Articles
Clarity and sincerity
Disillusionment in George Oppen’s postwar poetic
We have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. — William James
When we consider George Oppen’s post-1958, post-silence poetry through the prism of his politics, it is crucial that we consider his continued belief in Marxism as a political solution. Oppen’s interest in and later disavowal of Maoism as an experiment in large-scale Marxism inspired his 1960s poetry to interrogate the needs of the people and the sincerity of leftist political movements in addressing those needs in any significant way. That a poem can interrogate political beliefs in such a way is in concert with Oppen’s then-newfound conviction that it is possible for the poet to reconcile artistic and political concerns, much as he was attempting to accomplish in his own poetry at that time.
This belief in the political efficacy of poetry reverses Oppen’s prewar, presilence view of poetry as entirely separate from politics. In 1935, during the time of the Great Depression, George Oppen, then at the start of an impressive poetic career and in a brief yet frenetic burst of creative energy spurred by the Communist Party’s successes in organizing the unemployed, joined the Workers Alliance, a Communist front organization. Accompanied by his wife, Mary, Oppen quickly moved up the ranks of the party echelons, overseeing a milk strike in upstate New York (gaining the attention of congressman Hamilton Fish III) and later becoming reelections manager in Brooklyn. Due to the intensity of party life, and because the party demanded that artists use their talents in service of the Communist cause, Oppen decided to stop writing poetry rather than have his poetry used as a means of political expression. To do so would be a betrayal of artistic freedom, a compromise the then-twenty-one-year-old refused to make. Because of the magnitude of the economic crisis, Oppen stopped writing to devote himself to political activism, organizing the unemployed and homeless and later fighting in combat during the Second World War. Yet these seismic events ended decades before Oppen started writing again, and though this silence initially suggests a lack of commitment to his art, at the same time it indicates a political commitment significant enough to outweigh all other concerns.
Following the war, Oppen continued to be an active member of the Communist Party, despite disillusionment with the party following the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact and other minor disappointments, most of them having to do with party bureaucracy and the ever-shifting party line. Furthermore, Oppen’s decision to begin writing again in the late 1950s, after nearly a decade of self-imposed exile in Mexico awaiting the end of the McCarthyist persecutions of political leftists, implies a disavowal of the efficacy of political action and a newfound faith in the restorative and regenerative value of art. Oppen links this prolonged silence to his ongoing commitment to the Communist Party, even after the disappointments and defections of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and McCarthyist eras. While a party member, he kept private his artistic background, divulging his literary identity to a select few. Following the war, he chose to devote himself to his role as husband and father. The almost decade-long political exile in Mexico seems to have further stalled his return to writing.
Later, he would claim that he never entirely abandoned poetry, that there were more immediate concerns requiring his attention, and that he simply did not have time to write. Yet these explanations are unsatisfactory. For example, at the time he began writing again, the Cold War was heating up, resulting in numerous proxy confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the terrifying prospect of a nuclear exchange between these two political superpowers. Though he could have channeled his energies into political action once again, Oppen, who in the 1930s readily admitted to the limited practical value of poetry, decided in 1958 that he would rather devote his energies to poetry. He did so with such urgency that he would go on to produce three major poetry collections within the next ten years: The Materials (1962), This in Which (1965), and Of Being Numerous (1968). These volumes established him as a significant poet while simultaneously legitimizing his prewar poetic output.
Oppen is correct in claiming in his 1964 poem “Pro Nobis”[1] that his years of silence were in fact an apprenticeship, by definition to “serve another for a prescribed period with a view to learning an art of trade” or simply years of “inexperience” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). He stopped writing poetry, he explains, to continue his search in the concrete, as opposed to political, world, and his writing poetry again became necessary only when he and Mary admitted to themselves their political failure.[2]
As Michael Heller observes: “Political disillusionment, the close-up experience of injury and near-death in World War II, the cultural and political wars of the 1950s and 1960s, all contribute to an aura of isolation and fear permeating the work.”[3] Because of their complexity, these poems, Heller continues, “lead deeper into ambiguity” and intricacy: “Every act of precision and clarification seems to generate uncertainty.” As these poems are concerned foremost with Oppen’s disillusionment with the party, the trauma of war, and the political turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s, Heller is of the opinion that viewing Oppen’s postwar oeuvre as simply a “return” is incorrect. To do so, Heller observes, is to “[fail] to take into account not only the disillusionment with the Communist Party that Oppen finally experienced” but also Oppen’s “reversal of belief in art’s efficacy.” Oppen, Heller observes, “came anew to poetry, and in a greatly changed state of mind. Poetry held other possibilities he had not seen before, those of truth and clarity, possibilities that were in opposition to the political efficacy he had demanded of himself and which would have been demanded of him by the Party.”[4] Unlike poetry, party politics has no use for abstraction; Oppen was left emotionally shattered by the pragmatisms of party life, which values political expediency to truth. Heller’s most crucial observation here is that as a result of his political disillusionment, Oppen came back to poetry a fundamentally changed man. As a result, the poetry he wrote following his period of silence would by necessity be altered considerably.
Because Oppen clung so tenaciously to the dictates of Marxism even after the horrifying political realities of the Soviet Union became apparent, the often frustrating and exhausting attempt to reconcile political idealism with reality helped him view poetry as an unrestricted space wherein one is able to confront and test the various crises of the postwar world. Disappointed with Marxist-Leninism and opposed to Stalinism, in the 1960s Oppen, as with numerous other ex-Stalinists and as evidenced in his Selected Letters, became deeply interested in Maoism as a potential replacement for Soviet communism: a fresh, large-scale, real-world opportunity to apply and to test Marxist beliefs.
According to his Letters, Oppen was a dedicated reader of Chinese Literature Today during the 1960s and was familiar with Mao Tse-Tung’s Little Red Book (“I once read thru 10 years worth of … Chinese Lit today”).[5] Prior to the 1969 Playboy publication of an article featuring several Tse-Tung poems translated by Nieh Hua-Ling and Paul Engle, the magazine sent Oppen a proof, inviting him to comment on the article.[6] Congratulating the magazine’s editors and the translators, Oppen writes that the poems and their commentary indicate that the utilization of poetry for political purposes is acceptable only if the political systems are willing to interrogate the needs of its people and its sincerity in addressing those needs in any significant way: “IF the reader is sufficiently patient … the piece as a whole … gives some inkling of the way in which poetry (that is to say, depth of meaning) may be involved in a politics which is radical enough to … raise the questions of our purposes, of our desires.” [7] This statement agrees with his newfound conviction that it is possible for the poet to reconcile artistic and political concerns, much as he was attempting to accomplish in his own poetry at that time.
In his letters, Oppen writes of his respect for Mao[8] and at first Maoism looked like it might fulfill Oppen’s view of Marxism as a tool for interrogating the purposes of society — the reasons for social existence, the role it plays in individuals’ lives, how it should function in service of human needs. Moreover, while Oppen thinks Maoism, like any radical political ideology, derives from a desire to achieve change for the better, he reluctantly concludes that, as Stalinism before it, Maoism has resorted to deception, secrecy, and terror in order to control and maintain power over its people.[9]
Oppen’s view of Maoism changes over the next few years; by 1972, he professes in letters that he no longer thinks it possible for the Chinese Party to be straightforward about its policies.[10] Spurred by the continued failures of Communism in action, he notes in his papers that what he finds most appalling about Communism is not its Platonic outlaw of poetry, or its openly rigid and strict form of governance (Oppen thinks a case could be made for this inflexibility), but rather its dishonest portrayal of itself as exhibiting liberal qualities of tolerance and open-mindedness: “As one might agree to forget for Platonic reasons — that the perfect state does not need poetry, and in fact will not permit it. It is not that which is terrible about the Communists, it is in fact not the open stringencies — which can be defended — but the liberal pretenses.”[11] This, for Oppen, is an indefensible deception. Oppen uses as an example of this duplicity Mao’s saying “let a thousand flowers bloom” (a misquotation of “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”).[12] The Chinese intelligentsia used this slogan for six weeks in the summer of 1957, when they briefly allowed writers the freedom to criticize Mao’s political system, an invitation interpreted by some as a deliberate attempt to remove dissidents. Whatever Mao’s intent, his words, in Oppen’s view, are despotism disguised as democracy, a situation that, according to Oppen, leads to complete tyranny, as the citizenry cannot participate in a dishonest government. It is deceptiveness, and not oppression, which ruins the potential for democracy, Oppen argues. Had Mao ruthlessly condemned anyone who disagreed with his policies, at least he would do so openly, and this honesty preserves the potential for democracy. And yet, Russia and China, he contends, are societies whose institutions are based on duplicity; they are repressive, autocratic states in which the people are unable to participate in their governance. During the twentieth century, governments managed to surpass in size and scale their original purpose: to serve their people. The citizenry increasingly entered into a servitude to the state. Stalin, for example, considered the Russian people the raw materials of history. This, for Oppen, is the very definition of a crisis.[13]
As a result, Oppen in the late 1950s is no longer certain political parties are interested in addressing core social concerns of improving equality and fundamental human rights, even posing the question what exactly social organizations can do for people beyond providing them with food or shelter.[14] Despite this, he continues to base his ideas on political and social reform on Marxism. Marxism was, as Oppen explains, a foundation for the formulation of his and Mary’s political beliefs.[15] Unlike other economic and historical theories, it explained history to their satisfaction.[16]
From the evidence, his post-1958 Marxism is broadly socialistic. To Oppen, capitalism’s involvement in the government is decorous and based on speculation, while effective Socialist governments to some extent rely on the active participation of their citizenry.[17] Socialism, then, is for Oppen a more direct (and, by extrapolation, more honest) form of political interaction, and one that better addresses the needs of society. He observes in a 1958 letter to his daughter Linda that it is arguable that most of the population’s basic beliefs are socialist in nature. Liberals, he argues, even when they are unsuccessful, are acutely concerned with humanity’s intentions.[18] The very real advantage of socialism, as opposed to Marxism, he explains, is that while Marxism may be a more accurate description of economic reality, socialists do not censor their artists, execute their enemies, or develop needlessly complex teleologies in order to justify or explain their actions.[19]
Oppen may have at one time believed in Marx’s vision of a socialist utopia, a utopia that, ostensibly, had as little need for poetry as it did for Communism. Yet this vision foundered. Admonished by this failure, Oppen again concluded that whatever its philosophical or political validity, Marxism as a closed system is without vision and therefore without a future.[20] Without a vision to guide it, Marxism remains an ineffective method from which to proceed poetically toward the clarity of truth. The lamentable reality of Communist proposals, indeed of all Marxist proposals, Oppen concludes, is that it requires the capitulation of autonomy, be it political or artistic. This is especially problematic for the more creative members of a Marxist society: the writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers.
In the late 1960s, the need for vision was increasingly apparent. This was an era of massive political upheaval, including increasing hostility between whites and African Americans in the American South culminating in the Civil Rights movement. It was a time of violence and instability: political assassinations, social unrest, and the developing crisis in Vietnam, a crisis so monumental that Oppen would argue in a 1965 letter to Stephen Schneider that what was required was nothing less than revolution, namely a march on the Capitol in Washington, DC, and the president’s arrest. Until then, any talk of ethics or morality, Oppen declares, would be meaningless. Because he could not condone revolution (quite different from the rallying cry of the proletariat), he refuses to discuss ethics, deciding that there must be some other basis upon which humanity might reestablish its core values.[21] For Oppen, if the revolutionary’s proposal is to “sacrifice … at least a generation” in order to establish a government founded on socialist principals (a proposal he finds astonishing but imaginable), then at the very least the revolutionary should be honest about his or her objective. So far, he cautions, all leftist governments have been dishonest.[22] As a result, political claims to morality are suspect. The only hope for progress is an honest appraisal of where humanity is heading.
