[In the following interview which took place on May 25th, 1975, Powers talks with George and Mary Oppen about their lives, their art, and their impressions of other artists.]

[Powers:] Let me begin by asking you about the poem Drawing in Discrete Series. May I quote you:

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

Were you making a statement about the fragmentary nature of the poem and by extension of the fragmentary nature of perception and truth?

[George Oppen:] [Hereafter referred to as G.O.] In a lot of the poems that's said, isn't it? I don't know that I was thinking of it there. I was just speaking about “pointing,” the poems have that quality of simply pointing at the thing as a way of constructing a poem. It's an imagist base that I'm making use of there. But I'm also talking about form, and maybe even primarily, since that's a major preoccupation of this whole volume.

Did you want the poems to be concentrated hard fragments—the solids of what truth was available at that particular moment?

G.O.: I think I've talked about “lumps and chunks” since. I don't know that I was there. It's a sort of romantic drawing. I was just thinking about the thing containing itself and containing its meaning.

In Discrete Series were you interested in flattening out time?

G.O.: Yes, I haven't put it that way, but narrative has almost always been unfaceable for me. I have all sorts of doubts about it, and it violates what we've begun to talk about: my sense of the poem, the “moments of conviction,” I think I've said.

In a poem like the one about the Civil War, and again I'd like to quote it to you:

Civil War photo:
Grass near the lens;
Man in the field
In silk hat. Daylight.
The cannon of that day
In our own parks.

does the word daylight act as a time bridge?

G.O.: Yes, it's a time bridge brought into the present, a sort of middle voice.

And were you then going from the thing seen to the larger statement about the hollowness of war in general?

G.O.: Meaning, conviction, emotion—the immediate emotional response.

Would that emotional response be an integral part of what you mean by clarity?

G.O.: Yes, certainly.

So that's the light coming off what is seen?

G.O.: As in one of the new poems, “That passion, that light / Within and without.”

Is that also true of the Fragonard poem?

G.O.: Yes, the picture, the actual picture. But I was also interested there in the women themselves as almost a mediation of the culture. It's a personal fact that I see it as coming down through the women.

In such poems as Bad Times or the poem about the house on the hill, does your respect for the integrity of the object generate in itself the emotion?

G.O.: Yes, the meaning in the thing itself, but I wasn't getting into phenomenology. I was avoiding it. What I'm saying is what I felt.

I'm putting this a little crudely, but are you setting emotional equations into play? For example, the cornfields behind the house set up warmth, the rigid trees talk of a style of life, and the washing on the line indicates the essential family unit—is that a fair kind of reading?

G.O.: Yes, but it's also and above all the light, and that's the essence of the question you're asking about emotion versus phenomenology. Perhaps that's not the best word. I suppose I use the word light to mean that emotional response in that internal space.

Have you read Ponge?

G.O.: Yes, a little.

What did you think of his way of dealing with objects?

G.O.: Mary was particularly affected by it, but I'm suspicious of that and the whole Symbolist root, although I did use a quotation from Bonnefoy at the beginning of “Route.”

Another affinity I thought you might have felt was with Sheeler and the Precisionists?

[Mary Oppen:] [Hereafter referred to as M.O.] Oh, Williams had it more than we did.

Yes, I see that, but I was looking through some Sheeler reproductions a few days ago and I noticed that there were a whole series of works on New York, on yachts, and on New England, and that his method of construction by architectural cadences was yet another parallel concern.

M.O.: It really didn't strike us. I knew that Williams had always admired him a great deal, but he did not affect me particularly. Or you, George?

No. Well, I think, if I can say so, that we were a bit more sophisticated about factories than Sheeler was. But, nevertheless, we felt that whole area of things and we still do. We sometimes confess to just how much we feel it in Ben Shahn, who, for instance, we refrained from admiring because he developed an imitation of himself. It's only recently, as I've said to Mary, that I've had to confess to myself that every time I pass a rough field of tall grass I see that man sitting in it. Then Hopper, whom we've known, was also very close to us.

M.O.: Yes, much closer.

