Developing a Lyric Carapace: Urban Mood, Rebellious Banality, and George Oppen's Obscured Modernism

"I feel foolish sending you odd leericks—leeriques??—now and then, & receiving your deferred silent opinions in answer. I get you—but funny, I can't help feeling specifically what you once said generally that there's something to 'em."

—Louis Zukofsky to Ezra Pound (1931)

"On Generation of drivers: you feel it breaks. Certainly not untrue—I thought it a sort of lyric leap, but perhaps I'm wrong."

—George Oppen to Julian Zimet (1959)

"I wanted to speak for and with all those foremothers and my granddaughters too, my sisters, my frenemies. Because the lyric contains atemporality, enigma, and corporeality, it felt like the most apt vehicle for my work, and this is at the very core of my poetics."

—Carmen Giménez Smith (2018)

In her "Poetics Statement" for a recent anthology, Carmen Giménez Smith provides a succinct account of the political stakes of the lyric poem. Where resembling "the performance of the mind in solitary speech"—in Helen Vendler's oft-cited formulation—is often taken as a limit, preventing the poem from reflecting difficult and dynamic socialities, Smith shows us that many generic conventions can become apertures.¹ "[A]temporality, enigma, and corporeality" allow her to speak across subjectivities, to reflect on the operations of colonial power on intersecting experiences of gender, class, race and migration, and to connect the specific to the generational through the literary-historical. If a reader can still make sense of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Giménez Smith implies, it is partly because the same global regimes of oppression persist—by activating similar assumptions, Giménez Smith can speak to the present on behalf of the unvoiced past and an imminent future.² This is a version of the "social engagement" that supplies the anthology's subtitle: American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement.

Questions about the lyric's political efficacy have existed since the very beginnings of poetry, but these questions seem newly generative now that both poets and literary theorists are turning their attentions to those beginnings and to the lyric's prevalence within Western critical thought. Michael Dowdy, who edited the anthology with Claudia Rankine, summarizes this recent convergence of theoretical and poetic activity in his introduction, suggesting that the "tension between skepticism of and openness to received literary traditions" is a defining characteristic of both.³ And even though aspects of this tradition have long histories—Vendler's formulation prefaces a study of Shakespeare's sonnets—many of the poets that Dowdy and Rankine have anthologized are explicitly addressing a modernist tradition. Dowdy includes an explanation from Craig Santos Perez, which is as funny as it is apt: "White modernists, [Perez] deadpanned, stole Oceanic cultures 'to make their work less boring.' Now, he concluded, he is stealing it back in order 'to make my work more boring'" (quoted in Dowdy, introduction to American Poets in the 21st Century, 7).

Where contemporary poets highlight and reappropriate modernist aesthetic acquisitiveness, literary theorists tend to explore or resist the acquisitive nature of the lyric itself. "The New Lyric Studies," which Virginia Jackson initiated with her Dickinson's Misery in 2005 and consolidated in a 2008 issue of PMLA, show us how many disparate forms and concepts were forcibly united through an interpretative process of "lyricization," in which modernism plays a central role. In Dickinson's Misery, Jackson argues that the lyric came to be "highly valued in retrospect by modernism. … because it has been progressively identified with a form of personal abstraction that cannot quite be disowned, and yet cannot quite be embraced by modern critical culture."⁴ Her diachronic definition of "lyric" in the most recent Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics goes a step further, suggesting a process of homogenization whereby "Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W. C. Williams and Wallace Stevens all wrote short poems we now call lyric, though they tended not to use that description."⁵ She encourages us to instead view this corpus as "various verse experiments in what later 20th [century critics] increasingly cast as the alienation of the mod[ern] lyric subject" (Jackson, "lyric," 833). But an interesting slippage occurs, and is maintained, in the Lyric Theory Reader edited by Jackson and Yopie Prins: Eliot's late essay, "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1953) is positioned as a ligature between modernist poetics and New Criticism, with Jackson and Prins suggesting in a headnote that some of "Eliot's anxiety about the lyric can be traced to the New Critical lyricization of poetry."⁶ The Eliot of 1953 was surely concerned about his continued reception, but he and Pound, Frost, Williams, and Stevens had been publishing since the 1910s, and skipping the intervening forty years eliminates any sense of how their definitions might have developed over time. More pressingly, it avoids the ways that their earlier writing influenced the poets of the 1920s through the 1940s.⁷

Among the many movements and individual experimenters who begin writing in this intervening period, the "objectivists" present the most fascinating test cases. Their close connection to the earlier generation of modernists—especially Pound and Williams—suggests access to these occluded definitions and a source of resistance to the New Critical hermeticism. They also went dormant during the precise decades of "lyricization," and their resurgence as profoundly ethical voices in the 1960s and 70s suggests a potential resonance with today's "poetics of social engagement."

