The facts—as they say—as the publishers provide: “born in New Rochelle, New York on April 24, 1908 … his first book in 1934 (Discrete Series) … his second (The Materials) 1962 … most of his life in Brooklyn … in the late 60s to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, Mary … boating enthusiast … summers on the Maine coast.”

Added to this the known political activism (more apt perhaps would be communal concern) and the removal to Mexico when the postwar witch-hunt got heavy. A decade or more drawn from poetry—but the poetry that has followed reveals there was no real hiatus.

He has declared his wedge into “modern” poetry through Louis Zukofsky's early work. But when one is speaking of a lifetime's oeuvre—as in this case—best to let the poet speak in his own words: he knows what he is doing—consciousness being central to him.

Sincerity: “There is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.”

Discrete Series: “in mathematics … a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each of which is empirically true … the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.”

The poems—then—to illuminate (31 poems in that slender first volume) and the poems still remarkably tensile and fresh: or how time betrays many of the “moderns” by their clinging to its detritus and lacking the vision to read “the world, weather-swept, with which one shares a century.”

The opening words provide a substantive base:

“White”
“Thus / Hides the // Parts—the prudery / Of Frigidaire …”

(The next revealing the clarity of vision and remark/response best quoted in full)

The evening, water in a glass
Thru which our car runs on a higher road.
Over what has the air frozen?
Nothing can equal in polish and obscured
                    origin that dark instrument
A car
                              (Which.
Ease; the hand on the sword-hilt

Pound had spoken of poetry being at least as well written as prose—but had overlooked the extra-syntactical dimension that poets from as far back as language beginnings had discovered in breath thinking/ feeling.

The double-edge of this—hardly calls for explication.

“Her ankles”
“The three wide
Funnels raked aft …”
“The lights”
“The mast” etc. etc.

As Oppen declared: “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.”

To make a thing of it—the poem—declaring itself:

The edge of the ocean,
The shore: here
Somebody's lawn,
By the water.

And here—if your breath bothers to shape the articulation as articulateness you will find—characteristic of this poet—each word loving itself—that sacrament of dancing together Eliot descried in East Coker. As if the ear perceived what the mind breathed.

You will say: But it's not profound. Yet love is revealed in just such quiet modulations, such excellence of attention, where the lover does not have to point to himself to exist. How:

In this place, two geraniums
In your window-box
Are his life's eyes.

Which found renewal once more in Zukofsky's (Four Other Countries):

… regularly spaced
flower window boxes
                    of Berne …

As I have suggested—if a poet works long enough—into and through a given and givens of life—his work will incorporate its own ultimate critique. The critic (as such) may do no more than reveal and/or fathom it. So that the first book may end properly unended upon:

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)”

Dante's Commedia is recognizably of a time and place—as well as of a most individual and conjunctive spirit—but its locality penetrates our own even yet with a vision and a music that joins the stars. This alone is the “measure” that exceeds all date—even as it subsumes it.

Oppen has a transparent faith—an active confidence—a loyalty to—his word—which is—as he realizes—ours too. “I was thinking about a justification of human life, eventually, in what I call the life of the mind.” He joins Stevens at this point. But where Stevens—in his own version of the romantic—improvises and brings off remarkable cadenzas—Oppen prefers to try to see closer to find his leverage—as metaphysical Archimedes—towards spiritual community:

Likely as not a ruined head gasket
Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft
Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a
                                        pile-driver:
A machine involved with itself, a concentrated
Hot lump of a machine
Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with
                                        the valves jumping
And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing
                                        stops,
Is stopped, with the last slow cough
In the manifold, the flywheel blundering
Against compression, stopping, finally
Stopped, compression leaking
From the idle cylinders will one imagine
Then because he can imagine
That squeezed from the cooling steel
There hovers in that moment, wraith-like and like
                                        a plume of steam, an aftermath,
A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of
                                        comprehension.

