SOURCE: “The Subway's Iron Circuit: George Oppen's Discrete Series,” in Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 121-41.

When The Objectivist Press was inaugurated at the Brooklyn apartment of George Oppen in 1933, a few blocks from the site where Walt Whitman first printed with his own hands a book called Leaves of Grass, it was agreed that the authors would pay for the publication of their own work, alternative financing being unavailable. The advantage to George Oppen, acting as editor and publisher of his Discrete Series in 1934, was that this slender green book of thirty-seven pages was made as he wanted it: one poem, however short, to a page.

In an interview, George and Mary Oppen frequently answer for one another, finish sentences the other has begun, and occasionally speak the same words in unison; so it can be assumed that Mary registers George's discontent with the “poetical economy” with which New Directions reprinted his first book in The Collected Poems of George Oppen: “Well, Jay Laughlin just got a little bit too Scotch and wouldn't give a whole page to each poem and the way they've been reprinted makes some people think that if there are three little bits on a page, that's one poem, whereas that wasn't the way the Discrete Series was printed.”¹ This edition, black and white as an old TV, emphasizes a commercial publisher's parsimony and not the true economy of words which William Carlos Williams marks in the title of his 1934 review. The serial form of the book is the unfortunate casualty of the confusion over which “lumps, chunks,”² as Oppen calls his verse, constitute poems and which do not. Like the steel cables that are at once the structural support and the aesthetic appeal of the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges (landmarks of two of Oppen's residencie en la terra), an essential structural tension of the serial poem occurs between the series as relational system and the autonomy of each poem: the whole must act as a taut mechanism, just as the parts must have their independent sway. Oppen chose not to number his poems consecutively, 1 through 31, as Robert Duncan has, until recently, numbered his Passages; so it is critical to the book as a discrete series that his decision be respected to isolate the poems, each on its own page, as Creeley has done in his Thirty Things.

In an interview with L. S. Dembo, Oppen stresses the structural tension between the series and the individual poem as he defines the title of his book:

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.

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

A. 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.³

Oppen attempts to “construct a meaning” as one might build a bridge: should he impose a too rigid “rule,” his serial structure will snap in a high wind. Each poem is neither derived from the preceding nor does it generate the next—each must be, as he says, “empirically true.” This discretion is also contained in Jack Spicer's house-room analogy for serial structure: each room has its functional place in the house as a whole, yet the poet discretely douses the light from each room before proceeding.

In a letter to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Oppen makes a late addendum:

I thought too late—30 years too late—that the fly leaf should have carried the inscription

14, 28, 32, 42

which is a discrete series: the names of the stations on the east side subway.⁴

These four numbers are a mathematical example of a discrete series, but they also function analogously: the stops on a subway line which they indicate offer, as one rises out of the dark tunnel onto the cross-streets of Lower Manhattan, a series of empirically derived observations. Hart Crane shares Oppen's experience of New York in the section of The Bridge (1930) which he calls “The Tunnel”:

The intent escalator lifts a serenade
Stilly
Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then
Bolting outright somewhere above where streets
Burst suddenly in rain. …(5)

For Crane as well as Oppen, the enormous metropolis offers itself to the individual view only in discrete parts.

After the neo-Jamesian proem to the book, whose source in Henry James's “The Story in It” has been perhaps too thoroughly researched—down to the additional e that clings to Oppen's version of Maude Blessingbourne's surname—the second poem of the series offers a more characteristic example of Oppen's mechanism, if one can find the machine in the rubble of his syntax:

White. From the
Under arm of T
The red globe.
Up
Down. Round
Shiny fixed
Alternatives
From the quiet
Stone floor …

(Collected Poems 3) [hereafter abbreviated as CP]

Charles Tomlinson, the British ally of the Objectivists, first suspected that the empirical object (which this poem does not, finally, represent) is the control handle of a circa 1929 elevator.⁶ The scene could easily be the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, white ticker tape strewn about, strangely quiet after the stocks, their precipitous rise complete, had suddenly crashed: “Up / Down.” My own ignorance of economics, by which all stocks appear enigmatic alternatives, seems to support this interpretation. But the more salient question is, do we need to know what the referential object of this verbless poem is, and if we entirely satisfy our curiosity upon learning what it is, is the poem then a good one? William Carlos Williams, in his review of Discrete Series, answers this question in the following extended argument. The importance of a poem

cannot be in what the poem says, since in that case the fact that it is a poem would be a redundancy. The importance lies in what the poem is. Its existence as a poem is of first importance, a technical matter, as with all facts, compelling the recognition of a mechanical structure. A poem which does not arouse respect for the technical requirements of its own mechanics may have anything you please painted all over it or on it in the way of meaning but it will for all that be as empty as a man made of wax or straw.