G.O.: Yes, Hopper is a center of attraction for us. I'm not sure if Williams was, at that time, talking about “precision in form,” it's more nearly a populist concern with “the American Grain.”

It was not so much the vision of industrial potential as the years of the Depression that marked you?

M.O.: Yes, George was working in factories and had practical experience of them. This, of course, gave us a very different viewpoint, and I do think that factories, bridges, industrial constructions, have never been fully expressed in art or in poetry.

G.O.: Well, I certainly didn't have any real sympathy for or interest in that cathedral look, the monument of the times. What fascinated us and kept drawing us was something else—that hidden light.

M.O.: I was painting very primitive paintings at that time. I was trying to get hold of factories and of Brooklyn Bridge and how they came through to me. It was a different approach from George's but there was something in common. A cleanness of line and shape. A respect. I'd never felt that Sheeler's techniques handled it with sufficient solidity. Watercolor was too weak for what I felt. There was no third dimension to his drawing—it was excessively two dimensional. There wasn't any emotional content back of those bricks. It lacked strength.

G.O.: He imposed watercolor on the thing.

But he did have that idea that geometry could hold the truth of the thing and could make a statement about the particularity of the American object.

G.O.: This whole question of “Americanism” certainly did affect us. Mary could perhaps talk more about it than I since she felt it all the way back into childhood. There's a picture of her family in a log cabin. But we both felt, and I've said this often, that our first heading out together, the poetic side of it—although again all sides of it were poetic—was having discovered Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, etc. That was where we commenced together, the feeling of our ignorance, of all Americans' ignorance, of the things that you're talking about in Sheeler, although every time we come back to him I think there's something wrong, as Mary does.

What about the kind of definition given to “Americanism” by the abstract expressionists? I was thinking of De Kooning and Kline, who were directly concerned with the energy of the city.

M.O.: Well, I haven't a great deal of respect for De Kooning, but I do feel the emotional power of Kline. I don't feel it was direct enough to indicate that it was American or that it concerned American factories or history or all the emotional background that go with it. However, I certainly felt the power of Kline and have a great deal of respect for his calligraphy.

G.O.: And the drama is tremendous. I think it is drama, not energy.

M.O.: They're tremendous if you think of walking into them—dramatic, heaven and hell, thunderstorms. In a way they have the kind of power of Turner. I don't think of them as being particularly American, at least I've never accepted them as American. De Kooning came to America with a friend of ours, jumped ship and came in illegally in the 1920s.

G.O.: I regret that they came so specifically to the Museum of Modern Art—which I regard as somewhat of an enemy.

M.O.: But we were also interested in them, we went to the galleries—don't forget we were out of the country, we didn't come back until 1959-60, and we weren't in the U.S. during the period that those artists took over the scene. We were immensely curious and spent a lot of time looking, but to me what they painted did not represent the States.

Kline also had that sense of the destructive power of the city, the vigor and the destruction.

G.O.: Yes, a sense of crucifixion.

Was it a problem for you to live in a different language and culture, or did you find it conducive?

G.O.: Well, we knew many Americans in Mexico, but in France, on the other hand, we lived essentially with the French. My French later became, during the war, unobjectionable because it was unique. My accent happens to be Marseilles in as far as it's not American, and after the war it became Alsatian in as far as it was neither of those two. It's a fairly poor accent in Paris. French just sprang upon me as we landed at Marseilles, I was speaking French as I never had before without thinking in English. It was a great experience, as a matter of fact; it fit my bent. I was speaking the simplest language possible, and so were they. It was tremendously dramatic, we were often the first wave into a village of people who hadn't been able to tell the outside world their story. The words simply poured in. I could walk into any farmhouse and these stories that one simply couldn't bear to listen to were told me. They themselves were also fairly much limited to a very simple French.

I was thinking that some poets feel it's essential to live within the continuity of their own language, while others feel that distance helps them get into or find their own language.

G.O.: Well, using this language at that time I thought was wonderful, or rather that it was a wonderful French, free of those damned idioms that can't be separated from each other, yet somehow mean what you want to say. This was a marvelous period; the Mexican wasn't.

Was that a matter of the social context you found yourselves placed in?