(“Image of the Engine” from The Materials)

Hayden Carruth in an essay in Parnassus recently on Robert Frost feels himself critical of Frost's “sincerity” rather frequently—but is there any doubt that enters any mind before Oppen's words? His confidence in felt language becomes our own. In the after-mathematics here how incredibly apt becomes the word “comprehension”! How did this very model of William Carlos Williams' “machine” acquire its momentum as feeling—if not through the poet's devotion to his language—to the capacity of it operating within him?

Oppen often repeats words—not for mere effect ever—but as if he were literally discovering the sense in them and he were startled by it:

… The lost
Glitter of the stores!
The streets of stores!
Crossed by the streets of stores
And every crevice of the city leaking
Rubble: concrete, conduit, pipe, a crumbling
Rubble of our roots …

The shock is metaphysical. Perception moves beyond itself into the light—though no one sees better than this poet

Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuables. From disaster
Shipwreck, whole families crawled
To the tenements, and there
Survived by what morality
Of hope
Which for the sons
Ends its metaphysics
In small lawns of home.

(“From Disaster”)

He says: “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 … if one changes the line-ending.” Or how he actually does it—moves it:

The planet's
Time.
Blood from a stone, life
From a stone dead dam. Mother
Nature! because we find the others
Deserted like ourselves and therefore brothers. Yet
So we lived
And chose to live
These were our times.

Here the movement from line to line reveals cadence of thought and sense. The heft of it would be lost in any other dispensation.

Perhaps Oppen's most telling power is in his deceptively quiet—almost hidden—statements. Firm and yet requiring us to meet him in the words in order to come across—to reach their true depth—as these verses that close his poem on returning to his “Birthplace”:

                    … The house
My father's once, and the ground. There is
                    a color of his times
In the sun's light.
A generation's mark.
It intervenes. My child,
Not now a child, our child
Not altogether lone in a lone universe that
                    suffers time
Like stones in sun. For we do not.

Nevermind—O academic grammarian—the syntax that demands one's remaking. It is precisely there we enter and share feeling.

Perhaps only one who has abandoned poetry—felt an inadequacy in it—and then returned to it—as to the only place—can sing as he does:

… What I've seen
Is all I've found: myself.

Or:

… One might look everywhere
As tourists do, the halls and stairways
For something bequeathed
From time, some mark
In these most worn places
Where chance moves among the crowd
Unearned and separate
Among the crowd, the living, that other
Marvel among the mineral.

“I wrote”—he writes—‘not the symbol but the scene.’” Oppen is more than literate—but he—like Rimbaud—and any one who has gone “into” poetry—lives his words and the life we feel is just that life he has renewed there.

It reminds me of a wonderful almost illiterate Polish-Australian painter friend of mine in Paris—who used to—out of loyalty to me—attend poetry groups that I conducted at George Whitman's bookshop Mistral opposite Notre-Dame. One evening—or perhaps the next day—after a session at his atelier-bedroom he rebuked me for trying to explain poetry to people who didn't understand. I pointed to some postcard reproductions of Soutine and Chagall and others whom he deeply admired and asked: What would you do to help people see such works? He fumed and said: I'd say—Goddammit—you fatheads—Look—look—look!

In the face of so little poetry these days—for all the quantity presented—it is hard to believe sometimes that this work could be overlooked (pace the Pulitzer Prize and all that noise) and yet it is a safe bet that very little of it is allowed to seep into the schools or anywhere that intelligent feeling might be awakened by it.

He writes—or says:

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

One fact only remains: Oppen is a poet—a maker of poems. And by that I mean in all simplicity and difficulty—one who has found through language a way to share what he has realized AS realization—AS experience. There is nothing more I can do here than offer what little evidence the space permits:

What man could do,
And could not
And chance which has spared us
Choice, which has shielded us
As if a god. What is the name of that place
We have entered:
Despair? Ourselves?
That we can destroy ourselves
Now
Walking in the shelter,
The young and the old,
Of each other's backs and shoulders
Entering the country that is
Impenetrably ours.