However, Andrew Crozier's early essay, "Inaugural and Valedictory: The Early Poetry of George Oppen" (1982), established a preempting precedent. By arguing that Discrete Series's (1934) "connection with Oppen's subsequent writing is autobiographical"—which is to say, not philosophical or aesthetic or political—Crozier illuminated features that are unique to this first book while severing it from Oppen's later writing.⁸ Critics since have taken Crozier's position to many conclusions, but few have sought to bridge the distance between the two periods. Most see Discrete Series as apprentice work followed by a mythologized twenty-five-year silence, after which Oppen reemerged from the margins of modernism as a mature poet in full possession of his art.⁹ But Crozier's analysis was anchored by a less reliable weight than he could have realized. While researching modernist conceptions of the lyric, I happened to recover an earlier collection of poems that Oppen had sent to Pound, 1930's 21 Poems, and the poems therein signify a very different poetic trajectory.¹⁰ If Oppen's first book has been rescued from becoming poetic fait divers—as Roland Barthes might have it—by what he would go on to write, a new version of his career is now visible. And as Barthes reminds us: "the moment chance signifies, it is no longer chance."¹¹

These slightly earlier poems address the precise gap in poetic theory that we see in Jackson and Prins. While Oppen is often referred to as a lyric poet, the version of "lyric" in Discrete Series departs from his best-known early influences and is difficult to place in a poetic lineage. Oppen rejects the recondite hyperrefinement that even Pound's imagist poems tended towards, and his work is too syntactically difficult to be indebted to Williams's populism.¹² Ruth Jennison has recently come close to the how of Oppen's lyricism, but suggests that lyricism was something that Discrete Series suffered from and sought to exceed, describing the collection as "operat[ing] on occasion within the screenshots of lyricism that Imagism couldn't quite shake."¹³ However, Oppen's incorporating Ben Jonson into Discrete Series's "O city ladies" and his reciting Thomas Wyatt's "They flee from me" in a foxhole in Germany suggest a greater fascination with a long lyric tradition than seeking-its-defeat-through-seriality would seem to permit.¹⁴ Moreover, objectivism's relationship with imagism is complex, and as my first epigraph indicates, the younger poets differed significantly on this subject, particularly with respect to the lyric's "specific" applications.

21 Poems affords an occasion to renarrate Oppen's career and to argue for continued modernist lyric innovation throughout the Depression. Though these recovered poems do not contain many of the spare, oblique lines that are Oppen's early hallmark, they show us where these lines came from and what he hoped to achieve, and they complicate the way he returned to them—and by extension, characterized modernism—during his mature career. The young Oppen that this earliest work allows us to see is not an acolyte writing ineluctably in a fragmented style, but a (literally) experimental poet, one discovering through methodical trial and error what this thing called a poem is and what experience means for it. In the first section, we see Oppen moving away from focalizing "speakers" and towards building cohesion through "mood." Understanding the centrality of mood prepares us to see how Oppen's poetic and periodical contexts emphasize the urbanity of this concentration on mood. Through explicit references, 21 Poems stabilizes Oppen's early aesthetic relationship with major modernist poets, while the shifts between 21 Poems and Discrete Series reveal Oppen's self-conscious departure as he pursues city life without elevating it or rendering it exceptional. Finally, we turn to Oppen's mature reflections on his early poetry to build an account of his own efforts to obscure his modernist experimentation, which embodies the "retrospective value" that Jackson believes the modernists to have assigned to the lyric, but with its polarity reversed. Oppen locates ethical failures in his earlier work that he too "cannot quite … disown" (per Jackson) but which allow his later writing to take on a different social dimension.

Organizing Around Mood

The arrangement of Discrete Series is purposefully disjunctive, with Oppen admitting to Pound that he included at least one "[n]ot too good a poem … because it emphasizes the discreteness of the series."¹⁵ Yet this emphasis on interruption belies the extent to which Discrete Series returns to the same few settings, to urban streets, sailboats, highways, and bedrooms. Perhaps it is unsurprising that 21 Poems shows these preoccupations to predate the eventual book, but reading these same scenes across the two collections reveals a process of poetic concentration. Over the course of several years, Oppen revisited these settings with increasing pressure on the relationship between syntax and the poem's ability to convey sensation. The result is a radically fragmented rhetorical style that evades traditional assumptions of lyric personhood.¹⁶

Here, for example, are the third poem from 21 Poems and the seventh poem from Discrete Series. Both poems deal with urban alienation and both are separated into three verse paragraphs, but are markedly different in investment and approach:

