On the Selected Poems of George Oppen

Kate Colby

My brother texted me that a seagull had stolen a bagel from his kitchen counter. I replied, “Onion or raisin?” That night we heard a fox barking at the edge of the woods nearby. In the morning my father said, “John found half a rabbit in his garden.” I asked which half. My father is the one who taught me to ask the wrong question for comic effect. If my brother had texted, “A seagull just stole an onion bagel off my kitchen counter,” I would have replied, “It should have held out for raisin!” He threw a strawberry Nutri-Grain bar to drive it from his kitchen.

When we tell a story we select information. (The bagel was everything.) When, in the third section of Discrete Series (which was not selected for the Selected), Oppen says, “Thus / Hides the // Parts—” I understand it literally. The word “thus” and the logico-informational subordination it suggests ordinarily hide the mechanics of an inference. Having omitted the initial proposition, Oppen makes plain the void beneath a psycho-linguistic bridge. For instance, based on the bark in the dark, we think but don’t know that it was a fox that nabbed the rabbit. There are also fishers and coyotes in these woods. Is it relevant that John has two little dogs of the sort my father calls “yappy” and that a bichon frisée recently went missing two streets over? Between the fox and the rabbit there is no “thus,” but a thread in a filigree of contingencies. 

George Oppen selects words so well that they suggest equally what has not been selected—each poem is an inverse erasure, a source text implicating the whole world. The Selected Poems of George Oppen recapitulates his x-acto selection of words, a recursion that is both pleasing and maddening.[1] That the poems were selected by Robert Creeley somewhat redeems this act of violence, since Creeley at his most cooked-down is as x-act as Oppen. Creeley doesn’t cook everything down, though, and so the experience of reading him is like finding cut gemstones here and there on a walk through woods—leaf-light, titmice, moss, “My mind / to me a mangle is.” Man alive.

Oppen and Creeley are both masters of the double-jointed word—that “to” there between the mind and the mangle is everything (literally). The first line of Oppen’s “Party on Shipboard” (also from Discrete Series and also omitted from the Selected Poems) is, “Wave in the round of the port-hole.” In the context of the poem’s title, the primary semantic sense of “wave” is an ocean wave, but in the second line a tipsy passenger waves an arm to regain balance on the rocking ship. Now that we’ve been permitted to read the “wave” as movement of a body part, we can return to the wave in the porthole with complete uncertainty about whether we are looking in through or out from the porthole. On one side is the interior of the boat, and on the other, everything in the world that is not particular to the interior of the particular boat. Inside/outside, selected/collected.

In his introduction, Creeley says, “Still the confounding ethical question of how one can speak as one in a time when all are so threatened hardly disappears because one is a poet.” I have beef with this question. As with the porthole, why can’t we look both out and in? In a time of existential threat, utter silence is anathema, but how and as whom is it our responsibility to utter? Our current time is saturated with language. It fills our gills like the water the fish doesn’t notice. Selecting, carving away, squinting at syntax and its heavy bolts and hinges—at the prepositions undergirding our power grids—seems of the essence. Please, can we get back to it? If democracy and capitalism are at odds, and language is the tool of both, why are we letting it use us? Oppen famously stopped writing for 20 years because for him poetry was “a method of thought” and he was busy thinking about his political activism. He was not interested in writing rallying cries or social laments. But in our epistemologically perilous time, I believe it’s not only possible but critical that poets separately attend to the social world and put pressure on the language that goes a long way in creating it. George Oppen and Robert Creeley plumbed humans’ mutually dependent expressive and epistemological limits, and we’re going to need a depth chart to defeat the bottom feeders.

The Selected Poems ends with a series of 26 fragments found taped to walls, jotted in notebooks and on envelopes following Oppen’s death from effects of Alzheimer’s. Whether they constitute glimpses of the void or remnants of the bridge, I find their inclusion overdetermining and marginally unethical but am still drawn to fragment #7:

                                    I think I have written what I
                                    set out to say—I need
                                    not now turn to narrative
                                   
                                    I have told not narrative, but
                                    ourselves—no narrative but ourselves
                             

This is everything Oppen and his work stood for—Williams’ “no ideas but in the things” writ social. As a ragged closing bracket to Oppen’s oeuvre, which begins with the linked bits of arguable fragments that constituted Discrete Series, “Twenty-Six Fragments” was difficult to resist including, I suppose. But they turned him (in)to narrative.

Selection can be an act of violence or of love (which are not opposites).
                   
The right question is the one that’s left.
                                   
Sometimes what you see is how you’re told to want to.
                                

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[1] To capitulate is to surrender, and to recapitulate to restate. I can think of a thousand ways in which to state is to surrender.