We have come to the end – we have seen the end of the
assumptions of the generations of the immediate past. It is that, and not some alleged stuffiness
in the arts, which creates the cultural crisis. It is the poets who discuss the
real crisis in whom a future generation would naturally be interested.
—George Oppen,
letter to June Oppen Degnan, May 19631
In his 2010 George
Oppen Memorial Lecture,2 Rob Halpern extends a line of thought on
the concept of "patiency" that he began a decade earlier in an essay
titled "Of Truthful 'I's'."3 In the lecture excerpt, he
writes:
By patiency, I mean a situation of suspended agency
.... Its grammatical mode is subjunctive—expressing contingency and desire: a
perennial state of as-if-ness. 'As if' creates a distance—and a pathos—an
affective space of expectancy within the act of desiring to know ....
I take agency here to
be the forward drive of history and its attendant diasters. One reason Oppen
seems so relevant now in our own time (as evidenced, among other things, by the
outpouring of activity occasioned by the centenary of his birth in 2008) is his
direct involvement in that forward drive and his subsequent suspension of it in
favor of an openly engaged practice of poetry. Halpern emphasizes Oppen's
involvement in both the Popular Front in the 1930s and the Second World War in
the 1940s. The traumatic effects of such experience lend a very real sense to
the concept of "patiency": Oppen was, physically, a patient after his
injury in the foxhole in Germany, and certainly had to be patient during his political exile in Mexico.
What resurfaced in
Oppen on his return to the States in the late 1950s was not only the desire to
write again, but to actively engage a community of other poets. Oppen's
letters, in particular, are a remarkably moving document of the fine points of
such social nagivation. Halpern seems likewise aware of the self as essentially
relational, that any one person (one poet) is part of a complex social ecology.
What is needed now seems, then, neither the aggrandizement nor the denial of
individual subjectivity, but, as Halpern writes in that earlier essay, echoing
Marker's preoccupation with the future anterior, "a subjunctive poetics:
to write from that other place where 'I' might
be or might have been" (90).
1 The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis
(Duke UP, 1990), 84.
2 An excerpt from the lecture,
titled "Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen's Domesticity and the
Dislocation of Politics," was posted by Michael Cross on his blog. [available here]
3 Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics 3, summer 1999, 75-90.