This a vacant lot;	The lights, paving—
Impenetrable ground	This important device
Of embedded stones,	Of a race
Bottle-glass.
My shoes grow	Remains till morning.
Dusty, not of soil.
	Burns
No nor elsewhere. Simply	Against the wall.
This, and my dissatisfaction.	He has chosen a place With the usual considerations,
Between eyes and shoes, a plane,	Without stating them.
A spaced companionship,	opposing Buildings.18
This dust, and some immovable watchfulness.17

"This a vacant lot" begins with some a priori speaker naming and describing the space in which he finds himself, forecasting a sort of loco-descriptive poem updated with an empty, urban setting. Referring to the speaker as "he" is deliberate—the subsequent lines identify "my dissatisfaction" without any indication outside of the poem to allow us to interpret it, so we are urged to conflate this reflecting speaker with the poet himself. The poem from Discrete Series, however, never announces a speaker through an explicit "I" or "me," and begins with an impacted visual description that breaks off following the em-dash, implying that the speaker and space are inextricable functions of the poem itself. This trend holds true across both collections. Where Monique Vescia observes "the first-person pronoun is practically absent … occur[ing] only three times in Discrete Series," 21 Poems includes it thirteen times, in more than half of its poems.¹⁹

A developing understanding of "personhood" is latent in these different methods for representing the relationship between setting and poem. Discrete Series evinces a shift in attention, from the way a poem can represent a person's encounter with the world to the way the poem can represent a person's being in it, from a rhetoric that issues from a coherent person encountering the world to a rhetoric suggesting a consciousness that is determined by something that exceeds it. This is how we need to understand the comma in the first line of "The lights, paving—," which interrupts but without enough information to say how it does so. Does it denote a list that is preempted by the dash, does it suggest an incomplete parenthetical that would relate the lights and paving through a third term, or is it rhetorical, suggesting a pause? Each possibility requires the reader to hold some sort of absence in mind, to include a variable in the poetic sequence. The power of this variable radiates through the rest of the poem, and the invitation to supply our own resolution is essential to our understanding its status as poem. But this invitation produces a very different sort of ambiguity than simply announcing a crisis.

The poem from 1930 seeks a similar, circumscribed present absence, but it needs considerably more space to do so. It approaches its subject through stable grammar, and as the poem compares site and speaker in the second stanza, we recognize the breaks in "This a vacant lot" to be a method for emphasizing phases of thought. "Simply / This, and my dissatisfaction" suggests a correlation, as if the frustrated potentiality that the poem's speaker began describing through the lot's "Impenetrable ground" is a feature of his state of mind as well. It is only once the relationship between space and the speaker's thoughts is established that the poem invokes abstract placeholders that require the reader's imaginative triangulation, and it does so with awkward explicitness: "Between eyes and shoes, a plane, / A spaced companionship, opposing / This dust, and some immovable watchfulness." "Shoes" are the point of contact between the poem's speaker and the ground of the lot, and "eyes" are the source of the reflection that the speaker's "shoes" are "Dusty, not of soil"—which is also to say, they stand in for experience and observation, located at either end of the body. In this case, we can understand "a plane" as the poem itself, reproducing the speaker's reflection and acting as its own "vacant lot," a space in which both observation and experience become possible. The poem has moved from description, to reflection, to a kind of revelation.

"This a vacant lot" does not have a traditional poetic structure, but it has an arc that we can easily recognize. The fourth (and most compelling) criterion of Jonathan Culler's recent, "inductive" rubric for identifying lyric tendencies suggests "most … lyrics have an explicitly hyperbolic quality. … sometimes it seems the product of … generic convention that makes homely observation of a garden accessory into an epiphany."²⁰ Many of the 21 Poems reproduce this maneuver by focusing on the relationship between page arrangement and cognitive progression, most explicitly in the fourteenth poem, which describes the claustrophobic rise of office towers and then begins a new stanza: "Such a thing is in my mind" (Oppen, 21 Poems, 32). But we can see where Oppen runs into difficulty when we consider "This a vacant lot" as a whole. The final stanza does not make easy sense in relation to the previous sections of the poem, yet the logic of the poem expects us to read it as a revelatory summary. The concluding mention of "some immovable watchfulness" is a striking formulation, which appears to sustain the comparison between the speaker and the lot by referring to the act of self-reflection as well as the lot's placement in an organized community (who else would demarcate it as a lot? Who would pave it with the "embedded stones"?). But, the fact of the poem's progressive logic implies that some element of the speaker is "movable," that the realization is not discovered but reached. The vagueness of "some immovable" does not provide complicating information so much as contradictory information shifted into another rhetorical key, bringing a sense of certainty that undermines the second stanza's "No nor elsewhere" without addressing it. Though uncertainty or doubt could complement alienation, the poem's structure places these feelings at odds.

