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Radical Relation Jewish Identity and the Power of Contradictions in the Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and George Oppen Meg Schoerke : What are you now? If we could touch one another, if these our separate entities could come to grips, clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday I stood in a crowded street that was live with people, and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone. Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak to me. —Muriel Rukeyser,“Effort at Speech Between Two People” How shall we say? In ordinary discourse— We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words, The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights Daily with that predominance And we have become the present. We must talk now. Fear Is fear. But we abandon each other. —George Oppen,“Leviathan” “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” first published in 1935, and “Leviathan ,” first published in 1962, raise questions not only about the challenges of communication between people, but also about the possibilities of intertextual dialogue between two poets who, although contemporaries, have rarely been considered in relation to each other. The poems articulate central concerns that occupied Muriel Rukeyser and George Oppen throughout their respective careers: Can individuals escape their isolation and make contact with other people and the world around them? Does language serve as a 246 Schoerke gateway to such interactions, or an obstacle, especially if it lacks clarity and freshness? Although both poems are anchored in ordinary experience, they also implicitly voice political concerns, especially about whether people in a century wrenched by world wars and capitalist exploitation can overcome barriers of social conditioning, fear, and self-interest. Yet the drama of communication that both poems enact could just as well be applied to the dialogue they establish with each other. Simple, declarative sentences predominate in each poem, but Rukeyser writes in a loose blank verse augmented by gaps in her spacing and the ambiguous colons that introduce each stanza, while Oppen’s enjambed free verse announces his affiliation with William Carlos Williams, whose work he published in the 1930s through his funding of To Publishers and the Objectivist Press. “Effort at Speech Between Two People” and “Leviathan” speak to each other, yet also serve as reminders of how literary culture in the United States became so divided as the twentieth century unfolded that some readers may consider the poems’ stylistic differences more significant than their thematic similarities. In particular, readers who champion an American avant-garde tradition may not view Rukeyser’s poem as sufficiently experimental, despite her unconventional spacing and punctuation; while readers of a more traditionalist bent may dismiss Oppen’s poem as too experimental and likely deplore the liberties that Rukeyser takes with blank verse. Ironically, the poems are most radically experimental not in their styles, but in their incorporation of contraries: each poem advocates the importance of communication between people and clear apprehension of what Oppen calls “the preponderance of objects,” while recognizing how difficult these goals are to attain. Oppen’s last line abruptly announces a separation, even as the “we” show their kinship by their act of mutual abandonment, while in Rukeyser’s poem the two speakers, who alternate stanza by stanza, crave recognition but describe only their own experiences and fail to acknowledge the other speaker’s revelations.In contrast to Oppen’s bleak ending,“Speak to me”seems upbeat,but in context of the full poem there’s no evidence that the two speakers will ever exchange speech that is truly reciprocal. Both poems are, paradoxically, utopian and realistic. As literary experimentalists, Oppen and Rukeyser cultivated such unconventional ways of incorporating their political and ethical convictions into their writing. The two poets were so dedicated to those convictions, and so successful in realizing them not only in their work, but also in how they conducted their lives, that they became models for many poets who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. But because of their stylistic differences, and the very different groups of poets who championed their work, their many Radical Relation 247 “meeting-places,”to borrow a term from Rukeyser, have not been adequately recognized.Certainly,critics who write on the 1930s have acknowledged their Leftist politics,1 but have not commented on some of the similar aesthetic positions they took, particularly their frequent meditations on the complex relations between the individual and the community; their devotion to material facts and the...

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