Piling up pieces of paper to find the words

—George Oppen

In the previous chapter, I described how Gertrude Stein's most recalcitrant work reveals a social narrative in textual practices that would seem to serve entirely aesthetic ends. Those practices include her use of repetition, her deployment of social idiolects, her puns and pronominal play, her satirical use of canonical genres (play, sonnet, Bildungsroman), her flattened diction. What I have called “textual practices” Stein called “composition” to invoke both the evolving character of writing in time and the overall shape of the text. But perhaps we can see this social narrative in the physical page itself—not the published version of a text but the handwritten or typed manuscript on which the author first begins to compose. How does the materiality of the page interact with the materiality of social forms beyond the archive? What happens when the writer foregrounds manuscript and archive in the final published version? What is on the surface of the page?

To answer these questions we might turn to a page from the papers of George Oppen […]. It is relatively free of penciled marks or emendations. Brief prose remarks are spaced at intervals, sometimes separated by typed underlining. At the top of the page is a short lyric entitled “Rembrandt's Old Woman Cutting Her Nails”:

An old woman
As if I saw her now
For the first time, cutting her nails
In the slant light

It is a poem whose brevity and economy embody many of the values one associates with Imagism and Objectivism. The only concession to a larger theme is the phrase beginning “As if,” which introduces the absent poet, a third participant in the conversation between painter (Rembrandt) and old woman. This “As if” finds its visual correlative in the reference to “slant light,” which hints at the indirect source of sight, mediated through a painter, a historical period, an aesthetic frame, a rhetorical displacement: “As if I saw her now.”

Below the poem, perhaps serving as a commentary on it, is a prose remark, typed in caps:

WE HAVE A LONG TRADITION OF CONTEMPT FOR MATTER, AND HAVE CEASED TO NOTICE THAT ITS EXISTENCE—AND ONLY ITS EXISTENCE—REMAINS ABSOLUTELY UNEXPLAINED

To some extent this prose extends the poet's meditation on Rembrandt's design but shifts the emphasis from the painting's subject—the old woman—to its materiality, a shift that, as subsequent lines make clear, has distinctly existential implications:

We speak of people's death, except the deaths of the extremely old, as if they might have lived forever Of course they could not have, and therefore the difference between thirty years of life and seventy years does not in itself define tragedy

But the wives or husbands and parents and children!! That is, when the young die, there are the bereaved By the time the old man or woman dies, no one is bereaved? Dare we say that?

What began as a depiction of an old woman has now become an interrogation of the life beyond her. The author seems anxious to interpret the painting by understanding the world he shares with it, a world in which matter “matters.” And to the degree that both painter and poet engage the problem of mortality, they share the same world. What links poet and painter, youth and age, painting and subject is care: “It would be hard for human nature to find a better ally in this enterprise than love,” the poet quotes from The Symposium. But care alone is not enough; the material expression of that care, as presented in painting, poem, and prose, is the form that love takes. “Mankind is a conversation,” and one might add that the page itself, in its wandering and questioning, is the material analog of that conversation.

This page by George Oppen, one of thousands like it among his papers housed at the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego, represents a crucial problem for any consideration of literary genre: that of the poem's materiality, its existence as writing.¹ Once we have seen the poem in this context, it becomes difficult to isolate it from its written environment. Indeed, can we speak of “poetry” at all when so much of it is embedded in other quotations, prose remarks, and observations? Does Oppen's oeuvre end in the work we know as The Collected Poems, or does it end on the page where it began? I would like to take up some of these questions by thinking about the status of the manuscript page, not out of some antiquarian interest in early drafts but out of a concern for epistemological and social questions that lie at the heart of genre theory. For if genre implies a way of organizing knowledge, then to “think genericity” is to think thinking.

The question of genre in recent literary theory has most often taken the form of a debate over “new” genres (various forms of non-narrative prose, sound poetry, procedurally derived forms) or the rediscovery of previously marginalized genres (the manifesto, the fragment, the epistle). And while this discussion has had a useful taxonomic function, it has not addressed the issue of genericity itself, the degree to which modern and postmodern texts challenge notions of categorization altogether. It could be said that the current debate extends a more pervasive romantic skepticism over formal categories, manifesting itself on the one hand by a pursuit of some idealized, Mallarméan livre or on the other by a ruthless exhaustion of types through forms of appropriation, quotation, and parody.² It could equally be said that both positions rest on an opposition between literary and ordinary language that can be transcended only by exploiting the possibilities of the former to accommodate selective aspects of the latter.