Here is where the poem's lack of sophistication when compared to "The lights, paving—" becomes stark. The later poem is significantly more fragmented, such that when it is read aloud it sounds less like the record of a personal reflection than like separate snatches of speech caught while tuning across the dial. But we still understand it to refer to a race at night, a wreck against the side of a building that is there the following morning, and an awareness that an opaque series of decisions—by the racers, but also by the developers of the highway infrastructure—brought about this result. The poem produces a sense of tragedy abated by inevitability and impersonality, in the same way that its stretching between night and morning—a temporal effect heightened by the one-line second stanza—suggests the dawn's power to astonish despite the certainty of its breaking. Whereas the earlier poem conveyed a speaker's experience, the fragments of "The lights, paving—" recall William James's sense of the underacknowledged, partial nature of our own lives, however ordinary: "Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds."²¹ Oppen shifts this "more" from the speaker's previous experiences to the world that exceeds the boundary of the poem, and from a poetic rhetoric defined by complete, excerptible statements to one that is evocatively incomplete, relying on accretion more than grammar. In doing so, Oppen finds a method for retaining the indirect "condition of language" that Peter Nicholls sees as lyric's distinctive trait, but without needing to triangulate its address through an absent addressee.²² Instead, Oppen sublimates address into mood.

I use "mood" rather than "tone" because Oppen associated the former term with intersections between art and life beyond it, whereas he tended to use the latter to denote solipsism.²³ The ruptures of grammar and page arrangement mean that "The lights, paving—" rarely says anything directly, nor does it conjure stable images, but it is written in familiar words and it reads quickly and the impression that it gives is total. Some phrases impact the mood of the poem—"Remains" in "Remains till morning" acts as a verb, but its separation from its grammatical subject recalls the word's noun form, most frequently used to describe a dead body—but these heavily-toned phrases are at once less than the total impression and contribute to it. It would be impossible to reproduce it through an excerpt or to isolate the source of this impression in a single line. We can see that Oppen has brought together a unified poem without using syntax to build this sense of unity, particularly when read we read "The lights, paving—" alongside "This a vacant lot." Both poems are about urban space and the kinds of knowledge that they allow, and both suggest that the experience of these spaces is in some way unsettling, but in the later poem Oppen creates this sensation without sacrificing aesthetic coherence.

Oppen revisits this sense of urban alienation in many of the 21 Poems and from a variety of approaches, with increasing success but without the cohesion of "The lights, paving—." The nineteenth poem in 21 Poems, for example, performs an imagist experiment that seems to invert the associative trajectory of Pound's "In A Station of the Metro":

The pigeons fly from the dark bough unleaved to the        window ledge. There is no faceThere visible.²⁴

Where Pound's poem goes from a face in an urban crowd to delicate petals, Oppen's moves from urban fauna to a disappointing lack of recognition, and yet the poem moves too quickly for us to expect the "face" that the poem seems to. Instead, we read it as a gnomic description of an empty ledge, one that highlights a similar sense of alienation but one that we can't intuitively share.

In 1976, a scholar found "The pigeons fly" in a typescript of Discrete Series that Oppen had sent to Charles Reznikoff in 1933. Revisiting the poem prompts Oppen to reflect: "I see again that it is inadequate, but feel that I might well have included it nevertheless. Perhaps the poem should have been on the page following the poem beginning 'burns / beside the wall.'"²⁵ Oppen's sense of the poem's resonance with "The lights, paving—" reinforces the impression of deliberate experimentation. That this poem was part of Discrete Series until shortly before its publication suggests that he learned that an explicit and coherent speaker is at odds with the kinds of total impressions his poems seek, while "inadequate" suggests that there is not enough poem for it to hold together as a total impression.²⁶ In fact, these are the grounds on which William Carlos Williams praised Discrete Series when it was first published: "His poems seek an irreducible minimum in the means for the achievement of their objective."²⁷ With Poems as a point of comparison, we understand that the formal efficiency Williams observed was not an accident but a development, used to heighten the interrelation between lyric indirection and the world of the poem. "The pigeons fly" fails because it has been reduced beyond the minimum.