G.O.: Yes, the discomfort of being allowed to be American.

M.O.: The conditions under which we were allowed to be there were somewhat insecure because of the C.I.A., and so one was definitely required to be of the upper class and we found ourselves in a community of American emigrés.

G.O.: We weren't living within our personalities, and that was difficult for us.

Did the machismo get to you?

G.O.: Well, certainly in terms of our daughter, it was a fairly constant family preoccupation. It was a painful experience.

In From Disaster, when you talk about the “lyric valuables” were you thinking about this kind of reduction of vision that middle-class ambitions finally impose?

G.O.: That's clearly a part of the poem, but I was really thinking about the immigrant families, the Jews. This isn't a part of my own background, but it's very much a part of New York, and a thing, of course, that has fairly often been said. I was, perhaps, thinking of it more vividly, the disappearance of the meaning of these things that represented class and wealth. I said it had lost its meaning, “its metaphysic in small laws of home.” It's just the story of suburbia.

Wasn't there also a kind of wonder at the mere fact of survival?

G.O.: Yes, certainly. That struggle for survival is in some ways enviable. It had meaning. They had meaning in those terms for themselves. There is a story from our time in Mexico—perhaps I shouldn't tell it, but it is relevant. There is in Mexico City a Jewish community—all the nationalities, by the way, remain absolutely distinct, generation after generation. This applies even to the Spanish community, and maybe to them most of all. In any case, there is a Jewish community of Polish Jews. They must have been Polish since in my case no Mexican could believe that I was Jewish: their recognition of Jewishness required blue eyes and red hair—everything other than themselves. I didn't have such great differences and so I wasn't Jewish. Well, there was this community, and they'd all arrived in distress of various kinds, as refugees, and had been forced into the businesses that nobody else was terribly anxious to touch. So they were pretty bad, a pretty corrupt community selling on credit to criadas who didn't recognize what credit they were paying, and that kind of thing. The richest of these men was a man called Samuel, happily I don't remember his last name. I met him through our dentist, who was interested in business projects, and through him we were invited to a birthday party at Samuel's house. Samuel was the richest member of this Jewish community, and I guess that meant very rich. Wealth in Mexico is a fortress, quite literally a fortress with armed guards at the gate, someone to park the guest's cars, innumerable rooms, an immense ballroom, and so forth. Anyway, there was this party, and while our friend the dentist was talking to a woman friend, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that a group of people were gathering in the corner of the room. He was talking to her and at the same time trying to make out what they were singing. Suddenly their voices rose and became audible, and the whole room froze, including our friend and the woman he was talking to. They were singing the songs of the concentration camps, the death songs. The woman said to him, “They look happy,” and he realized that it was true. They were thinking of the time when they meant something and when they were in the right. Here, as in From Disaster, one finds the need of meaning, even though the meaning may be tragedy.

What do you think of Rothenberg's Poland or Meltzer's Luna, for example, and their interest in Jewish identity and myth?

M.O.: George has also been writing Jewish poems.

G.O.: And then there's Reznikoff who's always been writing them, and I think perfectly, without any sense of forcing. I think it was Duncan who said in England, when Rothenberg was reading Poland and came to the line “Vot are ve doink here?” that a line had been passed. The audience almost died and then found itself still alive. The unspeakable, the imitation, that imitation. And indeed it is what happened. There was a moment of absolute frozen horror. The unmentionable had been said.

M.O.: It's very interesting what happened with Rothenberg. I'm sure this is much closer in his background because, you see, it's only just one generation back. His wife began working for a Ph.D. in anthropology, and they went up to the Indian reservation near Salamanca and lived there for a few years. It was her project really, but Jerry began working on his own history in an anthropological way.

It's a wonderful sort of collage.

M.O.: Yes, those photos that Eleanor Antin did for it.

He has that identity of a cokboy who's both cowboy and Indian, besides all the other puns carried in the name.