It is the acceptable fact of a poem as a mechanism that is the proof of its meaning and this is as technical a matter as in the case of any other machine. Without the poem being a workable mechanism in its own right, a mechanism which arises from, while at the same time constitutes the meaning of, the poem as a whole, it will remain ineffective. And what it says regarding the use or worth of that particular piece of “propaganda” which it is detailing will never be convincing.

(MP 267–68)

The preceding statement has been brought to you by a counterrevolutionary modernist intent on eradicating the weed of romantic organicism. Oppen is not so interested in compelling our recognition of some machine in an urban landscape, whether elevator, ticker-tape machine, or as one critic rather perversely suggested, a shower stall, as compelling our recognition of the poem itself, the series itself, as mechanical structure. As critics, we would be a good deal too smug to think that, having exhumed Maude from the collected tales of Henry James or, like urban archaeologists tunneling under New York City, having unearthed the elevator car, half a century old at the bottom of its shaft, our job was done.

How, then, does the poem work? White and red are dialectical adjectives, the colors of the two globes, round, shiny, and fixed, which indicate alternatives of movement. As such, these adjectives are signifiers of an opposition. Lacking a verb, the poem relies heavily on prepositions to convey a sense of movement. The central pair, “Up / Down,” reinforces the opposition of the color adjectives. The syntactical impulse of the poem depends almost entirely on prepositional phrases: “From the / Under arm of T,” where “Under,” disassociated by a space from the anatomical description “underarm,” functions more as a reduplicated preposition. It may well be that the poet stands in an elevator, making an empirical observation of the white-up, red-down indicators of his own or other cars, noting the hush of a large, marbled lobby of an office building. But the prepositions that govern this poem are relational—like the lights, they are signs of an opposition. They are gears that, as they mesh, turn in opposite directions. We never get the referential, substantive noun—and if we agree with Williams that the poem is to be an object among the other objects of the empirical world, it cannot assume a secondary, representational relationship with the world.

How good is this poem? TO Publishers, begun in France by the Oppens and the forerunner of The Objectivist Press, included the poem in An “Objectivists” Anthology (1933) with the title “1930's.” The title implies that the referent of the poem is the entire Depression era, a formidable task for a poem of such modest means. We can propose, as Louis Zukofsky did of Charles Reznikoff's contribution to the Objectivist number of Poetry, that the particulars of the poem function metonymically to suggest the larger contexts: “It is a salutary phase of Reznikoff's sincerity that the verbal qualities of his shorter poems do not form mere pretty bits (American poetry, circa 1913) but suggest … entire aspects of thought: economics, beliefs, literary analytics, etc.”⁷ But, as Robert Creeley has said of his own early work, the poem strains under the obligations of being an anthology-bound “hit single.” The poem becomes good, in a sense, when Oppen sees fit to drop the unwieldy title and to include the poem in a discrete series, not an anthology; numbered 1, it is paired with the third poem in the series, numbered 2 and located on the facing page. The poem succeeds, not solus, but as a part of the whole series, its small gears meshing with larger; at the same time, it is discrete, requiring neither a substantive referent nor the rule or information of any preceding or following poem in the series.

The poetry of the Objectivists is predominantly metonymic; Oppen in particular is concerned with the relationship of part to whole. In one of his few essays, he rejects, with a nod to both Williams and Pound, the metaphors of nineteenth-century romanticism: “It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue; but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet's perception, of the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.”⁸ The third poem of Discrete Series, and the partner of the poem just discussed, illustrates the metonymic concerns of the Objectivists:

                    Thus
Hides the
Parts—the prudery
Of Frigidaire, of
Soda-jerking———
Thus
Above the
Plane of lunch, of wives
Removes itself
(As soda-jerking from
the private act
Of
Cracking eggs);
big-Business

(CP 4)

Metaphors, of which there are none in this poem, are no better than refrigerator cases, glossy and white, which prudishly cover the nuts, bolts, and flywheels of the machine; the metonymic “parts” are what is real and functioning in the Objectivist poem, the rest is all appearance. To the general public, metaphors are synonymous with poetical writing; to the consumer of the quick lunch in a bourgeois capitalist society, the corned beef hash emerges with its poached egg already nesting in the center. The Objectivist poet is an Apex Tech repairman not afraid to get his hands dirty.

Unlike the previous poem, this one supplies its context, or whole; the abstract noun subject is detained until the final line—“big-Business.” As Williams indicates in his review, unless the poem is first “a workable mechanism in its own right,” it will never be a convincing piece of “propaganda.” Oppen's gentle Marxism succeeds because of the poem's precise metonymic style, free of the bombast and sweeping gestures of condemnation which he found in much of the poetry of the Left.⁹ No soda-jerk, (and here Oppen departs from Pound) he does not make his poetry a service industry for any political party or economic program; it is a “private act,” like cracking eggs, which one can and should do for oneself.

