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“Conversation with One’s Peers” George oppen and some Women Writers My title comes from a letter George oppen wrote to the english poet Charles tomlinson in 1963: “i have come to believe again, perhaps in more rather than less despair, that the only possible hope is in the conversation with one’s peers.”1 in the following pages i sketch the situation of women writing in the 1960s and possibly the 1970s, and oppen’s bearing toward them. oppen, in his considerable struggles for an adequate form and language, found that he had a great deal in common with a number of women writers, had news for them,and quite possibly got news from them.His position with regard to language and many of his writing strategies are closely akin to those of quite a few feminist women writers. it is tempting, but certainly misleading, to suggest that oppen occupied and wrote from a feminist position. We now tend to take for granted what oppen had to struggle to realize. pretty well from the time he started writing again in 1958, oppen paid a great deal of attention to women writers, reading their work, encouraging them, corresponding with them.2 Kathleen Fraser said that hearing oppen read in 1967“cut through everything”; he“spoke to some level of gravity that was new,” providing “modesty, severity, and close scrutiny, in contrast to the flash and dazzle of any number of stylistic ‘performances’ by various n.y. based poets.”3 oppen had a considerable (but not always benign) effect on the writing lives of quite a number of women in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work has certainly not been without influence on a subsequent generation of women. preparing this paper, i wrote to a number of women poets, and received a quite surprising as well as generous range of responses. What follows partly draws on what some of them wrote to me, and so i thank, now, for their promptness and thoughtfulness, norma Cole, Jane Cooper, Beverly dahlen,rachel Blau duplessis,Kathleen Fraser,Barbara Guest,susan Howe, Frances Jaffer, denise Levertov, Maureen owen, naomi replanski, Joan re- 156 George oppen and some Women Writers tallack, adrienne rich, diane Wakoski, and rosmarie Waldrop. the diversity of these poets and their responses leads me to formulate my question in two parts: (1) What sort of news did oppen have, for so many women writers? and (2) Why did he notice them, why, in the 1960s and later, would he be drawn to pay close attention to their work? these are not simple questions if only because oppen’s relations with women are divided and complex. reading his work pretty extensively and intensively over a period of three or four weeks before setting pen to paper i found that i probably would have liked George oppen (or rather, the unit George-and-Mary) if we’d ever met; indeed i’m pretty sure of that. He sounds like a smashing person,and he’s an astonishingly wonderful poet.But it would be easy, paying attention and tribute to what sharon olds calls“that feminist side of George,”4 to sentimentalize or idealize him; it would be equally easy, too, to demonize him—and that, not simply because he seems to have enjoyed the company of younger long-leggy women. among his papers at san diego there’s a fragmentary draft of what might be a letter—i have no idea whether it was ever sent, nor do i know when he wrote it, or who to:“among the things i don’t want to say—out of old friendship—is this: if we did not undertake the‘space program’we would cease to be anything we have meant by ‘human’ ((all the women i can remember speaking of the space program have been opposed to it—secretly, at those moments, i regard the women as sub human———i do, i do.”5 Well. i’m not sure i’m going to even try to unpack that quite astonishing statement, though i do think it needs unpacking. i do want to get at some of the complexity of his relations with women and his attitudes toward gender, so i’m going to start by reading a couple of oppen’s poems. they trouble me—and it was that troubling quality, indeed, which led me to write to a couple of dozen women writers when i was casting around for my topic. tHe ZULU...

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