The most significant critique of genericity has occurred within the context of poststructuralism with its emphasis on écriture as the recognition of difference (différance) within the linguistic sign. Literature ceases to be defined by its “signs of literariness” but rather by its intransitivity, its refusal of rhetorical and generic markers. This refusal is a deterritorializing gesture that displaces the authority of official print culture in favor of what Deleuze and Guattari (1991) have called a “minor literature.” I would like to retain poststructuralism's emphasis on writing as trace, as inscription of an absence, but emphasize the material fact of that trace, an inscribing and reinscribing that, for lack of a better term, I have called a “palimtext.” By this word I mean to emphasize the intertextual—and interdiscursive—quality of modern writing as well as its materiality. The palimtext is neither genre nor object but a writing-in-process. As its name implies, the palimtext retains vestiges of prior inscriptions out of which it emerges. Or, more accurately, it is the still-visible record of its responses to those earlier writings.

The palimtext is a kind of ruin that emerges in an era when ruins no longer signify lost plenitude. The modern ruin, as Walter Benjamin points out, is immanent in mass-produced commodities, an allegory of modern materiality's impermanence and ephemerality. Like the electric lights in Stein's Faust play, the modern commodity-as-ruin transforms the idea of illumination to a gaudy display, invented for maximum exposure and salability, not for the subtleties of chiaroscuro. Textual self-referentiality—the modern equivalent of the baroque allegorist's memento mori—becomes a recognition of transitoriness and ephemerality in a world committed to the illusion of progress and permanence. Baudelaire is Benjamin's example of the modern allegorical poet precisely because he first diagnoses the shock features of modern urban life—the juxtapositions of dissimilar phenomena encountered among crowds in the city. The Paris of Baudelaire's poems “is a submerged city, more submarine than subterranean,” and like the city the poet's lyrics are an archaeology of historical transformations and ruptures; they provide a “pictorial image of dialectics, the law of dialectics seen at a standstill” (Reflections 157).

It is this image of dialectics at a standstill that best describes the manuscripts of George Oppen, a poet whose lyricism has often been treated as the replacement or repression of his own political involvement. By looking at his manuscript page, we can test his avowed interest in separating art and politics by showing his poetry as a form of daily practice. Because Oppen's work so little challenges generic boundaries, his material text becomes important for reconsidering the authority of those boundaries. The image of historical rupture in the lyric also animates my understanding of more recent writers such as Susan Howe, whose self-conscious manipulation of the material features of the page attempts to animate voices that speak from the margins of American frontier ideology. In both poets, the material nature of the sign and its specifically social and discursive contexts become part of what Oppen called a “lyric reaction to the world.”

“A LYRIC REACTION TO THE WORLD”

Poetry, according to Louis Zukofsky, “is precise information on existence out of which it grows” (Prepositions 28). It is seldom observed, however, that this growth begins and ends on a page. Traditional textual research has provided us with a methodology for investigating such materiality, but always with an eye toward some definitive version out of which to establish a copy text. As Jerome McGann points out, textual criticism has had until recently one end: “to establish a text which … most nearly represents the author's original (or final) intentions” (Critique of Modern Textual Criticism 15). That desire to recover the author in the work is part of a “paradigm which sees all human products in processive and diachronic terms” (119). Those intentions can be discovered by locating the last text upon which the author had a primary hand before it came under the influence of copy editors, compositors, and house style. The textual editor must master the corrupt text and delete any superfluous or extraneous material not directly related to the work in question. Genre becomes an ally in such mastery insofar as it provides a codified set of rhetorical and textual markers to which the text must ultimately conform. The editor's service to the author therefore is mediated by generic expectations.

