George Oppen

George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, most famous as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry — and to the United States — in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

Quotes
Of the future, they feel themselves The end of a chain Of lives, single lives And we know that lives Are single And cannot defend The metaphysic On which rest The boundaries Of our distances.
 * They have lost the metaphysical sense
 * from "Of Being Numerous" #26, 1968; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

Your coats wrapped, Your hips a possession Your shoes arched Your walk is sharp Your breasts Pertain to lingerie
 * 'O city ladies'
 * from "Discrete Series", 1934; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

The minuscule Sequoia seed In the museum by the tremendous slab Of the tree. And imagined the seed In soil and the growth quickened So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green Needles of a redwood until the tree Stood in the room without soil— How much of the earth's Crust has lived The seed’s violence! The shock is metaphysical.
 * And we saw the seed,
 * "Return" st. 2, 1962; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo.
 * The steel worker on the girder
 * "The Building of the Skyscraper" st. 1, 1965; ''Collected Poems of George Oppen", New Directions, 1976, ISBN 0-811-20615-7

Not themselves.
 * things explain each other,
 * This in Which (1965), "A Narrative", 3

The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990)

 * The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990) edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis


 * Perhaps what I would like is a truly democratic culture. Not a polemic nor a moralistic culture in the arts but a culture which permits one man to speak to another honestly and modestly and in freedom and to say what he thinks and what he feels, to express his doubts and his fears, his immoral as well as his moral impulses, to say what he thinks is true and what he thinks is false, and what he likes and what he does not like. What I am against is that we should all engage in the most vigorous and most polemic lying to each other for each other's benefit. — Who could have the conceit, the self-confidence to believe that that is what we should do throughout all the rest of human history?
 * Letter to Charles Humboldt (mid-1962), p. 64

Quotes about Oppen

 * Oppen believes that “Poetry has to be protean; the meaning must begin there. With the perception.” In his notebooks he says that “the present, the sense of the present arrives before the words — and independent of them.” He paraphrases Jacques Maritain: “we awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things.” But even as he recognizes that neither the self nor the objects of the world can be seen apart from the world that contains them, Oppen does not obliterate their differences. He avows, “a blurring of the distinction between subjective and objective — There has been no instant in my life when such a blurring was possible for me/ for one thing: too much a carpenter: I know what a blue guitar is made of”.
 * Forrest Gander, in "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen", in A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (2005)


 * Oppen writes in his notebooks, “I choose to believe in the natural consciousness, I see what the deer see, the desire NOT TO is the desire to be alone in fear of equality/ I see what the grass (blade) would see if it had eyes”. Instead of the traditional Western account of a consciousness that digests the external world, Oppen honors a consciousness interwoven with the world of objects, a consciousness that is nothing if not a collaboration with the world.
 * Forrest Gander, in "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen", in A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (2005)


 * In his poems, George Oppen wanted words to act out “truthful, lived experience.” His poetry is very literally a practice of perception. He even speaks of emotion “as the ability to perceive.” The syntax of an Oppen poem rivets our attention to both word and world in an enactment of intentional consciousness, the very act of perception and thought coming into being, of language and feeling arising as experience. His poems can be intricate, the syntax polyvalent, the disclosure nonlinear and difficult to render into anything like statement. And as such, his poetry might be considered an expression of life. As the Biblical Isaiah reminds us, “it shall be a vexation only to understand.” Clarity is not the same thing as simplicity.
 * Forrest Gander, in "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen", in A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (2005)


 * I've gone back more and more to Creeley, Duncan, and Olson in recent years. More recently to George Oppen, Robin Blaser.
 * Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)