(“The Crowded Countries of the Bomb”)

You ask: What has happened through the years to the man's poetry? Has it developed—has it “grown”? You can see and hear the move beyond thing—beyond poem itself (not poetry)—into the plenum of what he is at—where a lifetime of feeling and intelligence brings him to be. “All that there is, is / Yours …” “We must talk now. Fear / Is fear. But we abandon one another.” This is no longer a poetry of theoretics; it is one that can embrace its doubt.

Veritas sequitur …
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!
                                                                                Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
                                                                      The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
                                                            Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
                                                            The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

(“Psalm”)

I find myself drawn to response—to wanting to respond not to Oppen—but into a world of poetry he encourages. So that I find myself saying

How
impossible it is
to die
                    We have had
the word of
                                        men—
more than promises—
the word kept
as we keep it—
not to save it—
but to be saved
                                                            by it—
spent.
The question is: how does one hold an apple
Who likes apples
And how does one handle
Filth? The question is
How does one hold something
In the mind which he intends
To sell? The question is
When will there not be a hundred
Poets who mistake that gesture
For a style.

(“The Gesture” from Five Poems About Poetry—#1)

(He says frankly enough: “My abilities / Are ridiculous: / / To go perhaps unarmed / And unarmored, to return / / Now to the old questions—”)

Parked in the fields
All night
So many years ago,
We saw
A lake beside us
When the moon rose.
I remember
Leaving that ancient car
Together. I remember
Standing in the white grass
Beside it. We groped
Our way together
Downhill in the bright
Incredible light
Beginning to wonder
Whether it could be lake
Or fog
We saw, our heads
Ringing under the stars we walked
To where it would have wet our feet
Had it been water

(“The Forms of Love”)

The Zukofskys took me over—from Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights—to see the nearby Oppens—the one time we've met—some 15 years ago. I recall nothing of his words. There was cordiality. Now there are the words and I come to know him—to know his poetry. We must be patient with ourselves.

Of course there is Blake—whose sincerity also is become irrelevant—for something is moving through—to blaze in the face of the blinding Tyger. There is William Carlos Williams and the openness of speech and its trusted accuracy—even if only to record uncertainty, despair, or the futile hope. Boats, the structures of man, the sea, the city, the impossible beauty of a wild thing, poetry.

One more poem of his and one of my own as continuing movement outward—and then you must fish for yourself—must move also towards poetry (which includes the direction of standing still and beating the heart at its beat).

consciousness
                    in itself
of itself carrying
          ‘the principle
                    of the actual’ being
actual
itself ((but maybe this is a love
poem
Mary)) nevertheless
                              neither
the power
of the self nor the racing
car nor the lilly
                              is sweet but this

(“Who Shall Doubt”)

We speak with and through the words of others and feel them anew and feel the poetry: (this time my own in homage)

There is no way to get there—but having
arrived—and that's our predicament—we
find methods of exploring beyond it.
The issue is not whether any is
true—but whether any does or will do.
True? What kind of meaning might that word bear?
We feel and dwell upon the pain of what
being alive—only here—implies. Truth—
indeed—is breath wrestles us to the ground.
And there—like that mythological man
we dare to resemble—we kick back—reach
from the heaviness and heave of this—to light.

(“Antaeus”)

A mutual friend of ours, William Bronk, writes—as if he met here:

My hands explore your touch as though your touch
were reality and they explained it. Slow
to learn, they ask it be explained again.
Again. Or as though they were not quite sure
of the reality they meant to explain: here,
they say, and this, this also, this.
Oh, the reality is this. To explain
is possible. Touch me. I touch you.

(“The Touch”)

It is a laying-on of hands/of words. “Miracle of”:

We have begun to say good bye
To each other
And cannot say it

In Japanese, the word Sayonara means simultaneously hello and goodbye—but as I have had cause to explain to students here (in Kyoto) in English at least one must say hello before one can say goodbye.