G.O.: Yes. I'm not sure of the etymology of the word, but it's grand. Then in England we met Hamburger and others, and as Reznikoff knows so well, my Yiddishism is completely fake. It's nowhere that I know in my ancestry. Reznikoff will not permit me to say anything on the subject. I remember signing books with him when our first New Directions books came out, and in a moment when there was no one around I signed one and handed it to him. It read, “Read it in Health.” Charles said, “No, read it in good health.” The Yiddish was wrong. I've always felt this kind of thing, but in England I met Jews who are Jews in the sense I am, and we thoroughly understood each other. It was really a considerable experience for me, a very moving experience. As for the mythic element that you mentioned, I don't feel much background in that, although I do feel a great deal of background in some of the Apocrypha.

And the isolation that is such a strong theme in your poetry has, of course, been heightened by being Jewish?

G.O.: Yes, that was always there, including in my childhood. My sense of the thing was to be faintly foreign and, to tell the truth of it, rather aristocratic.

M.O.: We both had something of this sort in our backgrounds, and it's not hard to find it in very many segments of any population—this background of elitism. But I think when we started out, at age eighteen, we soon found we had to leave our families to find what we were seeking, and what we were seeking was to find out what the world was out there. Because we were American, we found we were entirely free to change class, and this was where our interests lay, and this was what we did. It led us far from our families almost at once. It also led us into politics, where, in the 1930s, we thought we had to do something. But we weren't fighting our own bread-and-butter issues.

G.O.: When I was about sixteen I read Israel Zangwill and came up with his phrase “walking-stick Jews,” and I almost died and thought that is probably what I am. We were foreign in any country.

M.O.: This adventure we were setting out on together was our education. France was our education.

G.O.: We went to college for two months. When I first gave some readings I entranced the audience of students by saying I'd never been to college. They almost cheered. But since then we've had a consultation with each other and said we mustn't say this because we did go to college. We only went to college for two months, but everything happened there. And, in any case, it's the only way out of your parent's generation to your own that I know of.

M.O.: It could have been done in the factory but, for people of our class background, college was the way and is the way.

G.O.: There were some friends there and a young instructor with Conrad Aiken's Anthology, as I've said a number of times. I had no idea of contemporary poetry. I knew mostly the Romantics of the nineteenth century.

I'm always surprised by your interest in Blake, although I know that both Duncan and Rothenberg, for example, hold to perception as vision.

G.O.: But such differences don't make us enemies. Blake can be extremely tough-minded, marvelously so. You can see this, for example, in the opening of Europe. A poem like Thel is almost a contradiction to much of what he's said, but it's still a wonderfully moving poem. But, as I've said, I wouldn't become Blake's enemy, it's just a difference of feeling about the man-created world, the consciously created world. I'm not arguing about these things, the shining out of things.

How about the cosmic level that Duncan achieves, although it's quite clear that he also feels the shining out you refer to?

G.O.: The difference is probably greater with Duncan, for whom these stories have been in his mind since childhood and are simply the content of his mind. I don't think either of us would bother to enter an epistemological argument. Myth is as present to him as the factories and all these other things are to us. I just wrote Duncan about a conversation I invited over some of the poems that appeared in Ironwood. I thought later that he was saying that some of them are incoherent or more or less incomprehensible. He had mentioned Heidegger, correctly, I see that, since what I'm doing is making that Heideggerian gesture of “pointing.” But again he mentioned Wittgenstein, much to my surprise, since I wasn't arguing epistemology. Duncan took it I was attempting to say what can't be said in language. What I wrote Duncan was that I'm not disagreeing about that concept but that, quite simply, there are things which can only be said in poetry, and that isn't at all the same thing. The line break is just as much a part of language as the period, comma, or parenthesis, and it shows that there are things that can only be said as poetry.

Did you respond at all to the notions of Deep Image, which also stressed perception as vision?

G.O.: To tell the truth, I was a little resentful of the feeling that this was a new school. I thought all of us felt that images were fairly deep. I'm not objecting to the poetry but just to the idea of it being a modernism.

In Materials, the poems often give the sense of being alone in the crowd, and you said that you found it easier to make contact with humanity, alone in the seclusion of your room at night, as an abstraction. Was this a kind of Sartrian huis clos situation with affirmation being almost an “engagement” of the eye?

