acceptance Speech [of the Chair of Philosophy at Freiburg] made in 1929, the year I was writing the poem. And the words “boredom” and “knowledge” are, in their German equivalents, the words he used. So I feel I have a natural sympathy with Heidegger—that he should use as a philosophic concept a mood of boredom. And the word is rather strange in the poem, too. The statements are identical.

Just what do you mean, he used as a philosophic concept a mood of boredom?

I was referring to one of the major concepts in the Acceptance Speech: the mood of boredom and the recognition of what is.

You also mentioned Maritain.

Yes, well, what I quoted in the first book is the sort of thing I value most in him: “We wake in the same moment to ourselves and to things.” That's pretty central to my own thinking. I don't like his religious apologetics, though.

We've been talking about philosophers that interest you; what about poets? I was wondering what your attitude is toward, say, Pound or Williams.

It's true, of course, that Pound and Williams were both extremely important to me. But some people think I resemble Williams and it seems to me that the opposite is true. Pound unfortunately defended me against the possible charge of resembling him in the original preface to Discrete Series. The fact has always haunted me. At any rate, my attitudes are opposite those of Williams. Certainly one would have needed a great deal more courage, without his example, to begin to find a way to write. He was invaluable and many of his poems are beautiful, though I've always had reservations about Paterson. I think “The Asphodel” is a most beautiful and profound poem.

I was under the impression that one of the basic themes in Paterson, “no ideas but in things,” would appeal to you.

I have always wondered whether that expression didn't apply to the construction of meaning in a poem—not necessarily that there are out there no ideas but in things, but rather that there would be in the poem no ideas but those which could be expressed through the description of things. I took it that he meant the latter until I found that the expression was frequently understood in a different way. As for Pound, of course, a lot of his things stay in one's mind forever. Again, I have a great many reservations about Pound.

Anyway, if your interpretation of the Williams line is correct, it seems to me you would in fact partly resemble him.

Perhaps.

What about the Cantos? They seem to be arranged according to a “discrete series,” by the “ideogrammic method.”

Pound's ego system, Pound's organization of the world around a character, a kind of masculine energy, is extremely foreign to me. And Pound's root in Browning, which is so much more tremendous than any other root he has, is also foreign to me. What I really read in Pound are passages and lines. Just about the time I'm beginning to consider Pound an idiot, I come to something like the little wasp in the Pisan Cantos, and I know that I'm reading a very great poet.

At least a poet capable of great lyricism.

Yes.

Toward what recent writers do you feel the most sympathetic? I know you mention William Bronk in your poems.

I admire Bronk, but I'd prefer not to run down a list of others. I have no system for judging them. I can name the poets who really have been of decisive importance to me—Charles Reznikoff and Zukofsky as a person, his conversation, not his poetry—although, again as with Pound, while I can make an awful lot of objections to parts of A, the opening words, “A / Round of fiddles playing Bach,” have rung in my ears for a very long time and always will, I imagine. Reznikoff has been the most important to me, consciously at least. And otherwise—this is what I have to explain—really Blake is more important to me than Williams, and several philosophers may be more important than Pound. The contemporary poets aren't the most important thing in my life, with the exception of those few things that really matter to me. Wyatt's poems, and several Middle English poems, among other antiquities, mean more to me than any except one or two of the contemporary. It must be some habit of life that makes it seem to young poets that all the other young poets are the major factors in his life. At any rate it's not true.

It would seem to be at least partly true of writers like Olson, Duncan, and Creeley. Have you read much of them?

I've read a lot of Olson. I think “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” is a very fine poem. I don't really like the Maximus Poems nor accept them at all. I admire Duncan insofar as I can understand him, which is very rarely.

I notice that in the poem called “Route” in Of Being Numerous you devote a whole section in prose to a story about Alsatian men who tried to avoid being conscripted into the German army during the Second World War by hiding in holes. Evidently that story meant a lot to you.

Yes, and I had to undertell it all the way because it's terribly dramatic and it got hold of me. I really had to tell it as quietly as I could, and, besides, it's a public story, the account of a terrible experience. But that's what these men did: they spent two or three years in a hole in the ground. They could get out of them only once in a while when it was snowing and their tracks would be covered.

Were these holes actually caves or what?

Foxholes or trenches, with logs laid down and covered over with sod after the man had gotten in. Pierre Adam, who told me the story, would help the men and bring them food when he could. It's a painful story to tell. I wrote it down as simply as I could and the language partly reflects the fact that Pierre told me in French and my French is limited. We spoke a very simple language to each other. It's the kind of story any existentialist—Sartre specifically—might tell except that it did happen to me and it was as important to me as the poem indicates. And Pierre knew what he was telling me; he knew the point he was making. He knew that I was very positive about politics, about a social and political morality—very positive about judgments concerning the war.

And this story is related to the rest of the poem?

The poem is about some of the things that have happened to me; the story is part of the meaning of that poem and all of the experiences told in it to record what I learned. “Route” is very closely connected to “Of Being Numerous,” the learning that one is, after all, just oneself and in the end is rooted in the singular, whatever one's absolutely necessary connections with human history are. The section plays that part in the poem.