Oppen has praised William Bronk' poems as “a permanent part of literature,” saying that his is “a poetry of the use of his own senses, for the universe is not an abstraction … it cannot be derived by abstracting.”¹⁰ One of Bronk's poems provides expert commentary on the Objectivist's metonymic approach to poetry and the world:

“Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World”
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.
Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that “here” is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.(11)

Bronk's promotion of the pronoun “what” to a substantive in line 2 and the lurching “which what?” of line 4—a precarious suspension of syntax—demonstrate a stylistic and epistemological affinity for what Oppen refers to as “the little words that I like so much”—that one knows the world only through a series of particulars, met and connected. While Oppen's verbless snippets and Bronk's fully formed clusters might not, at first, indicate an alliance of poetics, both poets recognize, as T. S. Eliot could not, that the form of the whole world is not within the circumference of the poet's perception. Charles Altieri codifies this distinction: “Where objectivist poets seek an artifact presenting the modality of things seen or felt as immediate structure of relations, symbolist poets typically strive to see beyond the seeing by rendering in their work a process of medi[t]ating upon what the immediate relations in perception reflect.”¹² Or as Bronk says more simply: we can make a world, but does what we make contain something of the real? Only the poem that employs metonymy as an approach to the real world can meet Oppen's “test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.”

Bronk's travelers, eating foreign foods and adjusting to local time, could comfortably appear in the eleventh poem of Oppen's series:

“Party on Shipboard”
Wave in the round of the port-hole
Springs, passing,—arm waved,
Shrieks, unbalanced by the motion——
Like the sea incapable of contact
Save in incidents (the sea is not
                    water)
Homogeneously automatic—a green capped
                    white is momentarily a half mile
                    out——
The shallow surface of the sea, this,
Numerously—the first drinks——
The sea is a constant weight
In its bed. They pass, however, the sea
Freely tumultuous.

(CP 8)

The effect of a “party on shipboard” is conveyed in the first three lines with an economy possible only through the contiguity, or tangency, of two perceptions: a single wave seen through the porthole (with its implied context, the sea); and, abruptly, a flailing arm (with its implied context, the remainder of the body of, the general group of, party-going passengers unbalanced by their “first drinks” and the white-capped waves). The wave and the “arm waved” are metonymies that, in a contiguous relationship, establish a complex scenario—revelry on the open sea.

The lines “Like the sea incapable of contact / Save in incidents” introduce an epistemological investigation which Oppen claims was not fully engaged until the series “Of Being Numerous” (1968). Contact, or empirical observation, is basic to the Objectivist program and to the method of Discrete Series itself. Williams, in the journal called Contact, claims as the essential quality in literature “contact with an immediate objective world of actual experience.”¹³ Although the poet can know parts of the real world in incidents (the splash of a wave against the porthole, or someone's drink against your arm), how can anyone, by direct contact, know the whole sea or the whole of humanity? Oppen collapses the terms of the simile, which in line 4 is syntactically detached, in his discussion of the poem with L. S. Dembo:

You see the separate waves but somehow there is the sea, just as you see people and somehow there is, or could be found, humanity. … The waves are the individual person. Humanity can't be encountered as an incident or something that has just happened. But all one has is “this happened,” “that happened”; and out of this we try to make a picture of what a man is, who these other people are, and even, what humanity is. … I left it as a contradiction, that I know there is such a thing as “the sea,” the whole. But the poem doesn't manage to see it, and it records the poet's—my own—inability to see it.

(MP 201-2)

As Bronk says, “conceded, we make a world”; so Oppen recognizes that out of discrete incidents we make a picture of what humanity is, hoping something real is contained there. A metonymic poetics is then the most tightly fitting wrench for this epistemological nut.

The epistemological “contradiction” that Oppen “left” in “Party on Shipboard” is closely related to the structural tension of a discrete series of poems. Oppen is “attempting to construct a meaning by empirical statements.” Each poem is an autonomous, discrete observation, but the poet recognizes that each poem, as a part, must participate in the relational system of the whole, the series, if he is to construct a meaning. He also recognizes that if each statement remains discrete, empirically derived, he will not be able to see the whole from any one part; the individual poem will not depend on the information of the whole, what precedes or follows it, for its meaning. How can the poet “construct” a meaning from statements that are “empirically,” separately, valid? The epistemological contradiction between the empirically encountered part and the implied but unverified whole finds its structural equivalent in the discrete series; if metonymy is the wrench, the series is the engine itself.