A passage from his personal papers best summarizes his disillusionment with leftist politics in general and Marxism in particular. There, Oppen laments that, though most industrialized societies have managed to provide the majority of its populace with the necessities of life, they have not attempted to unite all of humanity, knowing that this unification will result in the betterment of humanity. Our only hope, writes Oppen, is companionship, and such companionship is not possible among those who have not admitted anything.[23]
To Oppen, the political idealism of the far left gradually suffocated under the weight of its own dishonesties, rationalizations, and absurdities. Communism would never unify humanity because of its dependence on deception, on manufactured truth. Even democratic politics often lacks a clear vision for the future beyond platitudes and rhetoric designed to win votes. With this political reality in mind, Oppen’s decision to turn his attention to the poetry — imaginative, receptive, and emotional — is certainly understandable. By the late 1950s politics, which had driven him into self-imposed exile in Mexico, exhausted him. Poetry energized. Politics was in many ways a prison from which poetry could free him.
During the Depression, he explains, he confronted homelessness and unemployment. At the time, he was mostly ignorant of the larger political and economic forces that led to this financial disaster. This new reality made it necessary for him to explore these forces, because, for Oppen, the poet’s task is to perceive the world as accurately as possible and to transform this perception into poetic expression. Discussing the aesthetic implications of his prolonged creative silence, he describes his party experience as an investigation in poetry undertaken simultaneously with an act of principle. Because this exploration also led him to political activism it was, he insists, a moral choice.[24] His description of his poetic silence as an investigation is exact in the sense that during this silence he accumulated material for later work — a life lived from which to write — but only in hindsight. The political commitments became an almost seamless extension of their poetic life.[25]
The postsilence Oppen would always maintain that, despite this silence, he always remained a poet.[26] The 1965 poem “Eros,” which recounts a 1963 visit the Oppens made to Père Lachaise Cemetery, is a good example of the seamlessness between his life and art. While visiting the cemetery, the Oppens saw graves of French communards. In the poem, he writes of the communards’ almost religious devotion toward future generations, a devotion captured in the Paris streets, a city that provided Oppen’s generation of artists with their artistic education, suggesting that one’s political and artistic convictions both derive from the same concern for the future:
In the cemetery of Père Lachaise, and the grave
Of Largo Caballero and the monuments to the Resistance
A devoutness
Toward the future
Recorded in this city
Which taught my generation
Art [27]
Gradually, hindsight might have led Oppen to reinterpret his silence,[28] helping him come to terms with its length and, at times, its seeming finality. In describing his silence as an ongoing exploration, he may be interpreting his work from the vantage point of his postwar period of creativity, no longer perceiving his silence within actual, lived experience, where he most definitely was not a poet (except perhaps in the most general sense of the word). By then, there were other, more immediate concerns, like raising a family. Oppen’s political commitments removed him from a larger intellectual and artistic milieu in which he may have written new poetry had he not allowed his political commitments, in Heller’s words, to “impose itself as a totality” and “make him mute.”[29] Heller’s reference to muteness implies that art in some ways transcends politics or, at least, specific political affiliations or arguments. Poetry, regardless of the poet’s romanticism or imagination, is the product of the poet’s life, and not her or his politics (though the politics may be a part of that life). For Oppen, the poem’s aesthetic autonomy should be absolute; he simply could not fathom utilizing poetry for political ends while managing to retain a poem’s autonomy. This does not mean, however, that his poetry is without political substance, only that in his poetry he successfully resists the urge to resort to a naïve political morality. He understood that politics, like poetry or parenthood, is simply one facet of a range of human experience and that while a political interpretation of aesthetics is unavoidable, the artist should not accept limitations, political or otherwise.
In effect, Oppen’s turn to poetry during the late 1950s is itself a kind of apostasy. If in 1935 poetry was an ineffective method to address the larger political emergencies of his generation, of fascism and economic depression, then in 1958 poetry, not politics, became the appropriate medium with which to address the metaphysical crisis now facing not just the present but every generation, past and future. It is the poet’s task, Oppen said, to address those things in which future generations would be interested.[30] As a result, a poem must be, like the communard’s actions, concerned with future generations.[31] It was time to put aside ideological restrictions in favor of a plain, unmediated confrontation with the actual, clarified and tested through the medium of poetry.
According to Richard Pells, midcentury artists like Oppen could no longer accept the possibility of rationally structuring society through revolution and instead began concentrating on the difficulties inherent in “artistic expression and personal morality,” which they believed to be the foremost concerns of the “radical intellectual in a totalitarian age.”[32] After the Second World War ended, Pells observes, questions about the preservation of individual freedoms in a modern, technological society largely went unanswered. Pells insists that the failures of Oppen’s generation resulted from “political and psychic wounds of the decade’s final years” when the ideals of the radicalized 1930s were dashed against the realities of world war, totalitarianism and the “menace” of an increasingly bureaucratic and centralized government and military, which rendered citizens powerless. These wounds, asserts Pells, “paralyzed an entire generation of intellectuals.” [33]
This same dilemma troubled Oppen. Could he write poetry that addresses these realities without succumbing to a politically motivated (and perhaps internalized) rigidity? What was of greater value? Practical political action as he pursued in the 1930s, or poetry that could possibly help clarify the crisis in which they found themselves, or perhaps point a way out?
Responding to a letter from Carl Rakosi asking Oppen whether or not he could or would give up art in order to save a human life, Oppen writes that he cannot even begin to consider such a choice, as he never thinks about things in that way.[34] Yet in an earlier draft reply letter to Rakosi, he includes a lengthier response to Rakosi’s question. In it, he attempts to explain his decision to begin writing again even in the face of imminent disaster, telling Rakosi that in moments of great turmoil, everything one knows or has experienced of art returns to them and transforms them.[35]During the Second World War, Oppen, a thirty-four-year-old volunteer soldier, came under attack by German tanks. With shells falling all around him, Oppen, taking cover in a crater left by an exploded shell, thought of poems by Charles Reznikoff and Thomas Wyatt, and not of the political speeches of Earl Browder. Poetry is something more, and it means something more than the mundane and the commonplace. A poem is a kind of confrontation on an intimate level. It refuses to turn away. Therefore, a poem is not only evidence of a poet’s desire for survival (and, by extension, the desire for survival of all humanity, of which the poet is representative); it is also an artifact of courage. The poet’s debt is to those who come after him, the audience whom his words address. This burden is also a poet’s greatest asset, as the overwhelming responsibility of clarity and sincerity in both image and expression rest squarely on his shoulders. Poetry requires penetrative truth, artfully rendered, and the revelation of some crucial emotion that would otherwise remain hidden or unexpressed.
[1] George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 157. “Pro Nobis” translates to “For Us.” The phrase “Ora Pro Nobis” is the response to invocations of the saints during the Litany of the Saints. Oppen secularizes the statement by removing “Ora.” The number he refers to might mean the number of people the Oppens helped organize during the 1930s, the actuality being the realization of a Marxist-Leninist utopia of workers. This secularization, then, can be interpreted as his insistence that these actions were done “for us” to achieve an earthly utopia rather than a request to “pray for us” seeking salvation in the afterlife.
[2] For more on this point, see Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (London: Oxford University Press, 2007).
[3] Michael Heller, Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (Cambridge: Salt, 2008), 5.
[5] Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 303.
[6] DuPlessis does not describe the circumstances surrounding Playboy’s having solicited reviews from Oppen — not once, but twice (see Oppen, Selected Letters, 238–39 and 408).
[9] Michael Cuddihy discussed Maoism with the Oppens during a 1973 visit. According to Cuddihy, the Oppens were “intrigued by the Chinese experiment of housing and feeding a billion people, but [made] it clear that they wouldn’t want to live there” (Michael Cuddihy, Try Ironwood: An Editor Remembers [Boston, MA: Rowan Tree Press, 1990], 47). Oppen “expressed admiration for Mao and the leaders of Communist China and their willingness to discourage, even destroy for a time, much of what we know as the fine arts and other components of a high culture in order to concentrate single-mindedly on this overriding task. But, they would always add, I wouldn’t want to live there” (69–70).
[10] Oppen, Selected Letters, 246.
[11] Oppen, Selected Papers, Daybooks, and Prose, ed. Stephen Cope (San Diego, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 171.
[13] Oppen, Selected Letters, 119.
[14] George Oppen, “The Philosophy of the Astonished: Selections from the Working Papers,” ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Sulfur 27 (Fall 1990): 206.
[15] Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel, “Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,” in George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Hatlen (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), 28.
[16] Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, 18.
[17] Oppen, Selected Letters, 16.
[19] Oppen, Selected Papers, 64. To Michael Cuddihy, the publisher of Ironwood, with whom Oppen established an acquaintance a decade later, Oppen only begrudgingly came to admit that capitalism, despite its many flaws, “did a better job of creating and distributing wealth than anything else yet devised.” Yet, Cuddihy adds, “I had the distinct sense that this conclusion brought him no pleasure.” During a 1973 visit, Cuddihy brought with him a copy of The Weekly People, “the organ of the Socialist Labor Party … Mary … gently chided me and on their next visit, she brought along a copy of The Economist and … Business Week” (Cuddihy, Try Ironwood: An Editor Remembers, 69).
[20] George Oppen, “Meaning Is to Be Here: A Selection from the Daybooks of George Oppen,” ed. Cynthia Anderson, Conjunctions 10 (1988): 192.
[21] Oppen, Selected Letters, 387.
[23] Oppen, Selected Papers, 61.
[24] Hatlen and Mandel, “Poetry and Politics,” 24–25.
[25] Oppen, “Meaning Is to Be Here,” 189.
[26] Oppen, Selected Letters, 25.
[27] Oppen, New Collected Poems, 120–21.
[28] It is doubtful that he willfully misled others as to the nature of this silence.
[29] Michael Heller, “Oppen and Stevens: Reflections on the Lyrical and the Philosophical,” Sagetrieb 12, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 15.
[30] Oppen, Selected Letters, 84.
[32] Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper Collins, 1973), 335.
The test of belief
Or, why George Oppen quarrelled with Denise Levertov
There are fruitful literary quarrels and their opposite. For while the big, personal rift that opened up between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov exemplifies the latter — when he complained that the subjugation of her poetry to the cause of political activism was creatively damaging — George Oppen’s earlier argument with Levertov was markedly beneficial. It was the means by which he defined a poetic way forward in the 1960s, having known long before, as a Communist social worker during the Depression, the necessity of not politicizing his art. He would have been well aware then, when he stopped writing poetry rather than turn out propagandist verse for New Masses, that there always lurked the temptation to write from the standpoint of grand humanitarian idealism, as distinct from what, in modest plainness, you genuinely felt. Even in the days of his first collection, Discrete Series (1934), when he was still regarded as an Objectivist poet in the company of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi, he entirely rejected baseless “figures of elocution, or even of mere assertion” for “figures of perception” or images of veracity founded on the “data of experience.”[1] The preference remained just as strong after he had broken nearly three decades of publishing silence with The Materials in 1962 and maintained in an essay of the same year, “The Mind’s Own Place,” that the act of writing poetry is the surest test of belief. For him, it was essential to remember that “the great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete details of the poem.”[2]
He is also implicitly directing these words toward Levertov, a poet in a somewhat different lineage from him (D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Thoreau forming a major part of her inheritance), but who is politically close, in shared opposition to America’s war in Vietnam. For him, though, being on the side of liberal virtue is not enough, even with her kind of religious overlay. So when he says in a letter that his essay “is almost written at [Levertov], and at her latest poems, some of which are very bad,”[3] he is pointing to a notable failure of feeling that he sees in her fifth collection, The Jacob’s Ladder (1961), as instanced by the poem “During the Eichmann Trial.” There stands the Nazi defendant in the Israeli court, “isolated in a bullet proof / witness-stand of glass”:
an apparition
telling us something he
does not know: we are members
one of another.