Rebellious Banality

Oppen's substitution of controlling personhood with cohesive mood occurs simultaneously with him exerting greater control over his poetic lexicon, eliminating ornate words and elevated figures of speech, and replacing them with increasingly abstract arrangements of familiar words. This is, perhaps, why Michael Heller finds that Discrete Series "more than anything else, embodies a troubled vocabulary and structure of absences."²⁸ The words themselves are common enough, but there is something unnerving about their flexibility in these poems. Oppen's unlikely placement of mundane language is jarring, erupting associations in many directions at once, allowing these poems to exceed the banality of their subject matter. They do not "impoverish" the space of the poem, as Oppen describes in a later poem, but provide an unruly polysemy.²⁹

Specifically, this increasing flexibility allows Oppen to unsettle a too-easy assumption of cosmopolitan interest and excitement that was endemic to the literary world of the 1930s. In late 1931 or early 1932, Oppen sent Pound an annotated list of literary magazines, and his description of H. L. Mencken's American Mercury provides a helpful, contemporaneous commentary on the middlebrow modernist's sense of urban experience:

He deals with the stupidity of church societies, small town administrations, midwestern senators, and so forth. The ideal left unchallenged is apparently urbanity, or a virile cosmopolitanism. Obviously, Mr. Menken [sic] feels that the confession of enjoying "after all" a good glass of beer or a good burleque [sic] show as much as anything acquires special force in the mouth of a professional intellectual.

(Oppen, 21 Poems, 42)

Oppen may have had a particular article in mind, but this "special force" is the real point of derision.³⁰ It abets the belief that minor indulgences are elevated when they are enjoyed by those who are able to express themselves more eloquently than a parochial functionary.³¹ Oppen was hardly unique in taking issue with Mencken's sociological assessments—Jonathan P. Eburne has elsewhere illuminated the dissenting portrayals that appeared in novels by Nathanael West and Robert M. Coates and the broader importance of anti-Menckenism to a downtown "Dada-inflected iconoclasm."³² But this opposition to "virile cosmopolitanism" has a significant impact on the construction of Oppen's verse, pushing it towards a sort of rebellious banality that seems to be completely his own. Oppen eliminates the jargon and bombast that might belong to a "professional intellectual," allowing him to combat the tendency to elevate city life without having to turn away from the city.

These restrictions are, again, more obvious when poems from the two collections are compared with each other. Here is the ninth poem in 21 Poems:

The revolving door swings load after load into the lobby;There is a sound of secrets,A scattering of feet, a crossing, recrossing.But now, with the sudden weight of prophecy,Incredibly caught stillness,The carpet level to the door. From outside,Short clatter of a street-car—. a policeman's whistleBarely heard.                            Now first visible,Steadily back and forth,Past and past the newsboy (straining, silent),Unvaryingly waiting, overcoated,Walks the doorman. As in a dark houseA wicker chair cracks suddenly in the attic.³³

And here is a close thematic comparison in Discrete Series:

Who comes is occupiedToward the chest (in the crowd moving            oppositeGrasp of me)                        In firm overallsThe middle-aged man slidingLevers in the steam-shovel cab,—Lift (running cable) and swung, backRemotely respond to the gesture before lastOf his arms fingers continually—Turned with the cab. But if I (how goes        it?)—                The asphalt edgeLoose on the plateau,Horse's classic height cartlessSee electric flash of streetcar,The fall is falling from electric burst.³⁴

Both poems share signifiers like streetcars and men's clothing, and both explore the sensation of being in a crowd, shifting between being a part of it and apart from it. More broadly, they attend to the mundanity of city life: leaving an office building, using public transit, navigating construction, and looking through crowds.

However, "The revolving door" has an arc that situates its organizing consciousness in the figure of the office worker, and its acoustic play suggests a conspicuous cleverness that Oppen becomes keen to avoid. The first pair of repeated terms conveys seriality and emphasis, with "load after load" swinging through the revolving doors into the lobby, but subsequent repetitions are antanaclases, forcing the reader to think of the several connotations carried by single words in "a crossing, recrossing" and "past and past." The visible fact of the repetition suggests that the poem has already considered these possibilities and is repeating them to help the reader to see them.³⁵ "The revolving door" also puts a greater emphasis on slant rhyme and its consequentiality, especially in the assonant pair "whistle" and "visible" in: "Short clatter of a street-car- a policeman's whistle / Barely heard // Now first visible." These lines register what Culler might call an "opsic" slip, a shift from the poem's attentions to "produc[ing or] represent[ing] images" to being itself "a visual construction"—the nearly inaudible whistle in the figurative world of the poem collapses into the material word "whistle" that is "Now" being read and thus seen on the page by the reader (Theory of the Lyric, 256). This metapoetic shift across visual registers is the correlative of the geographic shift from the busy lobby to the dark attic, just as the poem's diacopic repetitions create a sense of stability that its geographic shifts can then displace, heightening the effect of poem's conclusion. This demonstrates a promising degree of sophistication in Oppen's handling of the poem as thing on a page, and unsurprisingly, Zukofsky singles out another similar "opsic slip" in an early letter to Pound.³⁶

But where Oppen's earlier poem theatrically reveals its textual materiality, "Who comes" foregrounds artifice from the beginning. In "Who comes," Oppen is using line breaks and indentation to slow the reader down rather than propel us forward to moments of assonance, so we are less likely to get swept up in his verse and reading it as cosmopolitan rhapsody. For instance, the one-word line, "opposite," seems to prevent us from hearing any end-line alliteration with the opening's "occupied." The streets in this poem are not a network between private spaces but exist as streets alone. Without a progressive poetic arc to take us away from, the words themselves operate similarly—we can be surprised by the regions of reference these words lead us towards, but without feeling as though we have lost the poem or that the poet has performed a sly intellectual trick.