G.O.: In a way, but I guess Camus was closer to both of us. La Femme Adultère would take that position. I was fairly conscious in that poem, which appears to be about Pound but which is just as much about Zukofsky, that I was following Camus's work fairly closely. Do you remember the story? The woman standing on the walls of the fortress. She's gone to the desert with her husband who's a traveling salesman. She stands on the walls of the fortress and looks out into the desert, and it changes her forever. She goes back to her husband, but she's the adulterous woman. She's had some experience that she can never speak to him about. I was aware of taking off from that image in Camus. Both of us read Camus.

M.O.: When Camus does that successfully, I find it really marvelous. He does it several times in the short stories and, above all, it's there in the Notebooks—that sense of looking out at night into what's there, and returning, but in isolation.

G.O.: I'm speaking of plain existence. My difference with Sartre is that I don't in the least dislike the world. There isn't the horror of the roots, the horror of it being there, not at all, and I think it's very definite in the poems.

But there's still, perhaps, that idea of making a reading of the world from a position of accepted isolation?

G.O.: Yes, but the value is extremely different. I found it much closer in Heidegger than I did in Sartre.

M.O.: Yes, I don't think Sartre has a wide enough experience of the world—it's a café experience, a Parisian experience, and I find it lacking over and over in just those human depths and elements that matter to me.

And this throws us back again on your preference for Camus?

M.O.: Yes, the sunlight in Africa, this marvelous sunlight, the way the incidents occur.

G.O.: I was attracted to his sense of childhood, his love for that period of his life. He's the only man I trust on that version of poverty. I certainly don't trust myself, but he really knows. In Paris he wrote that he would rather be that boy with the deaf and dumb mother than be an industrial worker at whatever pain in that city. So much for industrialization. I don't trust anybody else on this, including the modern communards.

I'd like you to talk about “actualness” and how that enters the poem?

G.O.: Well, there's that prose section of Pierre Adam in “Route” when he tells me about his experience. I was conscious, when I wrote that, that any of the existentialists could have written it. I wrote it, nevertheless, because it was actually what he said to me. Existential in the sense that you do what you do and that is the answer.

M.O.: You find out afterwards what your intention was.

G.O.: Simply, that you are yourself. The stranger was himself.

I'd like to ask you about two statements in your poems. The first in Product, where you write:

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

Is that a kind of uncertainty before the limits of what we can know of ourselves?

G.O.: Uncertainty as to the act of choosing ourselves.

Is there a shift in the statement you make in Myself I Sing?

And all I've been
Is not myself? I think myself
Is what I've seen and not myself
A man marooned
No longer looks for ships, imagines
Anything on the horizon. On the beach
The ocean ends in water. Finds a dune
And on the beach sits near it. Two.
He finds himself by two.

G.O.: In that man needs a measure. He defines himself by two. But there's still that ambivalence. Myself a man marooned, it's who you are at that moment. Yet I've also talked of Friday's footprint. I don't think it's the individual in an absolutely isolated experience, the whole of Of Being Numerous goes into that. In any case, it is what we are. It's necessary because it's what we are. I wasn't exhorting, or, at most, only in a few cases, as when I say, “Look out the window.” Very few of those poems that touch on the social-political ethic exhort. I'm just stating that we want to be altruistic because we are altrustic. I'm just talking again about the emotion. I forget now if I wrote or if I've elided some lines, but I'm saying, “What can will what the will should will?”

The little words …

G.O.: Yes, that I love so much.

Are they the words that most strongly resist being appropriated by, for want of a better word, “the system”?

G.O.: Yes, they remain attached to the object.

They can't be so easily abused or misused?

G.O.: I like very much that they can be separated from each other, that the word can place itself within the poem.

In the earlier poems you were mentioning the use of the noun for its own sake—the deer, the hill, etc., but in Seascape: Needle's Eye you've focused on even more intangible elements of syntax—the ands, buts, woulds. Is that a significant move for you?

G.O.: I don't think so, just the difference in the subject of the poems. In that poem, it was more than the nouns, less than the nouns, the question of how they take on substantial meaning. I was talking about language.

How to charge it?