Modern poets, in this context, are no different from previous generations in the way that they keep notebooks, use paper, and revise their work. But poets since Pound have incorporated the material fact of their writing into the poem in ways that challenge the intentionalist criteria of traditional textual criticism. At the same time that poets have foregrounded the page as a compositional field, they have tended to “think genericity” to an unprecedented degree, making the issue of formal boundaries a central fact of their poetics. Indeed, for many poets today it has become meaningless to speak of “the poem” but rather of “the work,” both in the sense of oeuvre and of praxis. We can see the evolution of such a poetics not just in the writings of poets but in their papers and manuscripts that, in increasing numbers, have been deposited in academic libraries. What we see in such collections is the degree to which writing is archaeological, the gradual accretion and sedimentation of textual materials, no layer of which can ever be isolated from any other. George Oppen's page, to return to my initial example, is only one slice through a vast, sedimented mass that quite literally rises off the page, carrying with it the traces of prior writings. That page is part of a much larger conversation for which the published poem is a scant record.

One of the most important implications to be derived from studying the material text is the way that the page reinforces certain epistemological concerns, notably the idea that writing is a form of knowing. Robert Creeley's remark, “One knows in writing,” Charles Olson's equation of logos and mythos (thought and saying), and Allen Ginsberg's poetics of spontaneity are but three examples of a pervasive attempt to ground thought not in reflection but in action (Creeley, “An Interview,” 279; Olson, The Special View of History 20). George Oppen is no exception. In a letter to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, he speaks of the poem as a “process of thought” and then goes on to qualify this remark:

but it is what I think. A poem which begins with an idea—a “conceit” in the old use of the term—doesn't learn from its own vividness and go on from there unless both terms of the conceit or one at least is actually there. I mean, had it begun from the parade, the experience of the parade and stuck to it long enough for the thing to happen it could have got one into the experience of being among humans—and aircraft and delivery trucks—?

(“Letters to Rachel Blau DuPlessis” 121)

For Oppen the poem does not represent the mind thinking; it is the thinking itself, including its marginal references, afterthoughts, and postscripts. One may begin with a “conceit,” but, if one attends to the “parade” of passing things, one will find oneself “among humans—and aircraft and delivery trucks.” Like one of his favorite philosophers, Heidegger, Oppen understands that knowledge is gained not by bracketing experience but by finding oneself already in the world, engaged in human intercourse. The poet strives to reduce words to their barest signification, prior to their subordination to cognitive or rhetorical schemes.

The ideal of a poetry that no longer represents but participates in the process of thought is hardly new. It is part of the romantic movement's desire to escape forms of associationism and empiricism by a belief in the poem's creative nature. George Oppen is seldom mentioned in such contexts, but this is because we have tended to read his poetry through modernist spectacles. Critics have seen his work as the logical extension of certain Imagist principles involving “direct treatment of the thing” and economy of language. It is as though we have focused only on the first word in the title to his first book, Discrete Series, to the exclusion of the second. By doing so, we have reified the processual—and I would argue dialogical—nature of his thought in an ethos of the hard, objective artifact.³ Such a reading is not surprising; many of Oppen's own comments speak of the poem as a discrete object among others, “a girder among the rubble,” as he liked to quote from Reznikoff. This emphasis on the single poem is supported by his oft-stated desire to find the final real and indestructible things of the world, “That particle of matter, [which] when you get to it, is absolutely impenetrable, absolutely inexplicable” (“Interview” 163).

My contention is that, rather than being regarded as a series of single lyric moments, George Oppen's poetry should be seen as “a lyric reaction to the world,” a fact that becomes dramatically evident once one looks at a page like the one described earlier (“Interview” 164). His poems represent the outer surfaces of a larger debate that appears fragmentarily in broken phrases, ellipses, quotations, and italics. We know, for example, that Of Being Numerous is constructed largely around quotations from Meister Eckhart, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Plato, Whitman, as well as friends such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Armand Schwerner, and John Crawford, all of whom enter the poem silently in the form of inverted commas. And even where such obvious quotation does not occur, as in the poems from Discrete Series, Oppen's paratactic logic, truncated syntax, and ambiguous use of antecedents embody the shifting attentions of a mind dissatisfied with all claims to closure. Like the “Party on Shipboard” in that volume, Oppen's narrative movement is “Freely tumultuous” (Collected Poems 8).

