George+Oppen

“Ultimately the air Is bare sunlight where must be found The lyric valuable.” //-George Oppen//

=Biography= George Oppen was one of the chief exponents of Objectivism, a school of poetry that emphasized simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme.

On April 24, 1908, George Oppen was born in New Rochelle, New York, to Elsie Rothfeld and George Oppenheimer (the family changed their name to Oppen in 1927). His father was a diamond merchant, and the family lived a comfortable, affluent lifestyle, which included servants and sailing lessons, a fact which conflicted with the strong identification with the working class that Oppen developed later in life. After suffering mental problems and a nervous breakdown, his mother committed suicide when Oppen was four, His father then married Selville Shainwald when Oppen was seven. She was a wealthy and ambitious woman with whom Oppen had a difficult and painful relationship that haunted him through his adulthood.

In New York, Oppen met poet Louis Zukofsky and soon became a central member of the Objectivist poets that flourished in the 1930s. In 1929, Oppen inherited a small sum of money which allowed the couple to start a small publishing venture. To Publishers, with Zukofsky as editor, published work by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, but the magazine was short-lived. The famous Objectivist Anthology which contained writing by Williams, Pound, Marianne Moore, Charles Reznikoff, and Kenneth Rexroth was published by the Oppens in Toulon, France, in 1932. After traveling to California and living in France, the Oppens returned to New York where, along with Zukofsky, Williams, and Reznikoff, they began the Objectivist Press. Oppen's first book of poetry, Discrete Series, was published, with a preface by Ezra Pound, in 1934. That same year, the press published Williams's Collected Poems, 1921-1931.

George and Mary Oppen moved increasingly to the political left during the Great Depression, becoming social activists. During this period, Oppen's poems appeared in small journals such as Active Anthology, Poetry, and Hound and Horn, but he soon gave up writing for more than two decades. Unable to write poetry that he felt adequately reflected the political circumstances, he began working for the Communist Party USA, serving as election campaign manager in Brooklyn in 1936. Disillusioned with the Party by 1942, Oppen quit his job and volunteered for military service to fight fascism. Oppen served in World War II, during which he was badly wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

Back in New York, Oppen and his wife found that their politics made their living situation difficult. They were targets of the House of Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and ultimately fled to Mexico in 1950, where Oppen started a carpentry business. Oppen revived his poetic career when he and his wife returned to the United States in 1958. In 1962, New Directions published Oppen's second book of poetry, The Materials, which was followed by This in Which (1965). In 1969, Of Being Numerous (1968) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Oppen's Collected Poems (1975) includes all of his poetry from Discrete Series (1934) through Myth of the Blaze (1975).

In the late 1960s, Oppen moved to San Francisco where he became stricken with Alzheimer's disease. He was able to complete his final work, Primitive, only with his wife Mary's assistance. He lived in California until his death, from pneumonia and complications from Alzheimer's, in 1984.

=Oppen and Objectivism= A member of the Objectivist school, Oppen concerned himself with the question, as Dick Allen of Antioch Review stated, "How can the poet communicate a realization of the concrete object as object without drawing the reader's attention to the way in which he communicates?" Dembo believed that the "aesthetic qualities of objects or events—apprehended not in terms of their associations or conventional meaning but in terms of their form or motion—[were] considered by Oppen to be 'empirical."' Oppen's writing career, Jonathan Galassi of Poetry believed, was "a life-long confrontation between an unimpeachably free spirit's sense of order and 'a world of things."' Irwin Ehrenpreis of the New York Review of Books saw this confrontation as "the effort of the mind to reach clarity of vision by turning always upon itself, travelling back and forth between things and words, reconsidering and correcting earlier impressions or ponderings." "Oppen," wrote Michael Heller in American Poetry Review, "[stood] alone in this regard: that his poetry is not composed of the effects of modern life upon the self, but is rather our most profound investigation of it." Oppen once commented that he was "really concerned with the substantive, with the subject of the sentence, with what we are talking about, and not rushing over the subject matter in order to make a comment about it."Because of this concern for clarity, Oppen's poetry is lean and precise. He had, according to several observers, a "distrust of language" that lead him to use words sparingly. "Nothing," wrote Hugh Kenner in the New York Times Book Review, "better characterize[d] Oppen than his wariness about the language itself, this distrust of inherent fluency. In a review of Seascape: Needle's Eye for Poetry, Mark Perlberg commented: "Oppen seems here to distrust most of the processes of language. Perhaps in an attempt to achieve the purest kind of statement, perfect in its honesty, he seems wary of rhythm, of patterns of rhythm, of connections, [and] of the music a poem can make." Oppen's spare poems "are tightly wrought meditations," according to Paul Zweig of Partisan Review, "which do not so much define as surround their subject with tentative thrusts of meaning. Abstractions and carefully observed details mingle to produce a line that is almost sculptural in its precision."

__**Psalm**__

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 poem, a strong tie to nature is obvious, while eschewing the classical elevation of metaphors to describe the world. The world is described metonymically, a sentiment echoed by Robert Creeley when he stated "George Oppen is trying all his life to //think// the world, not only to find or enter it, or to gain a place in it--but to //realize// it, to //figure// it, to have it literally in mind." While struggling with these ideals, he confronted secular ideology and feelings of alienation directly, his personal life not being too far from his work, having been driven into exile in Mexico for his beliefs.

=Oppen In Exile= After the war, Oppen worked as a carpenter and cabinet maker. Although now less politically active, the Oppens were aware that their pasts were certain to attract the attention of Joseph McCarthy's Senataxi committee and decided to move to Mexico. During these admittedly bitter years in Mexico, George ran a small furniture making business and was involved in an expatriate intellectual community. They were also kept under surveillance by the Mexican authorities in association with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were able to re-enter the United States in 1958 when the United States government again allowed them to obtain passports which had been revoked since 1950.

== =Influences= In his introduction to Oppen's Selected Poems (New Directions, 2003), poet Robert Creeley writes about the Objectivist Group: "However different they were later to find their lives—particularly so in the instance of Oppen and Zukofsky—all worked from the premise that poetry is a function of perception, 'of the act of perception,' as Oppen emphasizes in his one defining essay, "The Mind's Own Place." Oppen's complex 'thinking with his poems' is a consistent and major factor in all his surviving work." Creeley continues: "I think much becomes clear, in fact, if one recognizes that George Oppen is trying all his life to think the world, not only to find or to enter it, or to gain a place in it"but to realize it, to figure it, to have it literally in mind."

About Oppen, poet James Longenbach has written: "Oppen's respect for the art of making, no matter how small, is at every moment palpable, and it infuses his work with sweetness that makes difficulty feel like life's reward."

=Works= Discrete Series (1934) The Materials (1962) This in Which (1965) Of Being Numerous (1968) Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972) George Oppen: The Collected Poems (1975) Myth of the Blaze: New Poems (1975)

=Audio= Myth Of The Blaze (titular poem) media type="file" key="Myth-Of-The-Blaze-George-Oppen.mp3" width="240" height="20" align="left"

= = =External Links=

The Poetry Foundation's rendition of Oppen's [|Of Being Numerous]

=References=

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