G.O.: How to speak it! That most complex thing of syntax, of those connections which can't be dealt with outside the poem but that should take on substantial meaning within it.

Are these the basic reconstructive units in a moral sense?

G.O.: Partly, it's a matter of the structure of the world, the creation of the world which is not just nouns. We talked a little about time, sense of time, tense and time.

In the poem about the bomb, The Crowded Countries of the Bomb, was that aimed at restoring the real meaning to a concept the administration was actively trying to hide?

G.O.: I may, perhaps, have been more conscious of my own contribution to the difficulties created by the admirable Left and their talk about the bomb. I was, as usual, trying to speak of some actual place or person—but the fact was really in the air. I was speaking essentially of fear, not to say one was frightened, but just the presence of fear, the possibilities of destruction, of an end to us. I was not exhorting governments. I was speaking of being, all of us being, without the assurance of salvation. All of these answers inevitably distort—the actual answers are the poems.

Well, I want one further distortion about one of your poems whose movements I found difficult, not in the sense of confusion, but of being complex. I mean the poem in Seascape: Needle's Eye where you use the phrase from Weil.

G.O.: The phrase from Weil is, maybe, better than the poem. What she said was: “When a hammer strikes a nail, the whole force of the blow is delivered undiminished to the point of the nail. The head of the nail is the whole of infinity, and the point of the nail is held against the human heart.” I haven't done justice to the whole of the quotation, but I think that answers your question.

Have you moved more, in these poems, to an inner landscape? I'm saying this a little clumsily, but in the first poem you seem to start inside the “dark jewel,” then move out to the actual world of the “ragged birds' beaks,” and finally return back into the “limits of the ego.”

G.O.: I did, however, say no to the jewel, unless the jewel sees, unless the jewel, like a mirror, gives something back. I was speaking again of my own specific response and not searching that interior. I said no, and then said it's the lust of the eyes that moves the belly-wave. It acknowledges the spirit and circumstances of where we are, of being far at sea, of being among the elements. It's a little too complex to reduce, but it definitely rejects that inner space. It says no to it except where the spirit moves out to infinity, or at least to the given which I take to be infinite.

The musical structure seems to carry a lot. It moves by cadences?

G.O.: Yes, that's what I wrote it for. It's just that tune and that light.

You make a greater use of repetition of phrases that move in a different way the second time.

G.O.: Yes, I was writing the music and talking about the music.

Do you say the lines aloud as you write?

G.O.: I make the sounds in my mouth, but I think I don't actually say them aloud. I'm a little troubled with this since it becomes a temptation in poetry. I read rather well, and I'm able to do more things with my voice than you would think. But for me the poem is primarily on the page. I sometimes have to read carefully, flatly, to make sure the sounds are there. So I don't recite, as Pound does, but I pronounce it to myself.

Since you've mentioned Pound, is Speech at Soli an answer to Pound?

G.O.: It's a strange poem, a kind of confessional poem. It refers to that background of mine, and it's not completely comprehensible. I happened to notice that the etymology of the word solipsism was the name of a place, Soli. The Greeks, apparently, thought that town somewhere in Italy to be a very barbarous place. It's a memory of my adolescence. It's a memory of those country towns out there and the young girls living there. I was thinking of them in the 20s, Fitzgerald's period, and how they were caught up in what was then a new freedom. I was thinking of the tragedy of all that.

I was thinking of your insistence that it doesn't cohere. Was that a response to Pound?

G.O.: Yes, I was speaking of Pound as against the populism in my poem, and it won't cohere, it won't, I said, from Pound's damned Bertran de Born.

What was the “other distortion of the total” you were referring to?

G.O.: Oh, Soli and the Greeks. There are also some quotes from a letter of Rachel Blau—“young girls fall into wells.”

Were the increase in syntactical ruptures and ambiguity a formal answer to this new ground you were exploring?

G.O.: Yes, to say I wanted to say. I'm a little troubled by this feeling of incoherence. I think the syntax holds, I'm not sure. I knew I was moving in this direction and that it's a difficult area. I thought it was coherent enough—what are the names of the tyger, the glare of the tiger is in the little shack. I'm troubled by it because it's taken as being complex. I certainly don't mean it as a conundrum. I meant to speak almost back to the little “nouns.”