Writing to Levertov, Oppen notably centers on the last lines, with their echo of St. Paul. “Tho I think too,” he says, “that we are members of each other,” she makes no “demand” on her general words of human kinship. Free from any pressure or scrutiny, they “will not substantiate themselves” — as he sees it, repeating his essay’s vocabulary — “in the concrete materials of a poem”;[4] and such concreteness exists, it is implied, not in a ghostly figure of assertion, like the “apparition” of the dehumanized, glassed-in Eichmann, but in the full-bodied life and potency that stem from the genuinely perceptive figure. Oppen speaks as a poet who himself depends on the stimulus of such an image: not a pre-known thing, calculable metaphor, or invented imagery à la Amy Lowell and T. E. Hulme, or the kind of subjective “deep image” in Robert Bly’s poetry, but that which is closer to the solid trouvé of suggestive possibility in Reznikoff’s. Citing so often “a girder, still itself among the rubble,” from Jerusalem the Golden, Oppen sees the image as the encompassing power that can focus experience with an exactness that brings the poet fully inside its meaning. It is the point of concentration suddenly tightened by a chance occurrence, a striking object, a cluster of sensations or a piece of art, begetting from itself a sequence of the as-yet unspoken and unrealized. Out of one small, figurative instance a fresh consciousness can be opened up, as Oppen happily acknowledges in his essay when he leaves behind his implicit dispraising of Levertov’s verse and says of her Jacob’s Ladder poem “Matins”:
Denise Levertov begins a fine poem with the words: “The authentic!” and goes on to define
the real, the new-laid
egg whose speckled shell
the poet fondles and must break
if he will be nourished
in the events of a domestic morning: the steam rising in the radiators, herself “breaking the handle of my hairbrush,” and the family breakfast, to the moment when, the children being sent to school [with the mother in the poem rushing downstairs to give the boy his forgotten glasses],
cold air
comes in at the street door.[5]
What takes his attention here is not the language of religious uplift, which gives the poem its title, celebrates the preparation of breakfast (“Stir the holy grains, set / the bowls on the table”), and pervades other poems of the collection: as with lights in city windows glowing as “seraphic or demonic flames” (“A Window”), the “sacred salt” that sparkles on swimmers’ bodies in “The Depths,” and even the “sacramental excrement” in “Five Poems from Mexico.” He enjoys, rather, the clear way into the world’s actuality — a belief in that — offered by the image from “Matins”: the “new-laid / egg,” which must be cracked apart, like the breaking of the hairbrush handle, and the opening of the street door to let through “cold air.” All are the cleavings into the “authentic,” which later seem to Oppen as if Levertov “had walked out that door, opened the door and gone forth.”[6]
But with such an opening imaginatively widened, it would seem that the image had more significance for him than for Levertov. As he suggested to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, he got more poetic nourishment from breaking open the “egg” than its originator cared to discover: “A most wonderful of speckled eggs that I stole from her — with acknowledgement — in Mayan Ground. Not that Denise, so far as I know, thought again about that egg.”[7] Oppen, however, did think again, with major consequences for the image of “speckled” variety, when he rewrote the poem thus mentioned, “The Mayan Ground,” and included it in his next collection, This in Which (1965).
Yet the degree to which his creative theft from Levertov was vital in solving an inherent problem that the poem originally presented only becomes clear when we go back to its first published version in the journal Thin Line in 1962. For a poet so concerned with art as a test of belief, it was appropriate that he should be struck by the words of the Mayan high priests in the centuries following the Spanish conquest, who can no longer command a people’s faith. As he saw in The Book of the Jaguar Priest, a translation of their sayings, they had lost their power as protectors because they had ceased to be the interpreters of the calendar on which the Mayans’ whole life and agriculture depended. The foreign oppressors, they lament, “will bring to pass the final days and the end of all the protection of the people … and whether they [our daughters] are beautiful or not, there will be no defenders to guard them in the days to come.” Hopelessly appeasing the Spanish with gifts, “We mourned the red cardinal birds and the red jeweled ornaments; likewise the handfuls of precious stones which lie in the midst of our fields.”[8] But in bringing these quotations together in tighter, epigraph form —
… and whether they are beautiful or not there will be
no one to guard them in the days to come …
we mourned the red cardinal birds and the jeweled ornaments
And the handful of precious stones in our fields …
— Oppen is no Charles Olson in Mayan Letters, revering the instinct-based consciousness of a lost civilization. Instead, the helpless poignancy of the cries, concerned less with daughters than a surface decorativeness no longer protectable, clashes against lines that seek a more fundamental ground and standpoint:
Poor savages
Of ghost and glitter, merely rolling now
The tire leaves a mark
On the earth, a ridge in the ground
Crumbling at the edges
Which is terror, the unsightly
Sand of events silting
Where we make our homes …
Unsentimentally pitted against dead images and an impoverished culture (“Poor savages / Of ghost and glitter”) is the image of modernity’s tire pressing into the earth (“merely rolling now”) without any priestly demarcation of times for planting and reaping. All of that is gone when, in stanza-by-stanza insertion — first with a “mark,” then an emphatic “ridge,” then “Crumbling at the edges,” as the earth is broken down into “terror, the unsightly // Sand of events” — an onpouring, shapeless time overwhelms a sense of habitation in the world, “silting / Where we make our homes.” With earth turned into sand and unsure ground, the image can be pushed no deeper, though it has brought Oppen to a level of basic belief, however small, that contrasts with the shallows of faith from which the priests still speak. Harkening to the serpent god Quetzalcoatl with their figure of elocution (“Kukulcan, Kukulcan, // They said, moving on the waters”), they who once had “knowledge of the unrolling face of the universe for the protection of the fathers of the people from ruin and the descendants of our ancestors,”[9] have left their land bereft after their eighteenth-century miscounting of time:
And the count of the calendar had become confused.
They said they had lost account
Of the unrolling of the universe
In those fields where the dust drifts
From the oxen and the heavy sandals.
So we come down from the “unrolling universe” to what is “merely rolling now,” in ordinary time, as “the dust drifts.” The only real Mayan ground to be finally believed in, when the surface tread of beasts and “heavy sandals” succeed the tire, cannot but be a simple, if degraded, temporality and flux.
Revising the poem, however, Oppen burrows deeper than layers of dust and sand by means of Levertov’s image from “Matins.” In changing the original word order from “the unsightly // Sand of events silting / Where we make our homes” to
the unsightly
Silting sand of events —
he gives the last noun and dash a sharp new point, directing the eye along the richer trajectory of time that exists beneath tire-broken earth and sand:
Inside that shell, ‘the speckled egg’
The poet wrote of that we try to break
Each day, the little grain,
Electron, beating
Without cause,
Dry grain, father
Of all our fathers
Hidden in the blazing shell
Of sunlight —
This is not just breaking the speckled egg but re-creating it. By line-halts that cut into syntax so that words are jammed together in short-line, unexpected companionship, the ever-changing instant is opened up in its small, ungrandiose accretiveness. “Each day, the little grain, // Electron” — with the capitalized line-starts hitting the eye in their separateness — the granular particle of time is also the kind that orbits an atom’s nucleus, “beating” without divine causation and with a force that equally makes it “Dry grain, father.” In that emphasis and lineal juxtaposition, the small seed holds within it a store of generational potency across the ages — “father // Of all our fathers,” as the further stress demands — which is so great in its containment that its being “Hidden,” in that obtrusive, capital-letter way, makes it bulk all the larger inside a now expanded version of the speckled egg: “the blazing shell / Of sunlight —.” Within such brightness, furthermore, lies the core of new temporal meaning that radically transforms the poem’s last stanzas. The failed priestly guardians of time are still there, but not the depleted scene left in the wake of their miscounting, now
They said they had lost account
Of the unrolling of the universe
And only the people
Stir in the mornings
Coming from the houses, and the black hair
Of the women at the pump
Against the dawn
Seems beautiful.
The fresh light of “Each day” replaces dusty fields. For here the unrolling syntax, in pieced-out single lines or stanzas, provides the smaller time-count that is not to be lost or verbally passed over. Flux now has a value to be inhabited and defined by each separate human moment, when “only the people,” with the new stanza’s pointedness, “Stir in the mornings,” and when their “Coming from the houses,” in that distinct, capitalized instance, is as important as the women’s “black hair” at the pump. Singled out for the eye by the new stanza’s adverb, “Against the dawn,” it “Seems” — leaving behind the faded “beautiful or not” — all the more gleamingly “beautiful.”
Helped therefore by an image from Levertov, Oppen’s belief in such brilliant, everyday actuality is remarkably verified. He can even go further and admire other parts of her poetry that have a similar suggestive power, as when she says in the title poem of The Jacob’s Ladder that on this “stairway of sharp / angles … a man climbing / must scrape his knees, and bring the grip of his hands into play.” This to him, with his special regard for figures of substantiation, is “the real stone staircase of your poem,”[9] and he speaks as a poet who has himself stanzaically upheaved the weight of fact in “Chartres” — “That the stones / Stand where the masons locked them” — and evoked the work of “the welder and the welder’s arc / In the subway’s iron circuits” (“Vulcan”). Yet on Levertov’s side the feeling was not mutual. In fact, both poems come from a collection, The Materials, toward which she was largely unsympathetic when she reviewed it. To her, his solidities are more alien than attractive: the mark of a mainly disturbing and complex poetry, where “inner conflict” has been pulled “into the cruel daylight. Man in his environment, man with his machines; ‘how to live, what to do.’”[10]]Indeed, Oppen’s themes could later seem to her so negative, and so hostile to the kind of poetry she sought to write — with his criticisms almost certainly adding to the vexation — that her imagination even conceives him as totally obstructive. In “Who Is at My Window” (O Taste and See, 1965), he is the blighting presence, “the blind cuckoo” mulling over the “old song … about fear, about / tomorrow and next year.” He sings “Timor mortis conturbat … What’s the use?” while she wants
to move deeper into today;
he keeps me from that work.
Today and eternity are nothing to him.
His wings spread at the window make it dark.
Go from my window, go! go!
Oppen, however, will not be sent away. Replying to Levertov by poem, he unashamedly declares:
I distract
Windows that look out
On the business
Of the days
In streets
Without horizon, streets
And gardens
Of the feminine technologies
Of desire
And compassion which will clothe
Everyone
Windows are not darkened here but distracted, with Oppen shifting the viewpoint away from a Levertovian outlook on the world that to him is emotionally all-embracing yet also profoundly restrictive. Whereas she cries out for the immediacy of “Today,” the supposed openness to time is actually for him a vision of closure, with “the business / Of the days” shut in by horizonless streets, as well as by “streets / And gardens” (the emphasis carried over) of a determinedly narrow intent — or, as he says, “Of the feminine technologies,” where the noun has its own distinct suggestiveness. As the title of the poem, “Technologies” (This in Which) — originally “Wisdom, a Technology” —derives from Martin Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” where the technē of the modern world is the instrumentality that, in one of its forms, predetermines purpose. Instead of the “enframing” (Gestell) by which things reveal themselves to the consciousness, this is the delimited kind that “blocks the shining forth and holding-sway of truth.”[11]
Heidegger’s language, therefore, points to what Oppen sees as the problem when he describes Levertov’s work as “Poem after poem of technology, the technological prescription of wisdom literature, specifically How to be good,”[12] because, as he tells his sister, she is “determined to be … a good mother” and an activist against the Bomb.[13] Once more this is not the case of Oppen’s failing to share Levertov’s political outlook, in this case with regard to nuclear power blocs, but of his having earned the right, as a worker on poverty relief in the Depression years, to be humanly frank, rather than piously seeking “How to be good.” In his poem about poor people in modern-day Bergen Street (“Street,” This in Which), he notably observes: “It is terrible to see the children // The righteous little girls; / So good, they expect to be so good.” Such moral predetermining of purpose in Levertov is therefore to be questioned, even while Oppen writes that he admires women’s crucial “intervention and mediation” in the world.[14] “There are times,” he tells L. S. Dembo, that “one is infinitely grateful for the feminine contribution.” But, as he also says, “there are times when “one just has to fight about it, and this poem [“Technologies”] was more or less fighting.”[15] Hence the distinction he makes at the poem’s start when he opposes the “hard” insistencies of great, all-spreading love — as “hard buds blossom / Into feminine profusion” —with an image of something different:
The ‘inch-sized
Heart,’ the little core of oneself,
So inartistic,
The inelegant heart
Which cannot grasp
The world
And makes art
Is small
Like a small hawk
Lighting disheveled on a window sill.