Then even though “Route” and “Of Being Numerous” seem to be speaking about the general human condition, they are actually very personal poems, aren't they?

That's right, but I'm also writing about the human condition. All I actually know is what happened to me and I'm telling it. There wasn't any time in my life when I suddenly decided that now I'd write some philosophy. I'm just telling about what I encountered, what life was to me. In places I think I insisted upon this—“the things which one cannot not see,” I wrote, and “not the symbol but the scene.” I've written about what happened and the place it happened in, and that, I suppose, is the only philosophy I could possibly understand anyway, except for some kind of mathematical philosophy.

I wouldn't, for instance, talk about death with any great intensity unless I thought I was going to die. As close as I come to a philosophic statement is in that poem in which I wrote, “we want to be here”—just to set the fact down because the poems do have a kind of pessimism; and I'm reminding myself that I do want to be here, that I would not lack the courage to cut my throat if I wanted to do so. I don't do so. In fact I enjoy life very, very much. I wrote that poem in case there was any misinterpretation of that. And I set myself again and again, not in the spirit of any medical pragmatism, any philosophy offering to cure everything, nor in any effort to improve anybody, but just to record the fact, to saying that I enjoy life very much and defining my feeling by the word “curious” or, as at the end of “The Narrative,” “joy,” joy in the fact that one confronts a thing so large, that one is part of it. The sense of awe, I suppose, is all I manage to talk about. I had written that “virtue of the mind is that emotion which causes to see,” and I think that perhaps that is the best statement of it.

This is “the life of the mind” again.

Yes, and that's what I really mean by mind. If the virtue of the mind is missing, if somebody is “wicked” in my sense, I have nothing to say to him and it is this fact that causes me to mourn, now and then, for large sections of humanity. I don't know whether I can tell a whole city or a whole college or a whole class full of people that their minds should possess that virtue. If they do not possess it, I really feel despair when I face them, and I do not know what to tell them.

And this virtue is the primary feeling of the poet, a kind of sensitivity?

Yes, it is an emotion. The mind is capable not only of thinking but has an emotional root that forces it to look, to think, to see. The most tremendous and compelling emotion we possess is the one that forces us to look, to know, if we can, to see. The difference between just the neuro-sensitivity of the eye and the act of seeing is one over which we have no control. It is a tremendous emotional response, which fills us with the experience that we describe as seeing, not with the experience of some twitching nerves in the eyeball. It can only be interpreted emotionally, and those who lack it I despair of. And that's when the poems sort of stagger now and then, when I talk about despair.

But in a sense it's this very sensitivity that isolates the poet or makes him a lonely man, isn't it?

Yes, I quoted from a letter I received from a very young student at Columbia, Rachel Blau: “whether as the intensity of seeing increases, one's distance from them, the people, does not also increase.” It was a profound and painful question that I had asked myself in her words. And that's what you are asking me again, for all that I've written a whole poem to establish, if I could, the concept of humanity, a concept without which we can't live. And yet I don't know that poetry is not actually destructive for people, because what you are implying is true. It does lead to the growing isolation of the poet; there's no question in my mind about it. I can only say that for all one's fears and hesitations and doubts, and for my rejection of poetry for twenty or twenty-five years, I think that what we really want is not to establish a definition of the good and then work toward it, but rather to see what happens happen, to go wherever we are going. I think a poet comes to feel that this is all he does—moves us in the direction we are going.

I think it's interesting that for all your desire merely to report your feelings and to repudiate an ethical aim for your poetry, you do have strong ethical convictions to express. But, as you've said, the important thing is that the ethic be felt and not merely constructed. I notice that your poetry does refer to the Depression on occasion, and I imagine that your feelings during this period were particularly intense.

That's true. I think it was fifteen million families that were faced with the threat of immediate starvation. It wasn't a business one simply read about in the newspaper. You stepped out your door and found men who had nothing to eat. I'm not moralizing now—and I've been through this before—but for some people it was simply impossible not to do something. I've written an essay that appeared in Kulchur 10 in which I explained that I didn't believe in political poetry or poetry as being politically efficacious. I don't even believe in the honesty of a man saying, “Well, I'm a poet and I will make my contribution to the cause by writing poems about it.” I don't believe that's any more honest than to make wooden nutmegs because you happen to be a woodworker. If you decide to do something politically, you do something that has political efficacy. And if you decide to write poetry, then you write poetry, not something that you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering. That was the dilemma of the 'thirties. In a way I gave up poetry because of the pressures of what for the moment I'll call conscience. But there were some things I had to live through, some things I had to think my way through, some things I had to try out—and it was more than politics, really; it was the whole experience of working in factories, of having a child, and so on. Absurd to ask myself whether what I undertook was right or wrong or right for the artist and the rest of that. Hugh Kenner interrupted my explanation to him of these years by saying, “In brief, it took twenty-five years to write the next poem.” Which is the way to say it.

I probably won't stop writing poetry this time, not because I've changed my evaluation of things but partly because I feel I have only so much time left and that's what I want to do. During those years I was perfectly aware of a lot of time before me and I at no time thought I wasn't a poet. I don't remember saying it clearly to myself, but I never felt that I would never write a poem again.