I don't mean to imply that they're at all obscure, just that the load on the feeling is more complex.

G.O.: Yes, I think that's true.

You let the contradictions stand.

G.O.: There were also those twenty-five years of silence. I knew more or less what I was going to try to write in the three books and knew that the metaphysic was almost hidden in a poem like Drawing, that you mentioned. I knew I meant to move into this, but it is, in a sense, new ground. A great deal of what is said in Of Being Numerous represents thinking over those twenty years, and this represents the consciousness which was there over that time. It's not a revelation of that moment to me. I hadn't intended it to be more difficult, and I'm a little disturbed by that. I'm still talking of the glare of the tiger in the shack. I'm still speaking of the “numerous” thing, the fanatic windows, the fanaticism of the desire to see out. I think it's the same theme. I discovered these details in a way, not only mine. I hadn't thought of this but, maybe, I did reach “being numerous.” It pleases me very much that maybe I can think I was simply assuming all of us—yes, all of us—to be in these fanatic windows.

But the intimacy is higher now?

G.O.: Yes, it's a broader exposure.

M.O.: I think it's also to do with age. I think one is more thoroughly exposed in both these ways with age.

G.O.: I did have a good idea of where I was going with these new poems. It's not entirely a matter of difference in thought, if you call it thought; perhaps difference in consciousness would be better, which is new in these poems. It's quite simply a matter of acquiring some new techniques.

But you were pushing to new limits?

G.O.: Yes, but not in consciousness, only in something new in my ability to build the poem.

Could you say something about your sense of fear? Is it synonymous with awe?

G.O.: Yes; there is also Heidegger. Boredom and dread in the same moment. This is said also in the Maud Blessingbourne poem in Discrete Series, which was written in 1929. “The knowledge not of sorrow but of boredom …”

It's also in the San Francisco Poems where you talk of “fear in the wind,” and that “now we know something of fear,” and it also seems to have become part of the creative process itself, since you say in a letter to Rachel Blau that when a man knows something of fear, he then knows something about the word.

G.O.: Of that perception in depth. That series of San Francisco Poems opens with a love scene, those two things: the sunlight, the white room, the individual whose spirit rises to these things, and that other perception beyond the sense of destiny. I don't mean destiny as a promissory note.

Was that Altamont that you were referring to in that poem, the tarnishing of the vision that started with the flower people?

G.O.: Well, the remark about their “long hair, they seem to be in mourning” was an observation, not an advance response. We didn't know anything about the murder then.

M.O.: After we'd left the car we walked miles and miles. There were cars as far as you could see, up on the mountains in every direction, representing millions and millions of dollars.

G.O.: We left before the murder took place. I wrote the poem before I knew about it—for once I wrote a poem very rapidly. We knew something was wrong. It's just the incident, I'm not exactly philosophizing. There was no more innocence. Just those millions of dollars spread out in front of us.

Yet still it finishes on an optimistic note. You point to the miracle of the brilliance of the young children.

G.O.: Yes, it's historical. There's a sort of reference to Adam and Eve, to innocence. The poem finishes with “miracle of …” I didn't quite know what the miracle would be, but it had to be within the young children.

Could you talk of Occurrences and how the mind moves within that poem? You suddenly arrive in the Middle Kingdom of Elves.

G.O.: I guess I just loved it—it's the picture of the wasp and its wings.

M.O.: Like the Anniversary Poem, it's trying to find the thought that will take us somewhere.

G.O.: Yes. Maru has said it less vulgarly than what I'm saying all the time. Yes, that covers it. I'm saying that this is not a symbolist sensitivity, but that this is what we all live on. I've repeated it a great many times in my rather irritating arguments about the will and so forth—this wasn't any attempt to be tough-minded. I'm saying this is all of us. Those special sensitivities of some of those French writers, they're simply not my concern.

M.O.: It's where we are at.

The common push, that extraordinary philosophical weight that the Americans can give to the small words.

Right, you've said it, that says it all.