From cuckoo to hawk, the bird has changed, while its potentiality as a small image — capable of being magnified like the contents of the speckled egg — comes from a Chinese disquisition on the art of writing. “In a sheet of paper,” says Lu Chi’s Wen Fu, “is contained the infinite, / And evolved from an inch-sized heart an endless panorama.”[16] Making the “Heart” bigger at the capitalized line-start, without exaggerating “the little core of oneself” — “So inartistic,” as it may seem at this point — Oppen signals that the “inelegant heart / Which cannot grasp the world” in emotionally grandiose encompassment, has nevertheless the tiny word-grasp which does make “art” in its own rhyming way — “small” (as it keeps its tiny yet enlarged status on the single line) “Like a small hawk / Lighting” (emphasis shifting to “Lighting” after “Like,” as with “hawk” after “small”) when it lands with ungainly, lit-up truthfulness (no winged shadow) “disheveled / on a window sill.”
As a bird of hawklike veracity, rather than a miserable cuckoo, it also looks beyond the mind’s “enframing” to what might genuinely be believed in a world without closure seen by the creatures in “Quotations” (This in Which):
‘The insects and the animals
And the insects
Stare at the open’
And she said
Therefore they are welcome.
“She” is Oppen’s wife Mary, and the quotation is derived from the eighth of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where
with all its eyes the creation-world beholds
the open. But our eyes, as though reversed,
encircle it on every side, like traps
set round its unobstructed path to freedom.
What is outside we know from the brute’s face
alone …[17]
It is an animal view of openness which, says Rilke, is shared only by the child who “sometimes gets quietly lost there” before being “jogged back again” to conformity — forced, as the elegy also says, “to look backwards” at the narrower, adult concept of things, and forever made to “retain the attitude of someone who’s departing.” But, as Oppen shows in another poem, such imprisonment and escape to a open world that might genuinely be believed in, are both within the compass of the potent image. Having seen in a New York gallery a miniature copy of the late sixteenth-century marble statue by Giovanni da Bologna, done in the figura serpentinata style, he has a shape “Spiraling its drama / In the stairwell // Of the gallery” (“Giovanni’s Rape of the Sabine Women at Wildenstein’s,” This in Which), which means, in its twisted form, that the female victim, borne aloft by her abductor, is actually facing away from the direction she is carried toward. Therefore, “the girl / On the shoulder of the warrior, calling / Behind her in the young body’s triumph” is victorious in not being fully abducted by the violence of an art which would imprison the “child” in her. “Seeking like a child the eyes / Of the animals,” she reaches, like the ensuing poem, toward the entirety of a world beyond the limits of statue and gallery. “If this be treason / To the artists,” says Oppen at the end,
one needs such faith,
Such faith in it
In the whole thing, more than I,
Or they, have had in songs.
More important than the “songs” of falsifying artistry is “Such faith in it” — the noun stressed by repetition — “In the whole thing” — with the stress on the world as a believable entirety again achieved by repeating and expanding the phrase — that for Oppen is the close, verbal pointedness that makes language a substantiating power. He disagrees strongly with William Carlos Williams’s notion that “A poem is a machine made of words,”[18] because words are what come after the wordless event, as attendants on its supremacy. But equally he strives away from the “song” of an art in which the diction of hallowed mystery exists without pressure of meaning. Levertov’s reverential manner, for example, in “Come into Animal Presence” (The Jacob’s Ladder) could never be his when she acclaims the independent otherness of the creaturely world — a “lonely” rabbit who twitches its ears, a llama who folds its legs, and an “insouciant / armadillo” who glances at us but refuses to hasten his trot — by declaring: “Those who were sacred have remained so … An old joy returns in holy presence.”
But to verify the immediately “there!” in an animal scene and to keep attending on such presentness by a language of unrecondite surprise is the very different effect of Oppen’s “Psalm” in This in Which. No sacred song or praise of God, it is religious only by its careful devotion, stanza by indented stanza, to the secular wonder of place and time: a sequence of disclosure to which Oppen points in the epigraph with a significantly curtailed quotation from Aquinas, “Veritas sequitur …” Instead of “Veritas sequitur esse rerum” (“Truth follows upon the existence of things”)[19] what follows from sequitur, as the open-ended dots lead into the poem, is not necessarily a divine truth implied by Creation, but a moment-by-moment test of truthfulness in uttering a continuity beyond human predetermining:
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down —
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle and stare out.
“In this in which”: for what is solely inside the temporal, visible world, neither to be transcended or rushed past, is as much the poem’s concern as the collection to which it gives a title. Yet being so inwardly there, “In the small beauty of the forest,” where no onward-pushing verb disturbs the stillness, Oppen fastens on a moment that is imagelike in its spell and potentiality. It is not now the speckled egg or the miniature version of Giovanni’s statue which holds a suggestive power, ready to be unfolded, but the smallness of a “beauty” that has within it “The wild deer bedding down,” as a calm forcefully arrived at, an animal wildness unclamorously bent on simply being there and nowhere else. “That they are there!” — place and animals as inextricably linked as the word-matrix which utters them — is the cry both of energy and stasis, as the word “That” seemingly leaps forward to a greater syntactic destiny, yet is tensed to a halt by what is “there!” The latter word, however, has the verb-free impetus which homophonically keeps the next stanza’s “Their” inside the same core of force and rest, where aspirates are pressed against each other —
Their eyes
Effortless
— and the humble adjective of nonexertion is given an invigorating charge. Raised to capital-letter height, it takes on a visual prominence which is equally remarkable at the next line-start when, in the poem’s first verb,
the soft lips
Nuzzle
What might have been a word of fuzzy lingering has been enjambed into striking definiteness. No less magnified by sight and sound, as the poem opens out the forest image, is the action of “the alien small teeth” that, for all their smallness, “Tear at the grass” — not, however, with overblown savagery, as the casual and the energized keep their tense partnership. For “The roots of it” — a force of necessary emphasis carried over to visual prominence by the verb — “Dangle from their mouths,” with the harmlessly loose and the firmly intent brought together to produce the most vehement effect of the poem so far, “Scattering earth in the strange woods.” Torn-up roots and the stress on scattered earth, however, pin attention all the more fervently upon the visionary yet solid ground of the “strange woods”: a place of sheer being where
They who are there
are no more separable from the scene, with pronoun stuck hard against adverb in a verbless, invigorated resting-point, than is “there” from “Their paths” in the following stanza. Since these, moreover, are “Their paths / Nibbled thru the fields,” the participle of small-toothed action shares kinship with the other little bites or jerks of energy that have also been visually and vocally magnified, like “Nuzzle,” “Tear,” “Dangle,” and “Scattering.” With appropriate emphases and capital letter enlargements, therefore,
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
But here the miniature is scaled up in a further sense. Out “thru the fields” and back again to the forest, the small-bitten paths bring expansion to the scene of the animals, as the leaves which shade them on the now-extended verse-line, “Hang,” not just in big, emphatic suspense on the next line but as a crucial shelter amidst “the distances / Of sun.” For despite those vast, cosmic “distances” — or the extra-large white gap created on the page by cutting back the stanza’s last line to two words only — a close-up actuality, big in its littleness, adamantly persists. As a syntactic continuation from “Hang,” the first words of the final stanza hover in space —
The small nouns
Crying faith
— yet emphatically clutch again at the confines of the cherished, immediate world. At the same time they are loudly “Crying faith,” by sound and capital letter, “In this in which”: the accents driving words and solidities inseparably together yet sending the poem’s final lines into terrain past utterance. For as if roused by the cry, the wild deer “Startle and stare out” — out indeed from the close-knit intrication of human language, as verb jolts free from verb and the animals gaze right beyond the page into the yet-unspoken and unknown.
So words remain faithful to wordless existence. Not “small nouns” alone, but their little heightened counterparts, the adverbs, participles, adjectives, and unspeeding verbs, wait upon temporal reality as it gradually reveals itself. It is the same vigorous deference to fact and the unfaked which has made Oppen quarrel so valuably with Levertov’s poetry and gain from it one particular revealing image: a pursuit of the provenly felt which has engaged him, we should remember, since he first returned to writing poetry and asked in “Blood from the Stone” (The Materials), “Belief? What do we believe to live with?” Then he could only say, “all / That verse attempts.” But as he goes further in his poems of the early 1960s, with the same quest for verifiable, shared meaning which decisively heralds “Of Being Numerous” in 1968, a very different answer suggests itself: not what verse attempts as a test of belief, but what it here amazingly wins in the bright light of achievement.
1. Oppen to Charles Tomlinson, 5 May 1963, in The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 82, and Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” in George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 32.
2. Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” 32.
3. Oppen to June Oppen Degnan, mid-1962, Selected Letters, 57.
4. Oppen to Levertov, after April 13, 1963, Selected Letters, 81.
5. Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” 32.
6. Oppen to Dan Gerber, 27 November 1970, Selected Letters, 218.
7. Oppen to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 10 September 1965, Selected Letters, 393n20.
8. Maud Worcester Makemson, trans., The Book of the Jaguar Priest: A Translation of the Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951), 49 and 9.
9. Oppen to Levertov, after April 13, 1963, Selected Letters, 81. Oppen to Levertov, Denise Levertov Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University, box 78, folder 50.
10. Denise Levertov, “Poetry Pure and Complex,” review of By the Waters of Manhattan, by Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen, The Materials, The New Leader 46, no. 4 (February 13, 1963): 27.
11. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 28. The title essay was first published in 1954. See also Burton Hatlen, “‘Feminine Technologies’: George Oppen Talks at Denise Levertov,” American Poetry Review, May–June 1993, 9–14.
12. Oppen to DuPlessis, 10 September 1965, Selected Letters, 393n20.
13. Oppen to June Oppen Degnan, mid-1962, Selected Letters, 57–58.
14. Oppen: “I am very, very happy with women and very, very fond of women, and I do feel their intervention and … mediation in this”: interview with Oppen by Reinhold Schiffer, May 1, 1975, in Speaking with George Oppen: Interviews with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968–1987, ed. Richard Swigg (McFarland and Co., 2012), 82. “I was also interested there [the Discrete Series poem “Fragonard”] in the women themselves as almost a mediation of the culture”: interview with George and Mary Oppen by Kevin Power, May 25, 1975, in Speaking with George Oppen, 88.
15. Interview with Oppen by L. S. Dembo, May 1968, in Speaking with George Oppen, 32.
16. Shih-hsiang Chen, trans., “The Joy of Writing,” in Essay on Literature, Written by the Third Century Poet, Lu Chi, trans. Shih-hsiang Chen (Anthoesen Press, 1953). Words from the chapter recur in the poems “Guest Room” (This in Which) and “Route” (Of Being Numerous).
17. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, ed. and trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W.W. Norton, 1939).
18. William Carlos Williams writes, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” in Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1954), 256. He similarly saw the poem as “a workable mechanism” in his 1934 review of Discrete Series, to which Oppen replied forty years later: “a poem is not built of words, one cannot make a poem by sticking words into it, it’s the poem which makes the words and contains their meaning” (interview with Reinhold Schiffer, in Speaking with George Oppen, 85).
19. Jacques Maritain’s translation in Existence and the Existent (1948), trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan (Image Books, 1956), 21. But Veritas sequitur esse rerum (the epigraph to his first chapter, from which Oppen almost certainly took the words) does not occur at all in that form in Aquinas’s writings, according to the Index Thomisticus. Maritain has probably created one dictum out of textually separated words in a work such as Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae de veritatate.
