The test of belief

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.

 

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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.