Even after a year of reading him in my spare time, I still like to spend my evenings with Oppen. Here’s likely my favourite passage from him:
’Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance
from Them, the people, does not also increase’
I know, of course I know, I can enter on other place
Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of
thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
to me
Have made poetry
To dream of that beach
For the sake of an instant in the eyes
The absolute singular
The unearthly bonds
Of the singular
Which is the bright light of shipwreck
—George Oppen (1908–84),
Of Being Numerous (1968), 9.1-13
While readying some files for a project at Penn Sound for my buddy, Jess, I came accross a piece by Charles Bernstein on Oppen (originally appearing in Ironwood 26 (1985), and later revised for Bernstein’s My Way: Speeches & Poems.
Writes Bernstein:
Oppen’s syntax is fashioned on constructive, rather than mimetic, principles. He is quite explicit about this. Carpentry is a recurring image of poem-making. His poems, as he tells it, were created by a sort of collage or cut-up technique involving innumerable substitutions and permutations for every word and line choice. The method here is paratactic, even if often used for hypotactic ends. This tension, which can produce the kinetic, stuttering vibrancy of some of Oppen’s most intense poems, is at the heart of his use of the line break as hinge. In contrast to both enjambment and disjunction – as well, of course, as more conventional static techniques – Oppen’s hinging allows for a measure of intervallic “widths” of connection/disconnection between lines. The typical Oppen hinge is made by starting a line with a preposition, commonly “Of”). At its most riveting, this hinging taps into a horizontally moving synaptic/syntactic energy at the point of line transition.
Bernstein pretty much nails why I love Oppen’s work. What he describes as “intervallic widths” of connection and disconnection create spaces in Oppen’s poetry—in his lines—that my mind races to fill. I rarely read a piece of his the same way twice.
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