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9 GEORGE OPPEN 1908–1984 George oppen, a great innovator in American poetry, combined social awareness with an interrogation of language and a developing spiritual sense. He sought to discover what he called (in “Anniversary Poem”) the “paradise of the real.” He believed that in the act of perceiving one’s self and the world—and one’s self in the world—one comes into being. His poems enacted philosopher Jacques Maritain ’s comment that “we awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things.” The poems evoke those moments of reality-making perception at the same time as they critique social inequality and as they rupture language itself, so that words are revealed as a dense, foregrounded medium and not a transparent, invisible one. Oppen’s poetry challenges and entices. It raises questions and possibilities. It sets realizations into motion and rarely sees them through to closure. To enter into his work is to enter into the world and language with new eyes. Oppen’s experimental work functions as a vital bridge connecting such modernist poets as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Reznikoff (included in Volume Two) with such midcentury poets as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley and such present-day poets as Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein (all included in this volume). Oppen was the youngest member of the Objectivist group, which came to attention in the 1930s and included Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker (included in Volume Two). He wrote poems that emphasized the objects of the world and the human beings with whom he interacted. Oppen obsessed over each word he used, as he laboriously constructed , pruned, and revised his lines, often pasting one word over another until the poem was thick with words, most of them discarded in favor of the alternative pasted on the very top. The surviving sentences are often baffling. Oppen tore syntax apart to reveal the holes in language. In the resulting tension between words and emptiness, meanings and silence, the dynamism of the poetic process emerges. Oppen’s poetry includes a vision of the power and limits of language and, even more deeply, of the value of perception, connection, and articulation. Oppen was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City. When he was four, his mother, who had suffered a mental breakdown, committed suicide. This tragic loss interrupted Oppen’s childhood and haunted his existence for the rest of his days. When he was seven, his father remarried, but (according to Michael Davidson in his introduction to Oppen’s New Collected Poems) “the boy’s relationship with his stepmother was traumatic,” involving “forms of psychological and physical abuse.” When Oppen was ten, the family moved to San Francisco, where he grew up alongside Ø George Oppen 10 an older sister and a younger half-sister, with whom he remained close throughout his life. Going away to college at Oregon State University, he met his future wife, Mary, in a modern poetry course. On their first date, they stayed out all night, causing Mary to be expelled and George suspended. They immediately left Oregon together and began a fifty-year relationship that became one of the happiest marriages in American poetic history. After four years of hitchhiking and temporary work, the couple landed in New York, where they became friends and allies of the older experimental poets William Carlos Williams and Charles Reznikoff as well as the younger innovator Louis Zukofsky. All of these poets felt like cultural outsiders. They identified with the working class and wanted to discover new poetic forms and vocabularies. George and Mary Oppen founded the Objectivist Press, a name that reflected Zukofsky’s poetic program of objectivity and sincerity (and which had nothing to do with novelist Ayn Rand’s “objectivist ethics,” which stressed individualism over community). The press published books by Williams and Reznikoff and also Oppen’s own first book, Discrete Series, which included Tug against the river and She lies, hip high, printed below. Oppen’s poems were intended to comment on the suffering of workers during the Great Depression and at the same time to seek what Williams called an “irreducible minimum” of words in the achievement of the poems’ purpose. Following the book’s publication in 1934, George and Mary joined the Communist Party in an effort to fight inequality and fascism, then on the rise throughout the western world. They participated in protests and in relief...

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