Introduction
It’s difficult to say exactly what’s going on in Scottish poetry right now. But it’s definitely something exciting.
When I first moved to Edinburgh from Toronto five years ago, I uncovered only a couple of poetry series and one small press fair. Despite the general reverence for Rabbie Burns (I mean, a national holiday for a poet!) and the significant number of well-known Scottish poets like Tom Leonard, Jackie Kay, Brian McCabe and Carol Ann Duffy (the current British poet laureate), there didn’t seem to be the same ground-level exuberance for poetry that I’ve experienced elsewhere.
Now Glasgow and Edinburgh boast so many poetry events and book fairs that I can’t possibly highlight them in this limited space. You trip over poets like you trip over bad bagpipers swindling tourists on the High Street. We have page poets, stage poets, language poets, lyric poets, slam poets, vispoets, sound poets, found poets, conceptual poets. We have a particularly interesting scene of poets fusing text with dance, visual art, film and/or music.
Scotland is a small and sparsely populated “country” (I will return to the quotation marks anon), and the current trend in varied and explorative poetics seems antithetic to the number of people here (some paltry 5.2 million) — especially when you still find an inordinate number of bad rhyming poets in a huge place like London.
Which takes me back to the quotation marks. Perhaps we can credit this surge in Scottish work to the fact that Scotland is finally coming into itself again. The devolution process — Scotland’s separation from the United Kingdom in terms of certain political powers, marked by gaining its own parliament in 1999 — might result in full independence in the next five years. There will soon be a referendum, and odds are we might be a real country again.
As a poet raised by a Scottish father and grandfather (the latter especially queen-loathing) and French Canadian mother, I rather like the idea of independence — though I’m a bit wary of nationalism proper. What defines a nation? Where does colonialism end? But these are big questions. Let’s just say it’s an exciting time to be in Scotland, despite high unemployment, racism, sexism, ableism and homo/transphobia. We are on the cusp of something, and that something might be better than what we have as part of “Great” Britain.
We were speaking of poetry. The poets I’ve chosen to feature here are by no means representative of all of Scotland. For example, very few of the works are in Scots and none are in Gaelic. Most of the poets were born or live in Glasgow or Edinburgh. And when asked about the “Scottishness” of their work, most of them pretty much shrugged. Perhaps the (now-defunct) Scottish Arts Council’s efforts to produce officially Scottish™ poetry backfired? It’s hard to stuff a poet into a mold.
In this small survey, I offer you seven short examples of some of the people raising the bar of poetry in Scotland. Alison Smith’s British Sign Language performance poetry is a haunting and beautiful depiction of deafness, disability, and lesbian desire. Colin Herd’s versatile and often humorous texts evoke a wee taste of Frank O’Hara, with a distinctly Edinburgh twist. In a tour-de-force sequence, Jim Ferguson searches eloquently for links between nature, feminism, and working-class Scottish men.
Lila Matsumoto ensnares her readers with deceptively simple lines; her poems slowly take shape into creatures that seem to breathe on their own. Using everyday texts, Marvo Men perform something between sound poetry and improvised music, drawing on what’s left on the page after it has been read. Nuala Watt centers the disabled poet’s voice, skillfully separating the poetics of blindness and cerebral palsy from the simplistic symbolism of the Canon. And ShellSuit Massacre electrify listeners with their class-conscious found-poetry-techno, augmented by Sacha Kahir’s politically charged video.
Worth noting is that many of the people publishing and presenting work in Scotland are migrants — or, like myself, from here yet not from here. Arguably, it’s the mixture of home-grown and migrant poets that’s creating the new excitement in Scottish writing, the flourishing hybrid forms, the experimentation, and — dare I say it — the, um, Scottishness.
If you’re interested in accessing more new Scottish poetry, here are a few highlights of many possible recommendations:
Publications:
Gutter, Glasgow (Adrian Searle, Colin Begg)
anything anymore anywhere, Edinburgh (Colin Herd)
SCREE, Edinburgh (Lila Matsumoto)
Forest Publications, Edinburgh (Ryan Van Winkle and Forest Editorial Board)
Reading series and literary events:
Words Per Minute, Glasgow (Helen Sedgwick, Kirstin Innes, Kirsty Logan)
Seeds of Thought, Glasgow (Ernest and Tawona Sithole, Tarneem Al Mousawi)
Neu! Reekie!, Edinburgh (Kevin Williamson, Michael Pederson)
Inky Fingers, Edinburgh (Alec Beattie, Mairi Campbell-Jack, Harry Giles, Rachel McCrum, Katherine McMahon, Rose Ritchie and Tracey S. Rosenberg)
Crystal gazing
Clark Coolidge’s ‘Crystal Text’
“That mind artifact is mutable, thank the lord” — Clark Coolidge[1]
A few facts about crystals:
Once only mined (mind), most quartz crystal now is grown.
Quartz is the most common mineral on Earth.
Many crystals are piezoelectric: they emit a (thin) electric charge under pressure.
Crystals rotate the plane of polarized light.
Certain crystals are biogenic. Trilobites used calcite to form the lenses of their eyes.
Naturally formed by the combination of oxygen and silicon, quartz crystal has a habit of growing in the dark, its long prism always forming a perfect sixty-degree angle to the adjoining prisms. Calcite, on the other hand, occurs in limestone and other rocks that are formed biogenically, out of the fossilized shells of tiny dead sea creatures. In The Crystal Text, Clark Coolidge writes, “Transparency a matter of slowly mattering,”[2] torquing noun into verb and revealing in a flash both the semantic and scientific senses of ‘matter.’ The transparent matter of crystal accrues, slowly mattering itself into being. In the same way, the potential (however slight) for “transparency” in writing is “a matter of slowly mattering.” By turns transparent and opaque, The Crystal Text returns to the object of its contemplation — the crystal — and also to the grounds of its own composition. Matter amalgamates in gradual improvisation of poetic language and thinking, as Coolidge’s long poem accumulates its matter, layer by layer, letter by letter. It contains itself in much the same way a crystal does, and is a crystalline record of its growth.
In his study of jazz drumming and the work of Jack Kerouac, Now It’s Jazz, Coolidge writes, “I had thought the writer must first have it all in his head and only then put it into words, but no. I began to see how it was really excitingly done: You wrote from what you didn’t know toward whatever could be picked up in the act. Poetry starts here.”[3] Writing begins with accretion, accumulating bits both biogenic and inanimate, toward some structure as yet unknown. Coolidge, whose interests around poetry (he’s a jazz drummer, a caver, and a collector of fossils) so lucidly and plainly inform the poetry itself, mentions trilobites in several of his works.
After first reading The Crystal Text, in depth and amazement, I bought a piece of calcite crystal. It is clear, naturally formed in the shape of a rhombus, and it fits comfortably in the palm of my hand. (The Greeks felt a crystal “cooled” the hand when held. Pliny the Elder believed that quartz crystal was a permanently frozen form of water, and the word “crystal” comes from the Greek for “ice.”) There is a Moroccan trilobite on the desk next to the calcite. It is brown and spiny, like a chrysalis, and it’s about 250 million years old. It reminds me of the armored, anomalous horseshoe crabs that inhabited a beach in Delaware where I went every summer as a kid. Off past the beach houses with towels slung over porch railings and satellite dishes, the crabs crawled like dazed prehistoric visitors. I picked them up, walking with my father, and threw them back in the bay. Trilobites, which were killed off in the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, had compound eyes, with lenses like prisms that were made of calcite. These two remnants seem to have hurtled through space and time to land aligned on my desk: the raw, unpolished sandy rock fossil of an ancient marine animal and the clear, mysterious rhombus of calcite that composed the lenses of its eyes.
From ignorance toward (the impossibly small potential for) certainty, back out. At the outset of The Crystal Text, Coolidge writes, “Senseless this arrival at a subject for a start” (9). And later, “start / with something. Begin here” (67). The point is made, slowly and carefully, over the long series of poetic speculations, sprawling ruminations, and koans of which the text is composed:
One could divide it all up into
those who know how the work should be
and those who never know before the work.
But then those who did not know began to know
the materials, an intimate action
and can one go too far with material causes?
(will and would
rather than
shall and should) (33)
To whatever extent the object is an object-lesson (here, as elsewhere, an emphatically silent one), the crystal provokes a strain of thinking (among a number of other lines of inquiry) about writing as improvisation. As doing to see where the doing will lead. A slow process which takes place in the dark, almost an improvisation resulting in rock —beautiful, transparent and cloudy — to be harvested from a cave or simply to be seen. Or as the gradual accumulation, as sediment, of millions of creatures’ eyes. Yet: “can one go too far with material causes?” The poet seems to defer an answer with the parenthetical aside. On closer inspection, however, Coolidge is making a statement about inevitability. The “intimate action” of engaging with material causes — word, stone — is exactly the responsibility the poet takes up in writing. There will (rather than “shall”) be a call and response, however quiet, maybe even nearly mute, between writing mind and the external world of objects the crystal inhabits. It sets itself forth in the action: starting to write, an impulse to music.
In Now It’s Jazz, but elsewhere also, Coolidge makes it clear how deeply his interest in music coincides with his writing. This influence permeates the poetry at every level, and the vocabulary of jazz can be usefully borrowed to think through Coolidge’s project in The Crystal Text. Syncopation, improvisation, the downbeat, the head or standard: all of these ideas are native to the generous and alien landscape of the poem. Originally published by the Figures Press in 1986, The Crystal Text is a long (168-page) poem comprised of short bursts of lyric. It almost has the feel of a captain’s logbook, with daily entries detailing the crystal at the center of its attention. Like At Egypt, published two years later, it’s an epic lyric poem. Both are sustained meditations on a single subject; however, unlike At Egypt, The Crystal Text affords its subject more formal variation. Some of the poem’s sections are a single line; others run across several pages. Line lengths and sound patterns mutate, and there are fewer refrains.
If poems contemplating mute vessels (urns, jars) could be considered “standards” (in the sense of “All the Things You Are,” or “How High the Moon”), The Crystal Text returns to its head, or main theme, with a deliriously clear love of the form. Just as a crystal improvises its form (albeit — crucially — according to certain unseen constraints and systems), the poem stands as a record of its own improvised composition. Its form is a record of its relationship over time to the mute object of its inquiry, the crystal, in chunks of lived days, the sometimes clipped, sometimes sprawling sections of poetry which make up the long poem The Crystal Text. In Now It’s Jazz, Coolidge quotes Kerouac writing (in Visions of Cody) about jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz: “He can take care of himself even though he goofs and does April in Paris from inside out as if the tune was the room he lived in and was going out at midnight with his coat on.” Coolidge continues, “Yeah. That has the feeling of improvisation starting at a base and going out and you can get back if you want since you know where that is but you can also go anywhere and take whatever form in the going you want” (44). The tune, like the poem, records this form of departure from and return to theme. As obscure, dissociative lines snap in and out of focus, the crystal remains The Crystal Text’s base, a refrain strangely familiar in all its variations. The image of the clear piece of rock is suddenly and clearly summoned to the reader’s mind out of some piece of otherwise alien phrasing: as “Sky flake in a water pocket” (133), or “Stable portion, sense lesson, icicle twilight” (61), or “unlit candle” (114); as “a jet stripe of firm” (111), or “A scarf that is the weather’s edge / a rig of partial light” (83). These variations on the theme of the crystal are the matter of the poem; the poem’s transparency (or, turned to view from a different facet, its opacity) a matter of their mattering. As in good jazz, it’s all in the phrasing — fidelity to the theme and headlong, syncopated departure from it.
The beat is everywhere. Much of Coolidge’s poetic genius resides in his sense of stress, in his deliverance of language to its plain percussive value. At its most basic, syntactic level, the compression of Coolidge’s lyric exerts a sort of pressure of sound on sense. The words are struck, brushed, rolled, and dragged. Like Harry Partch, the iconoclastic twentieth-century American composer, Coolidge invents a field — a junkyard — of instruments, as well as a corresponding way to play them, in order to create the richly atonal, contorted rhythms of the poem. Through torque and compression of language toward pure sound, sense gets heightened and bent:
emitting his bulbs back behind the fog and fan factory
when evenings they laid out docked china and had
themselves a paid laugh. One knocked over the ocean
and sold his boat, walked away forever into the thicket
New England of brought ice turned into new green house.