How can we know, from its “shallow surface,” that “the sea is a constant weight / In its bed”? The adverb “Numerously,” itself syntactically afloat, suggests that one approaches the whole through a multiplicity of separate incidents; it also directs us, for further inquiry, to the later series “Of Being Numerous,” which begins:

There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.
Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series. …

(CP 147)

Oppen, aware that a discrete series is a structural reinforcement of the epistemological contradiction between the encountered part and the implied whole, considers whether, through the numerosity of occurrences in an infinite series, he may come to know himself as an object among other objects—that is, both himself as an individual and “ourselves,” humanity. The process, though, is still metonymic; each occurrence is only a part of that infinite series which might include the whole of a person's life. In these forty consecutively numbered poems, Oppen contemplates the relationship of a discrete, or finite, series (which emphasizes the separate validity of the individual poems) to an infinite series (which emphasizes the continuous process and the multiplicity of poems which find their validity in that process). In this endeavor, he approaches the poetics of Robert Creeley, whose infinite series, Pieces, was published in 1969, one year after the collection Of Being Numerous.¹⁴

Metaphor has been the traditional mode of language for those poets, from Coleridge to Eliot, who aspire to a comprehensive view of the world; they are able, as Oppen claims, to find an analogue for anything. The circumference of their perception is coextensive with the world, and their esemplastic imagination, with which they scope the field of similarities, is located at the focus of this one great circle. The “vehicles” of each metaphor orbit the central “tenor,” held by the centripetal force of the poet's imagination. This metaphoric mode of language is especially suited to the single, well-made lyric.

Metonymy as a mode of language is, by contrast, most appropriate to the structure of the series. Contiguity, the method by which metonymies combine to make larger structures, rather neatly describes the tangent and yet autonomous relationship of the individual poems of the series. The poems are like gears which, as they mesh, are only in contact one tooth at a time. Each metonymy is a point on the periphery of some whole or context; the force upon it is centrifugal, and so not directed toward a central poetic ego. Williams provides the graphic illustration in his essay on Marianne Moore: “There is almost no overlaying at all. The effect is of every object sufficiently uncovered to be easily recognizable. This simplicity, with the light coming through from between the perfectly plain masses, is however extremely bewildering to one who has been accustomed to look upon the usual ‘poem,’ the commonplace opaque board covered with vain curlicues. They forget, those who would read Miss Moore aright, that white circular discs grouped edge to edge upon a dark table make black six-pointed stars.”¹⁵

Or compare this image of “faces in a crowd” at the train depot, from the twenty-first poem of Discrete Series (closer, actually, to the semiotic apprehension of Creeley's “Numbers” than to Pound's painterly “Metro”):

The shape is a moment.
From a crowd a white powdered face,
Eyes and mouth making three———

(CP II)

A number of similar things, like modular seating or penny rolls, will stack up, paradigmatically, for easy storage. “Numerous” metonymies will form chains, contiguously linked, their contexts like “circular discs grouped edge to edge,” or to put it more sociably, like the bronze rings of the old Ballantine beer label. For this reason, the metonymic mode of language finds its structural correlative in the serial poem. Oppen approaches “the whole” through the numerosity of occurrence, not the comprehensiveness of the ego; his chosen form, with a postmodern humility, is the discrete series, not the epic (The Waste Land or The Cantos) or the sequence (Four Quartets or Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.)

The nineteenth poem of Discrete Series illustrates the combinatory aspect of metonymic poetry:

Bolt
In the frame
Of the building——
A ship
Grounds
Her immense keel
Chips
A stone
Under fifteen feet
Of harbor
Water——
The fiber of this tree
Is live wood
Running into the
Branches and leaves
In the air.

(CP 10)

Three discrete metonyms, bolt, keel, and fiber, combine to give form to the poem. The three contexts, while diverse, are not distressingly scattered or in any way surreal; it would certainly be possible, though not required, to find a pier in Lower Manhattan from which one could observe a building, a ship, and a tree. Such a referential justification is not the true test of poetry. Rather, we ask, is the construction of the poem sufficiently adroit that, as with a machine or system, there is nothing redundant or superfluous? In answer to this question, Williams states in his review: “Oppen has moved to present a clear outline for an understanding of what a new construction would require. His poems seek an irreducible minimum in the means for the achievement of their objective, no loose bolts or beams sticking out unattached at one end or put there to hold up a rococo cupid or a concrete saint, nor either to be a frame for a portrait of mother or a deceased wife” (MP 269).

Certainly Oppen's disposition of his nouns on the line is as careful as a grand master's placement of his rook or queen; the three punctuation marks in the poem are like the best of a spot-welder's craft. The larger contexts, building, water, and air, close each of the three sections. At the same time, they interact with the opening noun of the next section: we move from one human construct, “building,” to another, “a ship”; “water” keeps the nutrients running through “the fiber” of the tree. The metonyms themselves, though discrete, are also seen to be related: the bolt in the frame of the building is not decorative but structural; a sturdy keel is such a sine qua non that it is the traditional metonymy for a ship; and the fiber is that which gives form to all plant life. In short, these three metonyms are the indispensable items in their respective structures. Interestingly, none of them can actually be seen by the poet, like the parts of the Frigidaire. They are not decorative, “vain curlicues,” but structural elements, both in the empirical object from which they are drawn as well as in the poem-as-construct in which they now occur.