This idea of poetry as a “lyric reaction” can be understood best by comparing a poem from Of Being Numerous with a page from which it emerged. In the fourth section of “Route,” we encounter the image of a sea anemone, which launches a series of observations on language:

Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is the
“heartlessness” of words.
Neither friends nor lovers are coeval …
          as for a long time we have abandoned those in
          extremity and we find it unbearable that we should
          do so …
The sea anemoine dreamed of something, filtering the sea
          water thru its body,
Nothing more real than boredom—dreamlessness, the
          experience of time, never felt by the new arrival
          never at the doors, the thresholds, it is the native
Native in native time …
The purity of the materials, not theology, but to present
          the circumstances

(Collected Poems 186)

“Route” deals with the difficulties of achieving clarity, the lure of the finite and indestructible in a world of fluid boundaries. The section quoted here appears to be a qualification of that clarity, an attempt to express the “heartlessness” of words when they refuse transparency.⁴ This qualification takes the form of a meditation on boredom, a state in which the world is reduced, as Oppen says, to “dreamlessness.” The reality of boredom is, as he says elsewhere, “the knowledge of what is,” a state in which things have been divested of instrumental reason and may be encountered spontaneously, without reflection (“Interview” 169). It is a state in which one is naturalized in one's environment, “Native in native time.” Things have lost their novelty and may now be encountered ready-to-hand. This is a far cry from modernist despair over ennui as expressed in writers from Baudelaire to Eliot. In Oppen's version, boredom is the condition within which the “purity of the materials” may be experienced.⁵

The most confusing lines of this passage are those concerning the sea anemone. It is the only concrete image of the section and so becomes all the more important in establishing exactly how Oppen understands boredom. On the one hand, the sea anemone could represent a kind of ultimate passivity in which the organism's whole existence is conceived around “filtering the sea / water thru its body.” This interpretation would seem to be borne out by a brief prose remark included among Oppen's papers:

Boredom, the sense of lack of meaning—In the cities from the sense of being submerged in the flood of people, of not being able to see out, of being a passenger—In the small cities from the sense of shallowness, the shallowness of affairs———Actually, of nothing happening

Here boredom is compared to “being submerged in the flood of people,” a sort of urban analog to the anemone's condition. On the other hand, because it is capable of dreaming (at least in Oppen's version), the sea anemone might represent the endurance of concern and novelty against the deadening effects of routine. However the “conceit” is being used, Oppen is clearly trying to find an image of reduced nature, a biological reality that challenges the theological and metaphysical. In its published version, the image of the sea anemone cannot be interpreted symbolically; it is one of those “heartless” words that must be interrogated over time and through the poem.

This refusal of the anemone to become symbol is all the more evident when we look at a page upon which it makes an earlier appearance. Unlike the final published version in which all lines are relatively long, the typescript page contains a variety of prose and lined verse forms […]. The image of the sea anemone is contained in considerably shorter lines and seems to respond to a previous prose remark:

Impossible to use a word without finally wondering what one means by it. I would find that I mean nothing, that everything remained precisely as it was without the word, or else that I am naming absolute implausibilities, which are moreover the worst of all nightmares

The attempt to name, to “use a word without finally wondering what one means by it,” leads to a cycle of repetition in which the only thing to say is that “we die”:

We die we die we die
All there is to say
The sea-anemeone dreamed of somethong
No reason he should not
Or each one does
Filtering the sea water thru his body

I have retained Oppen's typos and misspellings to indicate how, at least in his early writing of it, the sea anemone was closely identified with the individual. The pronoun “one” is hidden in the misspelled word “anemeone,” and “somethong” is explicitly developed in the penultimate two lines (deleted from the published version). These two lines also provide an alternate antecedent for “his” in the final line, uniting anemone and human subject. Oppen wants to link human mortality with that of other creatures—as if to say “each one of us is like the sea anemone, living in a perpetual state of boredom, filtering the world rather than reflecting upon it. In this state all we can say of existence is that ‘we die.’”

This existential fact is not alleviated by theological alternatives. In the published version, Oppen stresses “The purity of the materials, not theology, but to present the circumstances” (emphasis added), but in the typescript version an attack on theology becomes the central feature, directly linked to Oppen's concern with language: “Because some people wrote a book a long time ago, they think they know what god is.” This remark on the limitations of an authorizing logos is extended later in a definition of the trinity as “the man, the spirit, and the mystery. / Which is man. And says nothing about god.” In pencil, Oppen has added “Job's God,” a remark that may very well have inspired the final remark: “an inconceivably brutal universe; it is possible that sea anemones dream continually.” Clearly a logocentric world view is inadequate to the brutality of the universe, a disparity given secular force by the image of the anemone and salvific force by the story of Job.