Another plans wicked bop pranks in the L.A. smear (108)
That’s where poems (Coolidge’s, spectacularly) yield electrical charge, as do crystals when pressed. Their atoms (in quartz and calcite, for example) are so tightly and regularly formed that when pressure is exerted, the positive and negative charges of which they are constituted are momentarily divided. This momentary division produces a slight electric charge called piezoelectricity (from the Greek “piezo,” meaning to press). This is the principle behind a cigarette lighter on a car dashboard, or the push-start button on a propane barbeque grill. Crystal radios also operate on piezoelectricity. So too, if an electrical charge is applied to the crystal, it will bend. This strange and beautiful physical characteristic of the crystal seems apt to satisfy the lunging percussive urges of the poem. Every torque of syntax or stressed syllable, each hammered word, seems to emit a faint but distinctly glowing electrical charge amid the slow darknesses and changing lights of the poem. Here is Coolidge talking about the one-word poems of Aram Saroyan:
I had a reason for getting to the place where I started to write that kind of thing, which I was trying to explain in being influenced by Saroyan putting his one word. He put so much pressure on one word, is what it was. He insisted that that word was the poem. You could talk about art being insistent emphasis. The words really came to me very strongly, as strong things. And I began to think: but I want to put them together with that kind of intensity.[4]
That intensity, the charge of Coolidge’s percussive lines, generates flares of electricity through the long sequence of poems that constitute The Crystal Text, as it spans changing seasons and the poet’s own slow, assiduous concentration.
“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness!”[5] Keats addresses his famous object of poetic contemplation, an ancient vessel painted with an unchanging pastoral scene. The poet studies it closely, looking all around it, as though there might be something within or beyond its form that would come to illuminate its enigma. Immutable and transfixing, cold stone alive with imagery, silent vessel abruptly given voice, the urn’s narrative remains static, its outcome made unknowable by its own unchanging form. The poet of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” finds grim solace and unearthly beauty in the permanence of the urn’s imagery. Keats’s poem enacts the object’s painted, changeless activity, detailing the “flowery tale” of the (silent) “Sylvan historian” which is the urn. For Coolidge, the crystal occupies an even more radically ambiguous relation to time. Coolidge writes:
The crystal is always showing a world
that does not exist except in remission.
It does not contain but transposes. (37)
Throughout The Crystal Text, the inert, immutable object filters the changing light of day through the prism it is. As Keats, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” narrates the flux the vessel points toward while always precluding, Coolidge watches hours, days, and seasons pass through the changeless facade of the crystal. Like the poem, it rotates these lights. The Crystal Text is strewn with cryptic glitches that point to the object’s temporal undecidability: it is “A scatter dance held rigid, knowledge is that?” (27) and “This place where morning is permanent” (34). Looking at it, Coolidge asks, “Why are there places where some thing is not happening?” (72). The crystal pends, it’s both in medias res and unfinishable: “During, see during, see the end of the line always receding” (46). It remains, like the urn, emphatically silent: “It does not say. It stay” (61). “Silence in the presence of the occulting lights” (104), writes Coolidge, baffled by the crystal’s strangely forceful reticence. It is almost as though the very silence of these objects — urn and crystal — were what both Keats and Coolidge find magnetic. In Keats, there is something to narrate: the urn is painted, and although the action depicted is endless and changeless, the poem’s attempt to speak for it constitutes the force and central dilemma of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The crystal, however, offers less to narrate; its presence is even more radically ambiguous. The temptation somehow to “narrate” it persists, alongside the impossibility of doing so. “It’s taking my light? It’s taking my words” (137): of course, it is taking Coolidge’s words — and yet the crystal remains almost completely inscrutable as a cipher for the Text.
Senseless thing, crystal, say you of yourself?
And all the other things I would say of you. Unto you,
and for you. (95)
As Keats’s poem comes to speak for the painted urn, it paradoxically acknowledges that the object’s silence sets it always ahead of the poem itself: “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (238). As the ode gains reflexive momentum, ecstatically listing the halted action of the imagery painted on the urn, it comes to speak for the silent urn, before running aground at the final, gnomic couplet:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (240)
The urn’s silence becomes insurmountable here. The desperate, enticing equation for which the poem is known is just as much an admission of the futility of trying to find something beyond the object’s form as it is a mere affirmation of the significance of beauty. More than anything, it is an irreducibly powerful statement about the silence of the object. The urn may be looked at from all sides but keeps its silence and is set during. It can, for these reasons, disclose finally nothing but its form: its beauty is the truth it discloses, the only truth we need to know since it is the only truth knowable. The oldness of the object, its permanence and silence prompt questioning and preclude certainty:
He thought he knew that. He wondered
if the crystal would still be warming in the sun after
all the humans had died. He imagined it standing
on a sandy plain like a fire in the fire.
There seemed beauty in this but no knowledge. (The Crystal Text, 114)
In Hugh Kenner’s massive study of Ezra Pound, The Pound Era, he writes: “When Wyndham Lewis writes (Tarr, about 1914) that ‘the lines and masses of a statue are its soul’ (art has no inside, nothing you cannot see), he tells us that we may confront any art as we must confront that of the Upper Paleolithic.”[6] Coolidge, whose friendship with the painter Philip Guston was certainly mutually influential (both are sui generis masters), is certainly familiar with the merits, and maybe necessity, of confronting “any art as we must confront that of the Upper Paleolithic.” In “Arrangement,” a lecture on poetics and process given at Naropa, Coolidge writes, “one of the things Guston likes to talk about most is cave art: the first painters, who are incredible if you look at their work. I’m not sure that anyone is more sophisticated. The mark, the first mark. Of course Guston talks about it like Mallarmé’s statement, ‘being a civilized first man.’ In other words, you’re in the cave and you’ve got your stick, but you know all about art, you’ve been to the Louvre” (159). There is a necessity, when painting or writing an object, to see it as first man might have. This initial seeing — the condition of possibility for the “intimate action” of beginning “to know / the materials” — opens a space where poet and reader, painter and viewer, might see the object as abstract form.
In The Crystal Text crystal can then become “a lock of standages” (44) or “a glow zone” (14). Neil Young, frozen orange juice, Angel Hair magazine, and Dave Brubeck appear in the poem’s frequencies, among many others. But the abiding, initial amazement, a shock of wonder like that of first man at the stone’s oldness runs like a seam through the poem. The crystal’s ancientness, its existence a priori the poet and the modern world are knowledge underlying The Crystal Text:
Crystal not survivable, but will remain me.
It lives in the sun-tipped palace of my regard,
until. One could place no period after it. (89)
The magnetism of ancient things, their materiality in time — calcite, trilobite, the sounds of language — must be a primary obsession of the poet. This is the “will and would / rather than / shall and should,” the inevitability poems start with. The crystal’s persistence in form over time, a nearly musical persistence of quiet shape, is one of the poem’s underpinnings. Like the urn, which “When old age shall this generation waste / … shalt remain, in midst of other woe,” the permanence of the crystal urges the poem toward a recognition of the impossibility of its own completion. Stone, urn, and poem are what “one could place no period after.” For the crystal there is finally no finally.
All of which is crucial to an understanding of The Crystal Text. But also, critically: “art has no inside, nothing you cannot see.” This parenthetical of Kenner’s, an aside, has had a killer effect on me. I wrestle with it because it seems at times to run poisonously counter to the more hopeful uses of writing. There is something monstrous about that idea, but as The Crystal Text, like “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” points out, you point to an inside that is and isn’t there. Keats looks at the urn from every side, and when the silent object speaks, it can disclose nothing but its self, the beauty of its form.
The crystal sits on the poet’s desk. He observes it. It is both alive and inanimate, silent and yet awaiting response. Like Wallace Stevens’s jar, the crystal organizes reality (and thereby, obviously but crucially, the ensuing poem) around itself. Stevens: “It made the slovenly wilderness / surround that hill.”[7] The crystal, like the jar, becomes the poem’s inscrutable cipher, its placement the enactment of the poem’s own making. Coolidge writes, “The world is a baffle that shows through to / you, everywhere” (89). Stevens writes of the jar: “It took dominion everywhere” (76). Of the crystal everything in The Crystal Text comes to surround, Coolidge writes:
Now all I can see is you. Whatever you contain.
Whatever you do to time, not to mention
perform on space. (95)
However, like neither the jar nor the urn, the crystal both is and is not a vessel. “What am I looking at? Into what’s locked businesses?” (45). It contains itself, and is both open and closed, its contents visible to the naked eye.
In, within, withheld, appearance
owns a shifty lock? Back to the thought, the crystal
open while closed (27)
This sense of the crystal as a vessel of itself, which is both open and shut, is conjured throughout the poem. “The crystal holds light but it is not hollow” (151). It is a “box of instruments, padlocked” (36), “any space one can see / is enclosed” (14), and “our encased answer” (71). “Is there a half-broken-open rock?” (57), asks Coolidge. The crystal is “notionless of its fill” (111), “but / crystal itself does fill” (46). What can it mean to think the poem as a vessel both closed and open? To what degree is it “notionless of its fill”? The crystal isn’t, like Stevens’s jar, “of a port in air.” It carries itself, through time, in closed form. “Art has no inside, nothing you cannot see.” And yet the crystal does have a visible inside, through which light passes: integral, visible and invisible. Its contents both inaccessible, yet completely apparent. A closed thing whose visible contents rotate light? A static thing capable of generating electrical current when pressed? Is reading then a kind of pressure put on the poem? The poem, like the stone, is composed of materials that provoke this impossible line of questioning even as they render it moot. They provoke it, like the urn, out of the very beauty of their forms. And preclude it by disclosing themselves only as that: “aporian solid” (14). Like the urn, the poet studies the facets and sides of it, hefts it and stares; like Stevens’s jar, its centrality to the poem is pursuant to the way it “takes dominion everywhere.”
Open while closed. “Into what’s locked businesses?” The static businesses of a form which came into being through improvisation, marks on the wall of a cave: as a “finished,” “discrete,” or “singular” “thing,” the closed form of poem or crystal displays simply the processes by which it was formed. It resists reference to anything else: it pends as the forms of the process by which it was composed. In this way it’s precisely an arrangement, as are cave paintings in Lascaux or an Eric Dolphy solo.
In the midst of writing this short essay I watched The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary by Werner Herzog about ancient cave art. Images of bison and horses seem to race across the walls of a cave our prehistoric ancestors once slept in, those early humans who felt the urge to record what they saw and to draw what they dreamt. In one scene, an experimental archaeologist wearing bearskin robes holds up a flute made of a vulture bone, and plays part of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On this ancient, newfound instrument, the song is beautifully and weirdly unfixed from its familiar significance: it becomes just notes, forms of sound floating into space.
2. Coolidge, The Crystal Text (Los Angeles: The Sun and Moon Press, 1995), 74.
3. Coolidge, Now It’s Jazz (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1999).
4. Coolidge, “Arrangement,” in Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, vol. 1, ed. Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1978).
5. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Complete Poems and Selected Letters (New York: Modern Library, 2001).
6. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 30.