A discrete series is a closed system; it is, to provide an analogue, “the subway's iron circuits” (CP 46). The poet and his metonymic mode of language are “the welder and the welder's arc,” joining part to part, rail to rail. In a later series, “A Narrative,” from This in Which (1965), Oppen acknowledges the necessity of a closed system when he says, “things explain each other, / not themselves” (CP 134). In agreement with this statement, Saussurean semioticians might don Oppen's “firm overalls,” since they too recognize that the link between the signifier and the signified, between word and thing, is arbitrary and not intrinsic; as a result, the single sign cannot explain itself and things cannot name themselves—they can only be accounted for in terms of an internally coherent system. A discrete series, then, is a hermetic rather than an orphic poetry.

In his interview with L. S. Dembo, Oppen admits, “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” (CW 175). His preference for the concrete, substantive nouns, like Zukofsky's obsession with the particles “a” and “the,” results in poems that Hugh Kenner has called “systems of small words.” Kenner elucidates Oppen's confession to Dembo:

This is important; it avoids Hemingway's implication that the small words have a more intrinsic honesty. It is cognate to Mallarmé's famous realization that nothing is producible of which we can say that “flower” is the name. (“I say, ‘a flower,’ and musically, out of oblivion, there arises the one that has eluded all bouquets.”) That the word, not anything the word is tied to, is the only substantiality to be discovered in a poem gave Mallarmé ecstatic shivers. … Oppen prefers to note that whatever words may be, men cannot survive without them.¹⁶

This knack of survival is indicated by the ninth poem of “A Narrative”:

                    The lights
Shine, the fire
Glows in the fallacy
Of words. And one may cherish
Invention and the invented terms
We act on. But the park
Or the river at night
She said again
Is horrible.

(CP 138)

In a dark and meaningless world (“And Bronk said / Perhaps the world / is horror,” as quoted in the eighth poem), even the word, an invented term arbitrarily linked to its signified, is warmth and comfort; we may act on words because we trust in the coherence of the system.

Kenner grants absolution to Oppen for his false faith in the little words: “We need not suppose that abstract nouns are empty whereas there is virtue in concrete ones. Rather, all nouns, all words, exist in a network of trust.”¹⁷ But Oppen is not so eager to do penance for his sin. In the Dembo interview, he says, “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 others. It's a sentiment” (CW 180). Although he recognizes that the little words are just as much a “taxonomy,” he cannot suppress a yearning for the elemental word and the colloquial object; the contradiction, as he has said, is “left” in the poem.

Again, as in “Party on Shipboard,” the contradiction that Oppen leaves stranded—his sentiment that the little words are more closely attached to the real and his acknowledgment that language is a system whose signifiers are arbitrarily assigned—is closely related to the structural tension of a discrete series. On the one hand, each term of the series, each individual poem, is to be empirically derived. He claims that “it's been the feeling always that that which is absolutely single [separate, discrete] really does exist,” and that it is “absolutely inexplicable” (CW 176). Oppen insists on empirical truth: “That they are there!” (CP 78). However, he can no more present in words the “absolutely single” than Mallarmé can present a flower from a real bouquet. He attempts, instead, to construct a meaning (i.e., the series itself) from these empirical statements. So the series, as an internally coherent system, allows these discrete observations, which cannot explain themselves, to explain each other. The structural tension, then, between a discrete observation and a closed system of relations is in part a manifestation of the contradiction in Oppen's thought regarding language itself—which he rather amiably, and productively, preserves.

Williams, like any economical building contractor, commends Oppen for the “irreducible minimum in the means” with which he constructs Discrete Series; there are no loose bolts or unattached beams “to be a frame for a portrait of mother or a deceased wife.” Discrete Series does, however, include several “portraits” of a young and very much alive Mary Oppen, not as sentimental ornaments, but as essential components in the structural economy of the work. Their eroticism is not a diversion from the urban realities of crane operators, tug boats, or elevators. These love poems function according to the same rigorous principles of composition as any others; they are objects “empirically derived” which nevertheless “explain each other.”

These poems are not, in any sense, a group, implying some thematic development or dependence of one on the other. But neither are they randomly distributed through the series, any more than a carpenter could randomly space 2 × 4 studs under a plasterboard wall. To be thorough, we would need to consider what similarities exist among these poems (their paradigmatic value), their pro- and antagonistic interaction with other contexts in the series, and their syntagmatic relations (the points of tangency or combinative effect of one poem and another). This examination would be fairly exhaustive, and so I have chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, the twenty-fourth poem of the series as a focus for discussion.

Oppen claims to be “a fairly passionate mechanic” (MP 205), and this passion seems to enhance the pleasure he finds in a photograph that juxtaposes a woman and a car:

No interval of manner
Your body in the sun.
You? A solid, this that the dress
                                        insisted,
Your face unaccented, your mouth a mouth?
                                        Practical knees:
It is you who truly
Excel the vegetable,
The fitting of grasses—more bare than
                                        that.
Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car-edge
Incognito as summer
Among mechanics.