What we see in the typescript page but not in the published poem is the dialogue between individual sections, each responding to and qualifying the previous. The sections are linked, one to the next, in a debate or argument over the efficacy of language in a “brutal universe.” Language is both the vehicle and the object of Oppen's speculations as he oscillates between competing propositions. Such dialectical progress can be seen in the published version to be sure, but the page—with its spelling mistakes, holograph emendations, and variable lineation—provides a “graphic” indication of how immediate and personal that progress is. Where the published page provides us with a series of more or less balanced (if truncated) prose statements on the theme of language, the typescript page provides us with the “graphic voice” out of which that theme emerges. The page shows Oppen grousing about difficulties of self-expression, the image of the sea-anemone serving as a satiric version of the poet himself dreaming in his watery environment. The sea anemone, rather than serving as an icon of either boredom or conscious reflection, is a term around which all other sections constellate. It does not “serve” the poet's purpose but gets in his way, forces him to ask each question anew.

THE ARCHIVE

The varieties of intentions I have described on one page are repeated throughout Oppen's archive. Like the individual page, the archive returns a quality of voice and physicality to work that may seem, in its published version, hermetic and isolated. In terms that I have already employed, the archive revises generic expectations, turning lines of poetry into quotations, queries, and speculations. As this chapter's epigraph suggests, Oppen was engaged in “Piling up pieces of paper to find the words” that would ultimately become poems. The archive is the physical remains of that piling up and deserves to be described as a text in its own right.

As the onetime curator of the Archive for New Poetry, I had a unique chance to view Oppen's papers in their pristine state, before they were divided up into separate categories according to genre (manuscripts, notes, correspondence, daybooks, etc.). When I first opened the boxes in which the papers were sent, I was not prepared for the chaos that appeared. Where some archives come in folders or envelopes with dates or other identifying marks on them, Oppen's papers appeared as a great midden with shards of writing in every conceivable form, no one page related to the next. A page containing a verse from the early 1960s would be followed by a page with scribbles from his last days. Prose and poetry were interspersed with grocery lists, phone numbers, quotations from philosophers, observations on films, tables of contents from books (his own and others). Every conceivable type of paper had been used, from cheap, high-acid newsprint (seriously decaying and flaking) to letterhead bond. Writing had been performed equally by typewriter and pen, the former often heavily annotated by the latter. Occasionally, passages of particular importance had been circled by crayons or felt-tipped pencil. Each manuscript page was like the collection as a whole: a marvelously scribbled, jumbled, and chaotic written field.

Although the bulk of the collection consists of individual pages like those already discussed, there are numerous larger manuscripts made up of anything from two to several hundred pages. In some cases, these manuscripts consist of a final typed draft of poems for a book, but in most cases the gathering is simply a heterogeneous scatter of poems, jottings, and typings. The methods by which these groupings are held together deserve some comment. Oppen used a variety of fasteners—from safety pins, pieces of wire, and pipe cleaners to ring binders. The manuscript for the poem “The Little Pin” is held together, appropriately enough, by a little pin. Another batch of pages is held together by a nail driven through the upper left-hand corner into a piece of plywood. A better definition of Objectivism cannot be imagined.

Oppen's method of composition can be best glimpsed by considering what I will call his “palimpsestic” manuscripts: pages of individual poems onto which new lines or stanzas have been glued so that the revised draft seems to rise vertically off the page in a kind of thick, textual impasto. Rather than add new lines on fresh sheets of paper, he would build his poem on top of itself, adding new lines, in many cases ten or twelve pages thick. One such palimpsest, containing work from The Materials, appropriately enough given the title, is “built” out of a ring binder. On the front and back inside covers, Oppen glued the entire script for a reading given at the Guggenheim Museum, including his own interlinear commentary.⁶ The binder's metal clasps hold part of a manila envelope (addressed to the Oppens in Brooklyn) to which other drafts and fragments are glued. The whole pile of pages is held together by pipe cleaners that are wrapped, at the top, around a number 2 pencil and a one-inch roundhead screw.⁷