What did you actually do during the 'thirties?

Oh, well, we were Communists, all right. I don't know whether to say we had philosophic doubts, but we knew that some forms of activity were of very questionable usefulness. We made sure that what we were doing was not politicalizing but something we really intended to do. We were in a way isolated; all our friends were poets and most of them were poets of the right wing. We joined the movement to help organize the unemployed. There're little accounts of it in the poems, which I think I muffed. The story has to be told very forthrightly and somehow I couldn't do it. It was a matter of going from house to house, apartment to apartment; I think we knew every house in Bedford-Stuyvesant and North Brooklyn and all the people in them. We wanted to gather crowds of people on the simple principle that the law would have to be changed where it interfered with relief and that settlement laws would have to be unenforceable when they involved somebody's starvation. And we were interested in rioting, as a matter of fact—rioting under political discipline. Disorder, disorder—to make it impossible to allow people to starve. It also involved the hunger march on Washington as well as local undertakings.

For how long were you active?

Not so many years. Then there's the well-known story of the difficulty of escaping from the Communist philosophy and attitudes and one's Communist friends. And then there came about a situation that made it impossible for us to participate anymore, even after the difficulty with our own thinking. We were under threat by the McCarthy committee and had to flee the United States. I don't think I have to tell the whole story about that. You get questioned as to who you knew and you refuse to answer and you get jailed. We did not want to get jailed; that would have been only a matter of a year—we weren't terribly important—but we had a child and it would have been a bad thing. Mexico wasn't an absolute refuge, but it made it a little more difficult to get us and we knew we needed only to make it a little difficult. Nobody was very excited about us. But we did have to flee. It was actually more dangerous to drop out than not because the McCarthy committee would figure you were ripe for becoming an informer and we needed our friends badly—and there was the fact of the child too. But this is a little difficult for me to say. There is a difference in one's attitude, in what one wants to say and doesn't want to say, doesn't want to put down on paper, when one is speaking to a child—well, I can't say I was speaking to our baby daughter. I'll simply say I was being a father, and fathers don't confess to fears even to themselves. That is in its way political, too. It's part of the whole pragmatism of social and political attitudes, the test of goodness, which extends awhile when one is thinking of a child. But it's much more complex. It was actually sort of a different time of life that I sat down again and set myself, for the first time really, to complete a poem, to really finish a poem and be sure I felt I had completed it. It was as a matter of fact in 1958.

Was this while you were still in Mexico?

Still in Mexico. The first poem I wrote was one of the long ones in The Materials. I think it was “Blood from a Stone.” It was a fairly rough poem which I knew I just had to write. It took three years to write the whole collection. I don't know what proportion of the poems were written in Mexico and what in New York.

Just how long were you in Mexico?

From 1950 to 1958.

That's a long time.

A long time.

Did you get involved with Mexican culture?

Yes, some, unsuccessfully. I think every American's experience is unsuccessful in this regard. I could tell very nice stories about Mexico, but I also have a lot of negative feelings I don't even want to state. The fact is that it's not a very good place for Americans to be.

What bothered you in particular?

I really will be attacking Mexico if I get into that, and there's no particular reason. But it had to do with my sense of being a craftsman, for whatever it's worth, and my sense of not being an executive. In Mexico foreigners are not permitted to produce objects, and the law is rigorously enforced. I set up a small business, which was not easy. One becomes accustomed to paying bribes everywhere and with the greatest possible tact and skill—a situation of infinite corruption, to begin to tell it, a society, a culture really trapped and not the fault of the people. They are trapped by their culture, by the relation of men and women, by the absolute corruption of government, by the habits of bureaucracy, the habits of people. One is forced to change class very sharply in Mexico; if one is a foreigner, one has to be an upper-bourgeois citizen, as a matter of law or necessity. None of these things was easy for us; they were by no means easy.

What kind of a business did you manage to set up?

I made—“made” in the upper-bourgeois sense—furniture. I never touched a tool. I set up with a Mexican partner, a very wonderful man and a very fine craftsman.

Was there any specific reason for your coming back in 1958?

Just that we could; the McCarthy thing was over. We only went to Mexico in the first place because we couldn't get passports. We weren't illegally in Mexico but we were helplessly there, and we paid an infinite series of bribes.

What did you do when you got back to New York?

Sat down and wrote poetry. We just found a place in Brooklyn which was easy enough to pay for, and I started writing again. I knew James Laughlin of New Directions Press would give me some consideration and that Rago of Poetry knew my earlier work or at least recognized my name, so I wasn't entirely without connections. I felt that people knew me a little.

Mr. Oppen, I am deeply grateful for your willingness to discuss your poetry and your life.

I have a liking for openness and a willingness to talk and question, and if one says something that is wrong, so one says something that is wrong. One tries not to write anything that is wrong, but conversations are another matter. Sometimes it turns out that people can find common ground or that they have that virtue of the mind I was talking about when they read your poetry—which is just another way of saying that they give a damn.