(CP 12)

Flattery is not the intention of this poem; twice he questions whether the image is actually of his lover. The woman is an unaccented solid—the dress does nothing for her figure, the photographer has caught her, as happens, expressionless. She has, like any Econo-Car, “practical knees.” And finally, it is as an elemental solid that the poet praises her: “you who truly / Excel the vegetable.” She is, like the other subjects of Oppen's poetry, and the poems themselves, unornamented by the traditional metaphorical blandishments, “more bare than / that.”

Oppen has said that he has a sense of “the greater reality of certain kinds of objects than of others. It's a sentiment,” perhaps the only sentiment he allows himself. He continues, “I have a very early poem about a car closed in glass. I felt somehow it was unreal and I said so—the light inside that car.” In the ninth poem of the series, that car, a limousine, elicits “a feeling of something false in overprotection and over-luxury” (CW 180-81). The “sentiment” to which Oppen refers is partly Marxist, a distaste for the accumulation of wealth; he assigns to such objects a lower level of veracity—the car appears in “a false light.” So the unflattering portrait of a woman in bright sun, “among mechanics,” not chauffeurs, is a positive counter in his argument, true praise.

The sixteenth poem in the series can be related to the twenty-fourth poem; their points of contact are very precise and easily evident.

She lies, hip high,
On a flat bed
While the after-
Sun passes.
Plant, I breathe——
                                                            O Clearly,
Eyes legs arms hands fingers,
Simple legs in silk.

(CP 9)

This is a more private scene, charged with a passive eroticism; only the master mechanic himself is present, pretending to be a houseplant. The bright sun continues to shine on his lover; we notice that the “noon” of “afternoon sun” has fallen away under the scissors of Oppen's cut-and-paste method of revision. The two most discrete lines of the poem, “Plant, I breathe——/ O Clearly,” flower with a gentle sprinkle of Oppen's own explication: “My own presence is like a plant, just breathing, just being, just seeing this. Well, no, I was talking about eroticism, just internal sensations, like a plant. I don't exist otherwise. It's the closure of eroticism within oneself. It's two things, the tremendously sharp vision of erotic desire, together with a kind of closing of one's self, within oneself emotionally” (CW 203). “O Clearly,” a syntactically detached exclamation, is then a marker for the empirical observation of the Objectivist campaign, brought to the intensity of an erotic passion. When we consider that the poet's lover “excels the vegetable,” she may then be said to be more open to an emotional-physical exchange (certainly her posture indicates this), in contrast to the poet's solipsistic pleasure. The concluding metonymic list of body parts (might they not include a fender, exhaust manifold, or head-light?) stops, like “practical knees,” on “simple legs.” They are, however, adorned with silk, since Oppen claims that he hoped it would be “an erotic poem … a dirty poem” (MP 203).

Another circular disc that can be placed edge to edge with the first love poem we examined is the twenty-second poem of the series:

Near your eyes——
Love at the pelvis
Reaches the generic, gratuitous
                              (Your eyes like snail-tracks)
Parallel emotions,
We slide in separate hard grooves
Bowstrings to bent loins,
                                        Self moving
Moon, mid-air.

(CP 11)

In “‘The Shape of the Lines’: Oppen and the Metric of Difference,” Marjorie Perloff takes a moment in the midst of her exacting prosodic analysis of this poem to note that “‘Love at the pelvis’ is hardly a very pretty image, despite the near-rhyme of ‘Love’ and ‘pelvis,’” and that the poet, “perceiving his beloved's eyes quite unromantically as ‘snailtracks,’” attempts a rather desperate simile (MP 224-25). Although this poem is the most sexually explicit one in the series, concluding in an active engagement, it is curiously similar to the twenty-fourth poem in its unflattering images of the woman. This poem and the sixteenth are joined, like Siamese twins, at “hip high” and “pelvis”; both focus our attention to the erogenous zones without much prior ambient description. The initial conjunction of eyes and pelvis, the parallel and yet separate grooves of the lovers, and their “self moving / Moon” shape suggest the less conventional, less “generic,” “69” position. But then the design of the poem, the positioning of the predominant noun phrases, is more significant than the finally undiscernible bodies of the lovers. Oppen is, after all, an Objectivist poet, not the casting director for a blue movie.

About this positioning, Oppen has said, “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 of the speed, of the alterations and momentum of the poem, the feeling when it's done that this has been rounded” (CW 180). As Kenner has said, casually embracing Mallarmé and Oppen, the words, not the bodies of the lovers, are the only substantiality to be discovered in the poem. Or there is Williams's desire, with one eye on Juan Gris, to write a poem that is “pure design.”¹⁸ So Oppen is concerned that each poem, and the series entire, be a made thing, “rounded,” with no sense of an undone.