More specifically, when we look at "Who comes" beside "The revolving door," we notice the absence of compound prefix formations like "recrossing" or "unvaryingly," which bring the earlier poem a degree of intelligible unfamiliarity. Instead, "Who comes" contains nearly half the number of articles and no indefinite articles at all, producing unfamiliarity by thwarting paratactic momentum and preventing us from locating a speaking perspective. The closing couplet, "See electric flash of streetcar, / The fall is falling from electric burst," turns away from concrete representation entirely, such that the reader does not know whether to "See [the] electric flash" or "See electric[ally]." Presumably, these lines refer to sparks erupting from the streetcar's rooftop pole connected to the electrified cable, but rather than freeze this burst as a photograph would, Oppen wants us to notice the process of falling. To do so, the poem must break from the expected "sparks are falling," and it dissolves its frame of reference in tautology, keeping it in the world instead of functioning as an epiphanic summary.

That this tautology occurs at the end of the poem, the place where it must resolve itself in some fashion, is crucial to understanding Oppen's developing sense of structure as a method of preempting Menckenian aggrandizement. Giorgio Agamben describes the final lines of a poem as the point at which the semantic and semiotic registers collide: "poets seem conscious of the fact that here there lies something like a decisive crisis for the poem, a genuine crise de vers in which the poem's very identity is at stake. Hence the often cheap and even abject quality of the end of the poem."³⁷ This is another way of understanding the unsatisfying epiphanic ending of "This a vacant lot"—that the epiphany is not demanded by the preceding lines so much as by the need to recognizably conclude the poetic act. But in "Who comes," the shock of the repetition comes from finding that the poem has already ended by depleting its vocabulary. We do not imagine it as an utterance that might continue beyond its versure (Agamben's term) but one that is utterly completed by its completion. It is a self-sufficient poetic object that invites no before or after.

"The revolving door," however, is unevenly propulsive, and produces misdirection through its temporality rather than its grammar. "But now, with the sudden weight of prophecy" and "Now first visible" keep the reader's attention on the presentness of each successive line, following the snap to attention, "now," with a word that echoes the present breaking upon us, "sudden" and "first." These formulations insist upon the poem as something occurring in time, in a similar fashion to the stanza formations of "This a vacant lot" but with a greater understanding of the stakes of this control, so that we do not suspect that the poem is taking us far from the office tower and into a "dark house / A wicker chair cracks suddenly in the attic" until it already has. We are unnerved by how quickly the trappings of the modern city become indications of the past, particularly because "The revolving door" more clearly signals the connections between lines and clauses. It is not as aesthetically impressive as "Who comes," but it is attempting something similar by insisting upon the world's breadth, even if the image of the dark attic is too glibly portentous to be a satisfying end.

But there is a sense of literary "breadth" here, too—"a crossing, recrossing" recalls a passage from Williams's Spring And All (1923) in a way that encourages us to see Oppen's move away from these acts of repetition as part of his wrestling with the influence of modernist poetics. In Williams's poem, "Careful Crossing Campaign / Cross Crossings Cautiously" reads humorously, flagrantly importing the language of a highway-side sign as part of the "antipoetry" Williams was accused of writing.³⁸ Williams parrots these accusations in the book's opening section:

Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent. Poetry that used to go hand in hand with life, poetry that interpreted our deepest promptings, poetry that inspired, that led us forward to new discoveries, new depths of tolerance, new heights of exaltation. You moderns!

(Collected Poems I, 177).

Now, of course, we do not doubt that Williams was writing poetry. But Williams's straw man critic reminds us of the assumptions about form and content that he and others were challenging. Williams's term, "antipoetry," caught on within his modernist milieu, and Oppen would have been familiar with it as a portable concept. Stevens cleaves to this notion as an explanation for Williams's urgency in his introduction to Williams's Collected Poems 1921–31 (1934), which Oppen and Zukofsky published through their The Objectivist Press. "[N]ow, in the midst of a baffled generation," Stevens writes, "as one looks out of the window at Rutherford or Passaic, or as one walks the streets of New York, the anti-poetic acquires an extraordinary potency."³⁹ Addressing the same streets and windows, Oppen's increasingly disjointed poetic style represents his own antipoetry, but one less concerned with "interpret[ing] our deepest promptings" than asking where that sense of depth comes from and why a "special force" or an "extraordinary potency" should be necessary.

