Content area
Full Text
I first read George Oppen's poetry while a graduate student in Buffalo, New York. I was especially fond of "Some San Francisco Poems" which, in the middle of Buffalo's brutal winters, returned me to a more benign landscape:
Having spent a great deal of time at Pedro Point in high school and college, I was moved by Oppen's unadorned presentation of the place, including the supermarket cart stuck in the creek bed. Later, upon meeting Oppen in San Francisco, I told him how much this poem had meant to me, and he explained that he and Mary used to take the bus to Pedro Point as one of their forays out of the city on public transportation. "It was simply where the bus stopped," he explained; "we'd just get out and walk around."
This anecdote reminds me that Oppen's more metaphysical concerns are often the result of material conditions - the exigencies of travel, work, and human intercourse - and that the "little words" he loves so much are attached to a world as immediately encountered as a bus stop.2 We could extend this anecdote further by showing how it illustrates a paradox at the heart of modernism, one between value and contingency: "distant life" refers to a world beyond words and therefore inaccessible, but it also means a world encountered, if at all, in words and therefore invisible. For writers like Pound and Joyce the paradox was solved by containing contingency in repetition, amassing cultural fragments towards an eternal dynastic edifice. Oppen chose to solve this problem not by adding more fragments to an already debased architecture but by refusing culture altogether. We could see his gesture both as a refusal to speak in the face of political pressure, whether from the Zhdanovian censors or the McCarthy committee, and refusal of the metaphysical lure of totality.3
The context of refusal in American literature has a rich and varied history, beginning with Puritanism and its fears of Antinomian rebellion. Poets from Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet through Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley and Susan Howe have all been skeptical of the full, adequate word, prefening to "tell all the Truth but tell it slant," as Emily Dickinson said. We could see George Oppen's poetics as emerging...