… not primitive, but the new primitive: a late thought retrospective with or anticipating an earliest freshness.

—Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare

Not primitive as unskilled in the use of tools, but the new primitive: one who would put aside tools and the skills acquired over a lifetime to come upon the universe as if for the first time, who would come to language and the writing of poems as if for the first time. The thought is late in the sense of recent or current. In this case, it represents what has been done in the years since the publication of George Oppen's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1975). It is retrospective with and anticipates the freshness of his own earliest work, the poems of Discrete Series (1934), in which the alteration of light “brightens up into the branches / And against the same buildings.” What the late thought of new primitive finds in this new book is the necessity of the light within things and of the light without:

Because the book has relatively few pages and because the lights are everywhere among them, it is possible to read Primitive as a single poem with a single idea. “A Political Poem,” the first poem of this larger serial “poem,” ends with a confrontation of light as day's image which “dawns on the door-steps its sharpness / dazes and nearly blinds us.” The image, which is complex, contains more than the force of the sharp morning light. What else is the condition of loneliness, the loneliness of becalmed ships, of violent men and women of the cities, and the great loneliness of “the sun-lit / earth turning.” The light is overwhelming as the medium through which this complex loneliness, the condition not simply of the individual poet or even of his society, but of the planet itself, is revealed. Whether one begins “with / nothing or / everything,” the loneliness is there. We notice it whenever our attention strays from the self. Or as in Oppen's condensed, oblique line: “for sometimes over the fields astride / of love?.” The question mark is for that moment when the self turns from itself to others and to loneliness. The poem is political, though not doctrinaire, in that the light reveals an external-to-self situation, and does not mystically subsume or transform it. There is the subsequent need to leave the zone of the private self in order to act upon what is seen as a public condition. Thus in the following poem, “Disasters,” it is required of the poet to overcome his own confessed vanity, his self-content, to cease his existence as a legislator of the unacknowledged world (the twist is Oppen's), “to descend / and be a stranger.” Surely, the irony of the descent from one isolation only to end in another cannot be unconscious.

Considered as a whole, the light may be thought of as a combined compound light of the external world's sunrise and of “verse with its rough / beach-light crystal extreme.” But such consideration makes no appearance in these poems. It is either the light within the commonplace things of the external world or it is the light within the conscious self, the mind, or within poetry as an event or construction of language, which is understood as an invention of the mind. There are two lights: both are necessary, the first for perception, the second for vision and the possibility of political as social action.

The end function of the lights is to show the present, the political as social present. “To Make Much” has the poem “discovered / in the crystal / center of the rock.” What is found in the image of the poem so discovered is the “transparent present” and “the abyss of the hungry.” The sequence that emerges from these first few poems holds for the entire series of Primitive. We begin with almost always literal things found in the external world and proceed through the act of discovery involved with these things to come upon images that build to poems yielding still more images, which culminate in a revelation of condition. This revealed condition, the results of vision and not sociology, implies the recognition of others and the connected need for action “in” that condition rather than in poetry. Things of the world attract the mind which makes images which show an extra-self situation or condition which becomes political with the realization that it can perhaps be most effectively acted upon outside the poem.

An aspect of Oppen's late thought is that neither sort of light is sufficient in itself and either may be actually dangerous in isolation. We are warned, in “Waking Who Knows,” that the mind—motive agent for the clarity-light of the poem as a language construction in contrast with the external world upon which it operates in the formation of images—will burn that world down if left to itself.

                    … mind
will burn the world down alone
and transparent
will burn the world down tho the starlight is
part of ourselves.

The external world is a bound for the displacing power of the mind. And that world should be understood as consisting of more than traditional “nature.” It includes all that is outside: “the great open / doors of the tall / buildings and the grid of streets” as well as other selves, the “hidden people,” “the small selves.” The point of “Waking Who Knows” (and of an earlier poem entitled “Primitive” from the This in Which collection) is that, waking from sleep and the self's unchecked dream-work, we indeed don't know if we will find the external “real” world in any recognizable guise. Or: for the moment of waking we find it difficult to distinguish between the reality of the dream world and that of the external world.

An extension of this aspect is the fear that language as mind's invention will pervert what is to be seen and acted upon: “… for a word like a glass / sphere encloses / the word opening / and opening / myself and I am sick / for a moment / with fear. …” This fear, as quoted from “Populist,” is that the relation between the mind and the world, a relation of representation and tension, may be disturbed so that the revealed situation cannot be trusted. One of Oppen's responses to this fear is to turn to those who apparently have little awareness or interest in the possibility of a confusion of lights: “… let the magic / infants speak … in that word blind / word must speak / and speak the magic / infants' speech. …” The infants are magic by virtue of speaking without the division of confusion; they say what they mean and mean what they say. And so it is “but for the gold / light I am lost” in “Gold on Oak Leaves,” a poem written by Oppen in response to “her golden / young poem.” The she-writer may not have been young, but her poem possessed the oneness that Oppen identifies with the young.

It would be a profound error, however, to conclude that Primitive ends in confusion. The final poem of the series, “Till Other Voices Wake Us,” refers back to the writing of Discrete Series—“I named the book / series empirical”—and to what must be read as the present where

                    … the myriad
lights have entered
us it is a music more powerful
than music
till other voices wake
us or we drown

It is the location of the lights within us that is alarming. So infused, we threaten ourselves to be lulled into a false beatific slumber which stops the process of perception to vision and dulls the awareness of the need to act upon what vision reveals. This slumber presents perception of the things of the world and the vision of our own condition. The final poem reminds us that for seeing to continue, for life in any meaningful social sense to continue, there must be new poems, “other voices.” Yet Oppen's frank acknowledgement of the need for those voices should not obscure the chance that they may not appear and that we may drown. Further, the need for them, which is another expression of the need to become a new primitive, is continual.

Nor should the generosity and humility implicit in that acknowledgement obscure the fact that Oppen's vision is tragic, a procession of lights leading to a condition of loneliness or what he has elsewhere called homelessness. What distinguishes it from others is its complexity and that he would propose to act upon what he sees, that he would make himself a new primitive when the laying aside of tools and skills is a genuine sacrifice, that he would invite the voices of others, particularly the young for whom his sacrifice is a model and a goal. And there is no transcendence. George Oppen's vision is complex and valuable. It is present throughout all of his work, but nowhere with the concentration of Primitive, this coda of lights.