Oppen's essay "The Mind's Own Place" (1963) supplies what might very well have functioned as Williams's reply to his critics:

Modern American poetry begins with the determination to find the image, the thing encountered, the thing seen each day whose meaning has become the meaning and the color of our lives. Verse, which had become a rhetoric of exaggeration, of inflation, was to the modernists a skill of accuracy, of precision, a test of truth. … Of the major poets it is only William Carlos Williams, with his insistence on "the American idiom," on the image derived from day-to-day experience, on form as "nothing more than an extension of content," who shows a derivation from populism. But it is the fidelity, the clarity, including the visual clarity and their freedom from the art subject which is the distinction also of Pound and Eliot and the force behind their creation of a new form and a new prosody.⁴⁰

Oppen's mature analysis encourages us to notice that the poetries Williams identifies and eschews are all forms of inflation, emphasizing extremes of belief and experience—although he does not explicitly connect them, the relationship between poetic "inflation" and economic inflation seems unavoidable. We can understand Oppen's mundanity, as well as his shift away from slant rhyme and diacopic repetition, to be his own efforts at rhetorical deflation. But in his later reflection, Oppen removes the urban context that seemed so crucial to his assessment of Mencken and to Stevens's account of Williams, shifting attention squarely to rhetoric and "the art subject" while allowing the sense of self-aggrandizement as well as the necessity of the urban scene to slip away.

These deflations are not so easily performed—indeed, Culler's sense is that "hyperbole" is essential. Oppen and Zukofsky also published Williams's neo-Dadaist prose, which registers the difficulty of making this kind of writing interesting. He begins A Novelette (1932) in a creative crisis: "No use, no use. The banality wins, is rather increased by the attempt to reduce it. Better to learn to write and to make a smooth page no matter what the incoherence of the day, no matter what erasures must be sacrificed to improve a lying appearance to keep ordered the disorder of the pageless actual."⁴¹ But it seems like Williams's goal is to escape banality or at the very least reduce it, not to embrace banality as a constraint and a challenge. In part, this is because Williams's attention to "the American idiom" places the conditions of speech as a limit on his work, and he increasingly turns towards historical sources to reinvigorate his language diachronically, as in Paterson. Oppen, however, has no such aspiration for his early work, and although "Who comes" is built from words that anyone might hear many times in a day, he has placed them in a syntax with no real-world referent. Rather emphasize the "presentness" of the line as he did in "The revolving door," "Who comes" uses grammatical play to dissolve any sense of the poem's moment, incorporating "the incoherence of the day" along with its ordinary subject matter. A single clause, like "Lift (running cable) and swung," can contain both present and past participles operating on the same object. This allows Oppen to answer Williams's crisis with another kind of tautology: how do we make the ordinary interesting without elevating it? By bringing it into a poem, with all the freedom that that act licenses.

Throughout 21 Poems, we find evidence of an Oppen writing unambiguously in the shadow of many of the major modernists in a manner that helps us to notice Discrete Series's still-more-advanced poetic deflation. In these earlier poems, Oppen often uses negating prefixes to create ambiguity much like e.e. cummings does in Is 5.⁴² The eighth of 21 Poems ends with a lightly modified version of Eliot's signal lines from The Waste Land, but it is hard to imagine the Oppen of Discrete Series putting much stock in the unreality of the "Unreal City" that Eliot describes in the poem's third section.⁴³ Instead, Oppen appears to have become increasingly confident in his own iteration of poetic modernism, no longer seeking to signal his participation but to extend the innovations he cites Williams, Pound, and Eliot as originating, building upon their "freedom from the art subject" by excluding the rhetorical postures that attended these earlier poetries as well (Oppen, "The Mind's Own Place," 31).

But contrary to his mature beliefs, Oppen's "Who comes" does not seem "determined to find the image" either—not in the way that the "opsic" play in "The revolving door" suggests, and certainly not to the extent that would license characterizing Discrete Series's aesthetics as "little more than an affiliation with the Imagist legacy as practiced by Pound and Williams" (Twitchell-Waas, "What Were the 'Objectivist' Poets?," 325). Instead, Oppen narrowed his focus on the moods and sensation of modernity rather than its sights and sounds, and his early poetry reforms lyric personhood until it can accommodate these sensations without becoming an exaggerated self-reflection. "Who comes" introduces deictic personhood in a way that "The lights, paving—" did not, but thoroughly undercuts its consequence and cohesion. "Grasp of me)" and "But if I (how goes / it?)—" both use parentheticals to suggest a tenuous lyric "I," as if it is a clarification or aside rather than an essential element of the poem ("Who comes," 14). "Grasp of me" is a particularly strange construction, offering a genitive association between the possible-speaker and this "grasp"—does the crowd have the "opposite grasp of me," which is to say, a backwards understanding of the poem's speaker? Or does the poem want the reader to take hold of it? Similarly, "But if I (how goes / it?)—" reads reflexively, as if the poem is asking an emerging personhood how he or she or they are feeling at the instant he or she or they occur. But then the poem breaks off for several lines of irregular lineation, reminding us of its materiality. It is as though the poem has invoked a lyric speaker only to realize it has forgotten how to have one. As a metapoetic device, asking "how goes it" of an empty lyric "I" is humorous, but as part of the syntax, its em-dash, followed by "[t]he asphalt edge," introduces a rupture that is, per Heller, "troubl[ing]" (Speaking the Estranged, 20). While it is funny to ask a grammatical construct how it is feeling, it is unnerving to find an entity assailed as a person to be unable to feel.