Although “bent loins” provides an erotic charge missing from the twenty-fourth poem's “Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car-edge,” in the most intimate of poems Oppen consistently gives priority to the design of the poem, the form of his lines, and a cubist's attention to geometrical shapes, ignoring the flattery or sentimentality attendant upon mere subject. (We might even say that he mocks the traditional “your eyes are like limpid pools” encomiums.) His hip high, bowstrings, and bent elbows are all bolts in the frame of his series, points of tangency which demonstrate that these are not single lyrics but poems at once discrete and related.

Oppen claims that in “Drawing,” the twenty-ninth poem of the book, he was “talking about form … primarily, since that's a major preoccupation of this whole volume.”¹⁹ “Drawing” and the last poem of the series are explicit comments on the form of Discrete Series; they are the construction foreman's blueprints.

“DRAWING”

Not by growth
                    But the
Paper, turned, contains
This entire volume

(CP 14)

The organic form of romantic poetry, like the growth of a plant in which the form of the bud is preceded and determined by the form of the seed or stem, is rejected; instead, with epigrammatic brevity, Oppen describes the mechanistic program of the Objectivists—each page turned as one would, at the start of a new day, turn over the engine of one's car. “Each term is empirically justified rather than derived from the preceding term.”²⁰ The car either starts or it doesn't. The effect of this formal description relies heavily on the 1934 edition of Discrete Series, in which each page, turned, revealed a separate but related poem.

But Oppen, who employs so few finite verbs, says that the turning of pages “contains” the entire volume; we assume that his careful choice of the verb has formal implications for the series. A discrete series is a finite series, a system of containment. Oppen has said that “discrete” means “empirically true” and “separate.” This containment, then, indicates the Objectivist preference for the finite series, or “rounded object,” over the unbound and ongoing process of the infinite series. Oppen constructs a system of containment with his pages; he does not, as we have mentioned, try to encompass all the world. Nor does he endeavor to take, as Creeley does in his infinite series Pieces, “a common audit of days.” The Objectivist selects discretely from the incidents of the day, and it is only in the combination of these separate pages, turned, that he constructs a meaning, contains his empirical observations in a closed structure.

The last poem of the series also concerns itself with formal arguments:

Written structure,
Shape of art,
More formal
Than a field would be
(existing in it)——
Her pleasure's
Looser;
‘O—’
                    ‘Tomorrow?’—
Successive
Happenings
(the telephone)

(CP 14)

Oppen will not let us forget that the poem is a made thing, a construction; it is, like a machine, assembled, so that there are no redundant, nonfunctioning parts, no loose bolts. As in the twenty-ninth poem, he contrasts his structural approach to poetry with the organic: a field and a woman's pleasure are “looser” than the forms of art. Williams records in his Autobiography the first meetings of the Objectivists in George Oppen's apartment—or, at least, he records their arguments for an implicit formal necessity in the poem:

The poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. Therefore, being an object, it should be so treated and controlled—but not as in the past. For past objects have about them past necessities—like the sonnet—which have conditioned them and from which, as a form itself, they cannot be freed.

The poem being an object (like a symphony or cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day.²¹

In Discrete Series, Oppen has invented an object, a new form consonant with his day; only the series, not the sonnet sequence, responds to the current necessities of “Successive / Happenings / (the telephone).” Each call is discrete, not derived from the information provided by a preceding call. Calls can be entirely unrelated (a wrong number), or fairly intimate: “‘O—’ / ‘Tomorrow?’” And until recently, “G Oppen” was assigned a number in the Pacific Bell System's San Francisco telephone book. The telephone, which did not exist when the sonnet was invented, becomes the contemporary analogue for a poetic form in which individual poems are at once separate and part of a system of communication.

The binding of my New Directions Paperbook 418, The Collected Poems of George Oppen, is already beginning to loosen around the few pages allotted to Discrete Series. When they finally fall out, I will cut and paste the poems, much as Oppen revised and edited his manuscripts, each on its own page. Discrete Series, an object consonant with its own day, continues to be the most economical formal example of the correlation of a metonymic mode of language and a serial structure. Empirically true in its particulars, yet the whole a finite, closed system. When Oppen says, with all Objectivist sincerity, that he “was attempting to construct a meaning by empirical statements,” that meaning is nothing but the form of the series itself.

Notes

1. Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel, “Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,” in George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Burton Hatlen (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), p. 41. The title of Williams's review of Discrete Series, to which I allude, is “The New Poetical Economy,” reprinted in Hatlen on pp. 267-70 from Poetry 44 (July 1934). Further references to this volume are abbreviated MP.

2. The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New York: New Directions, 1975), p. 21. All poetry by Oppen is cited from this volume, abbreviated CP.

3. “George Oppen,” in The Contemporary Writer, ed. L. S. Dembo and Cyrena N. Pondrom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), p. 174. First published in Contemporary Literature 10 (Spring 1969). Further references to this interview are abbreviated CW.

4. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “George Oppen: ‘What do we believe to live with?’” Ironwood 5 (1975): 65. Thomas Sharp also suggests the subway as a “prototype” for Discrete Series, but the Oppens, in conversation, were lukewarm to the idea (MP 277). Sharp nevertheless quotes a passage from Mary Oppen's autobiography Meaning a Life (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978) which concisely illustrates both the “serial” and the “discrete” aspects of subway transportation: “We didn't yet know the subway system [in New York, 1929], and we got off at stations at random just to see what was above ground. Once we stuck our heads out into a cemetery, another time we were on clay fields with standing pools of water, and once we were among giant apartment buildings in the Bronx, block after block” (p. 89).

5. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966), pp. 110-11.

6. Charles Tomlinson, “An Introductory Note on the Poetry of George Oppen,” Ironwood 5 (1975): 13. Harold Schimmel rebuts in favor of a “Bonnard bathroom nude” (MP 299-300), but his arguments for “Under arm” and “red globe” as the erotic glimpses of a keyhole peeper seem unnecessarily Freudian. Thomas Sharp attempts to confirm Tomlinson's suggestion of the elevator in conversation with the Oppens (MP 281). However, his claim that “with this knowledge, the poem gains for the present reader total clarity” reduces the poem to a riddle that one declares satisfactorily “solved” when one has “discovered” the referent. Such a poem—filled in and thrown out like the puzzle page of a daily newspaper—would be dispensable when the reader arrives at the “total clarity” of the referential “solution.” Gilbert Sorrentino has suggested in a letter to me that the object may be “a signal stanchion on the New York subway system platform (no longer, I think, in use). The signals were meant to alert passengers as to the identity of the next arriving train (red and white were the ‘colors’ of the dead and departed Sea Beach Express). Each line had its own color code—two greens, the 4th Ave. local, etc. etc.”

7. Louis Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification,” in Poetry 37 (February 1931): 273. In this special number edited by Zukofsky, the current first and third poems of Discrete Series appear in earlier versions, numbered 1 and 2, under the title “1930's.” It is possible that “1930's” was a proto-title for the entire series. The decade, overburdening the single poem, becomes a more convincing referent for the thirty-one poems in a serial form. As Williams says, the Objectivist intends to make “an object consonant with his day.”

8. Oppen, “The Mind's Own Place,” Montemora 1 (Fall 1975): 133. First appeared in KULCHUR 10 in 1963.

9. In “Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,” Mary claims, “We had no particular leanings toward the Communist Party—we were looking for someone who was active and who was doing something right now, and was something we could join. But we looked at the poets, we looked at the writers and we did not think that was any kind of art. Neither the paintings, the things that I was doing or—George can speak for himself—but we couldn't enter into that sort of artistic world. It was propaganda art” (MP 33). And George has said, in “The Mind's Own Place,” “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art” (p. 136), explaining in part his twenty-five-year hiatus from poetry—to confront the Fascists in Germany, and to evade the McCarthy hearings by self-imposed exile to Mexico.

10. Oppen, “An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook,” in the special Oppen issue of Ironwood 26 (1985): 24-25. Oppen has testified to his admiration of Bronk's work in several interviews; he refers to Bronk in the series “A Narrative” (CP 138).

11. William Bronk, Life Supports (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), pp. 43-44.

12. Charles Altieri, “The Objectivist Tradition,” Chicago Review 30 (Winter 1979): 6.

13. William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (1921; New York: New Directions, 1969), pp. 33-34.

14. In “George Oppen's Serial Poems,” Contemporary Literature 29 (Summer 1988): 221-40, Alan Golding argues that Oppen must not be considered as a kind of “miniaturist” but as a poet whose work is characteristically in serial form. Golding is of course quite right in his assessment. He does very little, however, to distinguish between the several types of long forms: “Oppen did distinguished work in the genre of—call it what you will—the long poem, the serial poem, the poetic sequence. My point, then, is this: that to overlook Oppen's sequences as sequences—to ignore why Oppen works in this genre—is to misunderstand, by limiting, the nature of his achievement” (p. 222). As with other critics, Golding makes the mistake of blurring rather than distinguishing these types of the long form in contemporary poetry. Oppen's serial poems are clearly not sequences, and they should not be described as such. Similarly, he compares Oppen's technique to Creeley's, but refers to the latter's volume Pieces as a “sequence of fragments” (p. 235). Such a description hardly clarifies Creeley's distinct practice of seriality, though the comparison with Oppen stands.

15. Williams, Selected Essays, p. 129.

16. Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 169.

17. Kenner, Homemade World, p. 170.

18. Williams, Imaginations (1932; New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 288.

19. Kevin Power, “An Interview with George and Mary Oppen,” Montemora 4 (1978): 187.

20. Oppen here slightly rephrases his definition of the discrete series, in a letter to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, quoted in her essay in Ironwood 5: 64.

21. Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967), pp. 264-65.