My purpose in describing the material component of Oppen's work is to suggest the degree to which writing was first and foremost a matter of something ready-to-hand—as immediate as a coat hanger or piece of wire. The pipe cleaners, metal clasps, and glue are visible representations of those “little words” that Oppen liked so well, the basic materials of a daily intercourse. “Gone for Breakfast in Z coffee shop across the street,” reads the back of one heavily scribbled folder, indicating that the recto of poetry easily became the verso of daily living. And just as he used whatever writing surface was nearby, so he drew upon the “signage” that surrounded him: newspapers, books, magazines, and, of course, conversations, parts of which can be found recorded through the collection. Oppen did not keep a separate notebook for poems and another for quotations and another for prose but, rather, joined all of them together in a continuing daybook.⁸ One finds drafts of letters to friends on pages that contain the beginnings of poems. In many cases, a quotation from a newspaper would become the genesis of a poem, a poem the genesis for a prose commentary on an article in the newspaper.

This daily, unbound diary covers an extraordinary range of subjects: the youth culture of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, the poetics of Imagism, the work of John Berryman (“shameless but seductive”), Jung, the Vietnam War, the Altamont concert, Elizabeth Bishop's “The Fish” (“I had always thought ‘o to be like the Chinook’ was the silliest line ever written, but I see that it is not”), Charles Olson on PBS (“giving birth to the continent out of his head like Jove”), Plato, Hegel, and Marx. His comments on Robert Lowell's “Skunk Hour” are worth quoting in full:

perhaps I simply do not understand the Christian sense of “sin.” I do not understand a sin by which no one was injured. If the people in the love cars were embarrassed by his peeking, then it was a sin. If not, it was merely undignified.

Or his remarks on Pound:

—and if Pound had walked into a factory a few times the absurdity of Douglas' theory of value, which Pound truculently repeats in the Cantos would have dawned on him—it sometimes pays to have a look And to keep still till one has seen.

Treated palimtextually, such remarks elucidate that trinity of concerns that informs Oppen's entire life: politics, epistemology, and poetics. The archive suggests that all three are inextricably united like those jerry-rigged manuscripts held together with pipe cleaners. As he meditated on contradictions in American politics, so he drafted poems; as he drafted poems, so he thought about the relationship of old age to love. The manuscripts do not suggest someone working toward the perfect lyric but one struggling for a vision of society in which the poem plays an instrumental role. To adapt a remark on the page mentioned earlier, Oppen “knows what he thinks but not what he will find.”

Notes

1. All references to George Oppen's papers are to the George Oppen Manuscript Collection at the Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California, San Diego.

2. To be historically accurate, the debate over genres is no longer “current,” important work by Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, David Antin, Ihab Hassan, and others having been conducted between 1970 and 1980. What has superseded debate over genre more recently has been a powerful “narrative turn,” marked most dramatically by the work of Fredric Jameson but visible in current trends in cultural studies, new historicism, and postcolonial studies. I discuss this shift in chapter 5.

3. Exceptions to this rule of reading Oppen's work as discrete poems are Joseph Conte's chapter on Oppen in Unending Design and Alan Golding's essay on “George Oppen's Serial Poems.”

4. In earlier drafts of the poem, section 4 directly follows those which, in the published version, conclude section 2: “I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity.”

5. Eric Mottram glosses these lines as stating that “Knowledge of boredom becomes a philosophic tool to ascertain what the facts are” (“Political Responsibilities of the Poet” 151).

6. The unusual convention of providing an oral script for one's reading is sustained by Oppen's colleague Charles Reznikoff. In the latter's papers, also housed in the Archive for New Poetry, can be found several such scripts for various venues, accompanied by written “offhand remarks” to the audience. A visual record of such practices can be seen in a video made of Reznikoff's reading at San Francisco State University given in March 1973 and available through the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, Calif., 94132, catalog number 36/28.

7. Many of the palimpsestic manuscripts had originally been pasted to the wall of Oppen's study, suggesting that he not only wrote on paper but lived quite literally within it.

8. I have edited a selection from Oppen's “daybooks” in Ironwood 26 (1985): 5-31. Excerpts appear, as well, in Conjunctions 10 (1987). Since many pages from his daybooks are early drafts of what became letters, it is worth looking at Rachel Blau DuPlessis's edition of The Selected Letters of George Oppen, which faithfully maintains the poet's spacing and typography.