7. Wallace Stevens, “The Anecdote of the Jar,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 76.
Poetry and the unpoetic
Early on in her 1996 study of “Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary,” a book entitled Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Marjorie Perloff puts forward the thesis — one which has circulated widely — that Wittgenstein wrote “‘philosophy’ as if it were ‘poetry.’”[1] Both “philosophy” and “poetry” appear in quotation marks, giving us to understand that a certain metaphorical grammar may be at work here, although equally it may be the very literality of these terms that Perloff wishes to insist upon, in order in some sense to “undo.” In evoking this proximity of poetry to philosophy, even by way of an analogy — of an analogical writing — Perloff calls to mind, without naming,[2] the figure (we might say spectre) of a form of “poetry” that writes as philosophy; which negates itself (as poetry) in a moment of zealous assertion of its truth (as philosophy). Perloff’s implied interlocutor here is the Plato of The Republic. In the background of Perloff’s discussion of Wittgenstein, of “poetic language,” and of “estrangement,” the three books of the Republic dealing with the exclusion of “poetry” from the ideal polis — in fact its interdiction — evoke the ambi-violence of a type of primal scene: on the one hand describing a castration-effect of language under the dominion of the philosophic Signified, and on the other describing the locus of a return of the philosophical “repressed,” its Unheimlich, its strangely resemblant yet disconcerting and innately threatening other. They rehearse in inaugurating political consciousness, towards whose “thought” — or rather rationale — language (and so-called poetic language above all) is henceforth subjectivized as “obedient, dutiful, servile, fawning” — to borrow the words of Zambian-born poet Karen Mac Cormack.[3] Plato’s consolation to poetry is to allow it to plead, to “make her defence”: in any case, poetry is under no circumstances to speak for itself, or to speak in its own name, it must rather be represented before the tribunal of reason by others, speaking in prose — as if it were philosophy.[4]
It has gone without saying, of course, that poetry “speaking as prose,” enters upon the purview of the philosophical only by virtue of this fact, that it does not speak (just as, in the Platonic schema, the truth — under the name Socrates — remains the last word of a philosophy that does not write). But though it is prohibited from speaking in its own name, the eliding of poetry into prose, into the “language of” philosophy, evokes a type of Freudian symptomatology — a type of “return” of the philosophic repressed — by way of this seeming aporia: as if it were philosophy (or even what Badiou, addressing Wittgenstein, calls “antiphilosophie”). There is a corollary, of course, in that the “repressed” is never any detachable thing, but rather a symptom of an inaugurating gesture, such as — analogously — of the Platonic schema. The impetus of poetry’s threat to the polis is entirely apportioned in the inaugurating action of this schema (to the extent that one might indeed argue that poetry — or if not poetry in its generic sense, then poiēsis in the broader tropological sense — “is” this inaugurating action “itself”). “La poème,” writes Badiou, “signifie l’être, et enregistre l’imminence de l’acte.”[5] In any case, poetry henceforth becomes that of which, in its own turn, philosophy will not speak — other than in the proscriptive mode or (equivalently) as an exemplum.
If the republic of Plato stands as a summa of philosophical-political accomplishment, poetry then assumes something of the contrary “function” — of détournement, of ostranenie, of disconcertion and masking: which is to say, it does not state itself as thought, but enstates a type of thought (the unheimlich poetic object, so-called, puts us in the position of thinking at the same time as it maintains a critical distanciation, a “persona”). It is able to do this not because poetry may be applied “philosophically” or “politically” (i.e. as a vehicle for thought in competition with philosophy/politics), but because it itself constitutes a condition, an illicit possibility of the “philosophical” and of the “political” (Plato’s exclusion more than implies it).
We see in Plato that the very activity of formalizing the political as philosophy as thought presents itself as the locus of a kind of obsessional neurosis. The poetic exclusion becomes the bellwether of an entire system and the necessary condition for its terms and the discourse they represent to uphold their claims to a sovereign reason (one unperturbed by internal contradictions).[6] By excluding dramatic poetry from his ideal polis, Plato strictly excludes the possibility of such a thing as “poetical reason,” even if (or rather because) the logic of “personae” employed in dramatic poetry is ostensibly the same logic as underwrites philosophical discourse: i.e. the logic of hypothesis. And philosophical discourse is no mere descriptive system — it is not, as Wittgenstein rightly argued, theoretical, but rather an action, an activity (eine Tätigkeit), thereby commensurate with thinking, with “thought,” and thus commensurate also with a “poetics” of thought.[7] Despite Plato’s objections to the contrary, the activity of philosophy (and Plato’s own philosophical “mode” — aporetic dialogue plus interrogative suspense — is very much exemplary of this) brings together what Badiou calls a syntax continually tempted by mathematics and a semantics equally tempted by a “poésie hermétique.” It aspires to a “crystalline univocity” at the same time as it is drawn towards an “absolute equivocation.”[8]
If Wittgenstein himself formulated no “poetics,” his investigations of language and propositional structures themselves articulate a poetics. In a note, Perloff cites Stanley Cavell to the effect that while “in Plato, philosophy retains a given reality, an autonomous cultural, intellectual, institutional life,” for Wittgenstein such an autonomy no longer obtains.[9] We see that in part this has to do with the view, given in the Tractatus, that language in all its modes — including so-called “philosophical discourse” (as much as “poetic language”) — is either commensurate or contiguous or (to the extent this is possible) both, its autonomy founded solely on a series of rhetorical (poetical) manoeuvres, such as those played out in the Republic. Wittgenstein, however, doesn’t merely dismiss “philosophic” or “poetic” language as categories, but rather — and quite significantly — demonstrates that the logic of Plato’s gesture (the foundational gesture of the philosophy/poetry dichotomy) is itself vested in precisely this contiguity of language (and there is a temptation here to emphasize its as such, if this itself were not a pleonasm): it is a language-effect, an operation of a certain as if. In a very fundamental sense for Wittgenstein, philosophical language and poetic language are hypotheses which are mutually implied if yet in no proper sense equivalent. As Badiou observes:
Words take on, in philosophy, a sense both imperious and troubling. They are at the same time made axiomatic by the effort to systematise and poeticised by the rhetorical energy of doing so.[10]
The Tractatus (an attempt, in Badiou’s estimation, to produce a work sans extérieur through an evocation of linguistic materiality: “the contrary of the entire rhetoric of Platonism”)[11] — though concerned with articulating principles of “logic” — commences with a series of aphorisms, in the guise of axioms (replete with its own numerical pseudo-system, “un principe de montage, codé par les numerations”), about delimitation and discourse, summed up in 5.6: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt). It is important to understand Wittgenstein quite literally here. If Browning by way of McLuhan says “a man’s reach much exceed his grasp, else what’s a metaphor?” this “reach,” for Wittgenstein, means the possibility of language, and thus the possibility of a world — which is to say, of an idiom.[12] The aporia of language, of poiēsis, for Wittgenstein organizes itself around an absolute alterity that is only ever able to announce itself by way of “paradoxes” that are nonetheless fully in accord with what is conceivable — as for example the type of hermetic statements we find in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, such as in Notre Musique when one of his actors proposes a two-fold definition of “death” as both “the impossibility of the possible” and “the possible of the impossible.” In both instances — Godard and Wittgenstein — paradox is not a descriptive pragmatics, but a “syntax” and a “stylistic” (“une stylistic de l’aphorisme,” e.g.).[13]
For Wittgenstein, language — whose “limits” are contiguous with those of the possible — is “everything that is the case” (proposition 1). But what “is the case” in language? Or let me return to Perloff’s formulation, from which two questions seem to want to present themselves: What does it mean to write as if? And what is poetic language?
The institution of Philosophy, according to a certain tradition, is properly founded with the writings of Plato. Voilà. This idea has recently been restated by Badiou, who points to Plato’s de-suturing of “philosophy” and “poetry,” in the republic, as the foundational moment.[14] It is a moment reflected in the birth of the Enlightenment, in the de-suturing of science and metaphysics. It suggests that, in-advance of itself, “philosophy” remained alchemically indistinguishable from the “poetic,” wrapped up in so much subjectivism. Badiou’s point hinges on the nature of the exclusion of poetry from Plato’s ideal polis — specifically the exclusion of dramatic poetry, in which the persona of the speaker is not grounded in the selfhood of poet or listener/reader, and not consequently bound by any criteria of truth (it evades the juridical, in that it disavows responsibility for its avowals) — thus permitting philosophy to constitute (or believe it constitutes) its own rule-governed class of language. At the same time, Plato’s gesture of exclusion presents itself as a type of necessity, without which philosophy would not be able to assert its claims over reason and truth, though equally the fact of poetry’s exclusion has always — however subtly, however discreditedly — represented a certain embarrassment, a certain disquietude, like the continued existence of a Britannicus in the eyes of a Nero.[15] Ostensibly, the dramatic poet is regarded by Plato (who for his part appropriates the figure of Socrates to rail against the deleterious influence of Homer on Athenian morals) as a species of sophist, whose language presents an especial dilemma for philosophy because it is able at every stage to simulate the discourse of truth, without, as it were, being responsible for its own words.[16] However, paradox is situational, it finds a way of inhabiting the very systems that seek to reduce or exclude it; it is produced “complementarily” with them (as anti-matter is to matter) and abolished in their abolition (as Barrett Watten says, “A paradox is eaten by the space around it”).[17]
It is for this reason that we find the “poetic exception” consistently undermined throughout Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In order to account for language at all, it is necessary to account for language in its broadest ramification. Wherever a theory of language exists which maintains a poetic exception, the spectre of “poetic language” constantly haunts and undermines its definitions, its suppositions, its “world view.” And yet the relation of poiēsis to philosophic logos also assumes the character of an aporia. Poiēsis, like the sophist, will not be pinned down. It presents, in fact, the allure of an anti-paradigm (of which, more later). Our ability to know what “poetry” is remains here negatively defined, either with regard to the master discourses of philosophy or politics; and in light of a historical project which has maintained the autonomy of aesthetics (to which the term “poetry” has been most often affiliated) a number of questions arise as to the systematization of poetry, the reconvergence of poetry and philosophy by way of a poetics, and the designation of an “unpoetic.” Between the inflection of the definite article and an apparent appropriation of the exclusionary prefix, the term “poetic” hesitates between two seemingly contradictory tendencies: a paradox. On the one hand, there is the consolidation, from the classical era by way of the Renaissance, of both formal and ethico-aesthetic delimitations of the poetic (to the exclusion of elements deemed “unpoetic”); effectively a re-inscribing of Plato’s originary gesture, by means of which poetry — as the formerly excluded — redeems itself once more for the good and the beautiful. On the other hand, there is — primarily associated with modernism, but finding diverse antecedents — the assumption of a critical stance which seeks both to upset the ideological foundations of such an aesthetics and at the same time to extend the idea of the “poetic” by means of the “unpoetic.”
If there exists an historical moment at which the consolidation of the “poetic” by way of an exclusion of the “unpoetic” shifts towards an extension of the “poetic” by way of an engagement with the “unpoetic,” then problems of more than merely definitional character arise. (Is it true, as Roland Barthes claims, that “it is only recently that literature comes into existence — as a problem”?)[18] What is of particular interest, however, is how the poetic/unpoetic dichotomy re-inscribes, in a reverse movement, the signal exclusion of “poetry” from Plato’s ideal “polis.” The history of modernism suggests a politicizing of the “unpoetic” (or an acknowledgement of the “unpoetic” as the “political”) orientated towards a critique of official modes of discourse, including official modes of poetic discourse (and consequently, official modes of modernist poetic discourse, once these too have become reified). Nevertheless, this “politicization” (in truth, the “poetic” is political from its origin) necessarily tends towards a recuperation of “poetry” for the “polis” (in one respect or another, the “poetics of the unpoetic” tends to assume a stance with regard to the polis, or the “cultural police,” and thus to be defined by it). In almost every instance, the poetic “avant-garde” — as it has manifested itself, however diversely, throughout the history of modernism, and in its more recent incarnations — has nevertheless maintained a social-transformative function (a re-negotiation of the terms binding poetry to the polis): for Surrealism it was to bring about a poetico-social revolution by means of a change of consciousness; for Dada, the abolition of “false” moral-aesthetic values (“Art” or “Kultur”) etc. The question, then, is how can we treat the “unpoetic” as a paradigm of “poetic” critique? What does it mean when we accede to the idea of the “poetic” in advance of such a critique? And what does it mean when we seek to extend, or progress, the “poetic” by means of the “unpoetic” — whether in its singularity, or as a plurality? And this raises again for us a question posed by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Is poetry [therefore] a sign or is it an instrument of power?”[19]
But to return to my first question: What would it mean to write as if?
