A Political Poetics: George Oppen and the Essential Life of the Poem

‘At No Time not a Poet’

Shortly after the publication of his first collection of poems, Discrete Series, in 1934, George Oppen joined the Communist Party and stopped writing poetry. Oppen’s departure from poetry was to last some twenty-five years until the late fifties when he began work on “Blood from a Stone” and the poems which were to become his second volume of poetry, The Materials, published in 1962. That same year he explains his decision to stop writing in a letter to Max and Anita Pepper: “There are situations which cannot be honorably met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning. If one goes on to imagine a direct call for help, then surely to refuse would be a kind of treason to one’s neighbor” (Letters 65).¹ Oppen here foregrounds the fundamentally moral and political dimension of his refusal of poetry’s “fiddling” in the face of crisis. As he elaborates in a 1969 interview with L. S. Dembo: “If you decide to do something politically, you do something that has political efficacy. And if you decide to write poetry, you write poetry, not something that you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering. That was the dilemma of the ‘thirties’” (“A Discussion” 174). Here, as in many passages from his letters, interviews and “daybooks,” Oppen decisively frames his earlier silence as a refusal of poetry as a politically or morally inadequate expression or response.² Poetry, that is, cannot directly intervene on “human suffering” nor respond to the “direct call for help” that Oppen heard so clearly in the thirties.

Oppen’s silence has attracted much attention and fascination; indeed, to the point of, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis comments, “the mystification of that silence, an obsessive return to it . . . almost as if it and not the oeuvre which follows it (and the vital ‘prologue’ of Discrete Series which precedes it) is the paradoxical artifact of Oppen’s poetic career” (“The familiar” 18). Certainly, however, the fascination is understandable since the story of Oppen’s “not writing” in dramatic ways engages several compelling narratives: the pathos of the thirties; activism, military service, and exile; refusal (or negotiation) of class privilege; parenthood; the fraught relationship between the aesthetic and the political; to name a few. Still, DuPlessis’s “‘The familiar/ becomes extreme’: George Oppen and Silence” remains exemplary in its attempt, as she has it, “to think about that silence speaking”; to explore the ways in which Oppen’s poetry is continuously coming into contact with and being shaped by the “silent double—the Doppelganger—of writing” (19, 28). Offering a way to read Oppen’s silence inside his writing, DuPlessis bypasses that “mystification” she indicates, identifying instead the “use [of] silence and space as a main prosodic element” in Oppen’s poetry (28). Silence, in DuPlessis’s reading, is not the antithesis to poetry but one of its generative forces.³

Yet Oppen’s own framing of his twenty-five years as a response to the explicit limitations of poetry is not easily absorbed into his renewed poetic commitment and practice. Norman Finkelstein’s succinct summarization—“There comes a point when poetry is no longer serviceable; it becomes a luxury” (26)⁴—distills nicely the predominant character of Oppen’s own account of his silence. Poetry, and all art, is a “luxury” in the face of crisis, an inconsequential, even indulgent act that, like any other extravagance, is incumbent on the good conscience to renounce. Oppen’s decision to stop writing, in this reading, follows the good sense of W. H. Auden’s frequently quoted remark that “poetry makes nothing happen” and sharply draws, or relies upon, that line between the ephemeral nothings of the aesthetic and the solid somethings that make up and are demanded by the political and social real. Peter Nicholls’ gloss of Oppen’s silence gets at a similar point: “There are, in short, emergencies which demonstrate the incommensurability of art’s resources to the...