there are still wolves left | Halpern on Oppen

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.

before the words | George Oppen and the Limits of Discourse

One curious fact about George Oppen is that as his own poems drifted toward the dizzying and seemingly groundless lyricism of his last volume, Primitive (Black Sparrow Press, 1978), an increasing number of young admirers began writing critical responses to his work. Far from being disinterested, Oppen's letters from the 70s reveal his active engagement with such essays, dissertations, and requests for interviews and other forms of information. Yet his resistance is just as palpable. He himself wrote very little critical prose, and seems to have had little interest in making himself clear in that way. When asked about his poems, he often quoted from his poems.

In response to an essay written by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (an essay praised, during a visit, Oppen mentions, by Paul Auster, whose own essay on Reznikoff Oppen had praised), he remarks in a letter from April 1976:¹

... you analyze too much: you set yourself too much of a program- - - The program prevents you from sinking in ((into the-thing-before-the-words)) (316)²

And another remark, to John Taggart in a letter from September 1974:

I have of course – as you have too – some reserves about a doctoral thesis which much seem to absorb the poem into itself, into the thesis   For the poem is of course not that, the poem is the moving edge [...] (289)

Oppen clearly respected and encouraged both DuPlessis and Taggart, but his reservations about such critical discourse, the intellect cast in prose, seem almost to have encouraged his own move back to all that it is not, the sea, the line of the horizon, the space between words, phrases, clauses before they harden into sentences.

image: from Ironwood 26 (1985)

¹ The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Duke UP, 1990), 316.

² In an earlier letter, to Alexander Mourelatos, sent sometime before February 14, 1972, Oppen writes:

- - a place     a place at least to begin.   But place in another sense: place without the words, the wordless sphere in the mind – Or rather the wordless sphere with things   including a word or so     in it . . . . That I still believe to be, as they say, Poem:     the thing in the mind before the words     to be able to hold it even against the language - - - (236)