One recent exploration of this question is Karen Mac Cormack’s 2008 book, Implexures — whose title refers to an archaic usage, defined by the OED as “an infolding, a fold.” Mac Cormack’s text might be loosely described as a kind of “dramatic poem” (though for the most part in prose) whose “poetics” is organized around certain constructs of persona articulated through a matrix of travelogue, letters, journal entries, diary entries, notebook entries, memoire, self-quotation, quotations from diverse sources — scientific, historiographical, philosophical, literary (including Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Deleuze and Guattari, Max Beerbohm, Aphra Behn, Marcel Duchamp, and Petrarch) — newspaper clippings, civic ordinances, parliamentary records, etymologies, genealogies, trivia, photography, diagrams, dreams, mythology, political commentary, number tables, and the odd forgery (a letter, for example, from “Susan Hicks Beach,” the author’s great-aunt, “to Jacques Derrida circa 1880”): all arranged in thirty-one sections, plus postscript, plus index of “sources.” Incorporating conventions of philology, Implexures examines the functional distinctions between poetry and artefact, record, testimony, document, facticity, and ultimately what it means to speak of truth statements (Mac Cormack: “promotion to meaning enlists words”[20]). The montage-effect of the work — the paradoxically seamless and yet inassimilable “demarcation” of the so-called poetic object — demands accounting for: firstly with regard to the logic of dichotomy (which not only underwrites whatever may be said about the “poetic” and “unpoetic,” or dramatic poetry and philosophy), but of genre and consequently of discourse as a whole; and secondly with regard to the possibility of montage, of expropriation or re-expropriation (whether of the poetic for the philosophical, for example, or of philosophy into the poetic): montage here describes a syntax, the implexure of language.
During the late nineteenth century, Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If specified an array of instances in which “fictive” thinking lent comparative impetus to biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence. For Vaihinger, all discourse, all genres, are structurally reducible to the sequence of thought encapsulated by the “as if.” Additionally, Vaihinger argued that science, in a strict sense, is speculative, since we can never really “know” (or directly experience) the underlying reality of the world. Rather, we construct systems of thought and act “as if” these correspond to some objective reality. The worldview presented by science is, for Vaihinger, ultimately constructed upon certain fictional foundations, even if it is a highly coherent and effective one. This view reflects the practical reliance of science upon hypothesis, but also the dependence upon indirect verification. Meaning that much of what underwrites our reality cannot even be represented by means of analogy. Often, science is concerned with what, for us, remains fundamentally unknowable. For Vaihinger, the as if underwrites the very notion of hypothesis, of modelling, prediction, predication, possibility, and fiction. It also evokes synonymy, similitude, analogy, metaphor, representation, and signification. In short, an entire poetics. Here, the quasi-oppositional dichotomy gives rise to a theory of radical contiguity. Not equivalence, but a structural contiguity of discourse, of language. Importantly, the as if also generalizes our thinking about such things as hypothesis from the “object” of a given discourse (what it knows or can know), to the character of that discourse itself. For example, with regard to Plato’s ideal polis, we can treat philosophy (in the sense of being founded upon a certain dichotomization) as a type of as if. That is to say as a hypothesis, or a set of similar hypotheses. The coherence of philosophical discourse thus devolves, in a certain sense, upon the coherence of its hypothetical foundations: the as if. Vaihinger’s theory of fictions, which begins with a consideration of knowledge and hypothesis, attempted to address questions of human subjectivity, and the preponderance of individuals to employ psychological fictions to mediate their experience of “irrational” social realities (ideas which echo those of Charcot, Breuer, and Freud concerning hysteria — in which psychosomatic illness is recognized as indistinguishable from “conventional” illness. The forms of simulation encountered in hysteria, for example, point towards a functional equivalence of reality and fiction at certain crucial points, echoing not only the methodological dependency of science upon a philosophy of “as if,” but also the status of this “as if” as foundational for scientific method and its forms of verifiability. Mac Cormack:
How the unknown becomes the known (process again) and sometimes becomes lost, misplaced, suppressed, de-known, subjectively and collectively, from culture to culture …[21]
This “process” is given throughout Implexures by way not only of the concatenation of discourses, but by way of a type of archaeology or paleo-etymology, in which the “evolution” of language(s) articulates a logic of as if whose terms are themselves thus “propositions.” One example, early on in Implexures, has to do with the contiguity of the terms “grammar” and “glamour” — tending towards paradox:
The word glamour “developed” as the Scottish spelling of the English gramayre or gramarye (entered into English in the 14th century denoting grammar or learning) but by the 15th century it signified occult learning. By the close of that century (in its modern spelling) glamour meant a specific form of magic spell or charm cast by devils through the agency of (usually) female witches, and supposedly caused the illusory disappearance of the penis …[22]
The politico-philosophic evolution that will have elsewhere conjoined phallus and logos, here encounters an “illusory” castration at the hands, so to speak, of a grammar gone astray along a path of orthographic deviancy — precisely what Plato was so anxious to preclude in his well-known discourse (written in the persona of Socrates) against writing; a companion-piece to his treatise against poetry (with which analogy seems unavoidable). For Mac Cormack, the evolutionary pathways of these terms describe a “poetics” of the possible: each term acting as an open hypothesis, suggestive of a shifting locus of meaning which “circulate equivocally,” in Badiou’s reading of Wittgenstein, “between the sense of the proposition … and the sense of the world.”[23] Just as for Wittgenstein, the “world” for Mac Cormack (everything that “is the case”) is language-dimensions (“without exteriors,” as Badiou says). Mac Cormack:
From string theory to M-theory (one dimensional strings giving way to higher-dimensional membranes) but apparently “most of the known physical forces operate only within a particular (mem) brane” — except perhaps gravity. If gravity “leaks out” it might allow an inferring of a parallel “brane’s” presence. And so what’s presently referred to as “dark matter” could be ordinary matter on one of many (?) parallel branes, its emitted light “trapped in its own world” but its gravity now also in ours. How to infer the “curled up” extra dimensions of language …?[24]
Mac Cormack’s Implexures — via what Badiou terms “le principe syntaxique du montage” — evokes writing as multiple personae, a writing as if, which puts to work the dichotomic interval of “parallel branes” — so to speak — in order to “infer the ‘curled up’ extra dimensions of language.” To return to Perloff, if Wittgenstein is seen to write “philosophy” as if writing “poetry,” this would not mean the one in “imitation” of the other, or a reverse “expropriation” of the one to the other, or even an “anti-philosophy” in any simplistic sense, but — let us hypothesize — a writing by which “poetry” and “philosophy” are re-inaugurated, and again re-inaugurated, tropologically, across this “complementation” (as Buckminster Fuller used to say) of as and if. Mac Cormack’s Implexures, to paraphrase,
is an engagement with depiction abstracted, skewed, the poetry a layering of interactions internal and external so too “on” and within linguistic forms.[25]
It would be incorrect to suggest here that Mac Cormack’s text records an attempted “intervention” by means of the poetic, or poetic “strategies,” into those discourses from which it is conventionally viewed as excluded. Nor is it merely an act of serial appropriation. It is not enough simply to “change all the sentences,” as Charles Bernstein has said,[26] just as it is ultimately self-defeating to submit to an anti-paradigm such as the “unpoetic” for the purpose of pursuing “poetry by other means.” The paradigm/anti-paradigm of the un/poetic (just as much as Badiou’s anti/philosophie dichotomy) needs to be reviewed in light of Derrida’s response to Foucault in his 1963 essay “Cognito and the History of Madness” (concerning Foucault’s attempt to employ “madness” [unreason, alogos, and — by declensions implied — poetry] as a paradigm of the critique of history-as-reason [i.e. philosophy], Derrida poses two basic questions: If history is a rational concept, how is it possible to write a history of madness? and second, If Foucault claims to speak for a madness that by definition must remain silent does he not risk re-appropriation by the very mode of exclusion that he claims to avoid? “We have the right,” Derrida argues, “to ask what, in the last resort, supports this language without recourse or support …? Who wrote and who is to understand, in what language and from what historical situation of logos … this history of madness?”).[27] At the very least this has to do with the fact that poiēsis, if not necessarily “poetry” as a genre of literary discourse instituted in one sort of Platonistic gesture or another, already articulates structures contiguous between all modes of discourse — including the technical and even mathematical. Like Wittgenstein’s logic, poiēsis — the poetic[28] — doesn’t give a picture: it is foremost structure and situation. It internalizes its dichotomies in advance, so that to speak of “poetic language” is at once to stipulate a general condition of the signifiable, while at the same time evoking a fundamental aporia, paradox, or pleonasm. The “impossibility of the possible” and the “possible of the impossible.”
1. Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3. In L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein (Paris: Nous, 2009), Alain Badiou in a similar vein describes the Tractatus as “Une saison en enfer écrit dans la forme de Un coup de dés …” (102; the comparison with Mallarmé is also made earlier, on page 88).
2. Except in two endnotes, on pages 246 and 254. Perloff’s intervention necessarily casts back — in light of Russell and Whitehead’s failed Principia Mathematica — to the very foundations of philosophy and, explicitly or otherwise, concerns itself with an inherence of what is sometimes called “paradox” or aporia in the project of reason from Plato onwards and its haunting by the figure of “poetry.”
3. Karen Mac Cormack, Implexures (Tucson: Chax Press, 2008), 58.
4. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1955), book 10, 607d-e.
5. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 112.
6. What this in part amounts to, is an acknowledgement that poetry is effectively excluded by Plato because it cannot be instituted, that it cannot be reduced to the type of definitional regimen he seeks to employ throughout in order to establish philosophy etc. on axiomatic foundations. In other words, that this “exclusion” is always a “pragmatique descriptive,” as Badiou says, since “by definition” poetry already writes itself out of the Platonic equation in advance, at the same time as it haunts each of its terms (philosophy defines itself, we might say, with poetry very much in mind, while poetry is only arbitrarily concerned with the philosophical as such, and this is what philosophy, to Plato’s way of thinking, cannot bear). See Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 109. Another consequence of all this is that, despite yoking together the terms philosophy, politics and thought, Plato succeeds only in describing a type of theoretical complex, under whose rarefied conditions a philosophical “way of life” might become possible.
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, intro. Bertram Russell, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 4.112.
8. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 99, my translation.
9. Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 246n20.
10. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 98.
12. What can be thought or expressed is both inherent in language but also contingent upon a state-of-affairs of language: its poiesis, its making. Charles Bernstein, in an interview with Tom Beckett, argues: “A task of poetry is to make audible (tangible but not necessarily graspable) those dimensions of the real that cannot be heard as much as to imagine new reals that have never before existed. Perhaps this amounts to the same thing.” Bernstein, “Censers of the Unknown — Margins, Dissent, and the Poetic Horizon,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 184.
13. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 99.
14. Badiou, “Language, Poetry, Thought,” trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, Theoretical Writings (London: Continuum, 2004), 239ff.
15. Poetry in this sense is the subjective in language.
16. Plato, in seeking to exclude those aspects of discourse that contradicted any systematization of language-as-reason (logos), above all paradox, was possessed by the same demon that drove Bertram Russell. The system of dialectical reduction in Plato produces the aporia of indeterminacy, just as the system of mathematical reduction in Russell produced the logical ambivalence of a whole class of sets.
17. Barrett Watten, “Plasma,” In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984), 27.
18. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), xv.
19. Mahmoud Darwish in the film Notre Musique, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (2005).
20. Mac Cormack, Implexures, 14.
23. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 100.
24. Mac Cormack, Implexures, 88.
26. Bernstein, A Poetics, 152.
27. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 62.
28. On this collocation, see Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell. Revised edition. (London: Routledge, 1993), 308.