Reading Discrete Series after 21 Poems, we understand Oppen to have revised the "I" to accommodate not the profundity or symbolism of the modern experience but its banality, deploying a lyric that is not alienated from the crowd so much as at risk of existing only in it. Reading Discrete Series alongside 21 Poems, the increasing fragmentation we see is not simply a result of modernist experimentation pour l'art but a necessary precondition for Oppen's revision of the lyric mode to suit an emptier urban life. Writing about modernist poetics in the city, Arnold Weinstein argues for the primacy of the fragment as a structural conceit: "fragment itself conveys not only the bedrock nature of city life as the flickering experience of heterogeneity and simultaneity (indeed, as the negotiating of [Charles] Baudelaire's key binary, solitude/multitude), but it also propels outward—from shard to whole, individual to polis, present to past."⁴⁴ Oppen's lyricism resists the totalizing assumption of these binaries, and the process of refinement evinced by 21 Poems helps us to recognize that he became sharper and more direct in his treatment of these seemingly-Manichean dilemmas. Discrete Series reckons with solitude not by retreating into interiority but by thrusting the subject out into the dispassionate crowd, and it reckons with the past by layering the absent over the present until the concept of "moment" dissolves.

In doing so, Oppen razes the Baudelairean crowd typically used to define modernist poetic treatments of the city, in which shock is its primary experience. But it is a fundamentally Cartesian urban subject that Baudelaire's poetry dramatizes, one whose "shield of consciousness … show[s] us the length one had to go to have an experience, and at the same time dramatizing why we usually do not."⁴⁵ After reading Oppen's characterization of Mencken, we know Oppen would have been profoundly skeptical of any effort to valorize these "lengths," and his "I" results in the transposition of shock from the experience of novelty to a reconfiguration of banal modernity, adjacent to the speaker. Whereas Baudelaire's "shield of consciousness" authorizes the sublimity of its being broken, Oppen's "I" exists as an impenetrable, empty carapace. If we follow Marshall Berman's belief that Baudelaire was the "first modernist," then Oppen, through his rebellious banality and consequent evacuation of a feeling subjectivity, could be considered the last.⁴⁶

Calling Oppen the last lyric modernist also shifts the way that we understand his renunciation of poetry and dedication to political organizing. These two decisions are linked, but are typically taken as complete explanations for each other, when the leftwing modernist taste of the period seems to have had as much of an impact as the effort that his "second career" required. In Oppen's reply to L. S. Dembo, who was the first to notice the Henry James quotation interpolated in "The knowledge not of sorrow"—which begins Discrete Series and was Oppen's first poem to be published—he glosses the underacknowledged aesthetic stakes of his silence: "I argued, shortly after Discrete was printed, that James and not Hemingway was the useful model for 'proletarian' writers - - - - and realized, in the ensuing discussion, if one could call it a discussion, that I must stay away from left-wing 'cultural workers.'"⁴⁷ More could be said about Oppen thinking of his own writing through two novelists, but the contrast is clear—preferring James's digressive, psychological explorations to the spare, actionoriented Hemingway marks a point of irreparable disagreement between Oppen and his peers. It is not only that Oppen's early poetry completes the Baudelairean inquiry into the content and structure of "experience" and the relationship between that inquiry and how we understand "self," but that this very pursuit was taken as orthogonal to the effort of creating a more just world. But there is political power to this pursuit, as Giménez Smith and Perez and a host of other poets have recently shown.

The Values of Retrospect

Oppen's systematic deflation of cosmopolitanism and revision of the modern lyric have been previously difficult to see, but not only because we lacked 21 Poems. His comments about Discrete Series from the 1960s and 70s tend to focus on missed opportunities and failures rather than the poems themselves and what he hoped to achieve. When asked about his earlier writing in April 1968, he refers to having "trouble with syntax in this undertaking" instead of celebrating the sublimation of speaker into experience through disjointed syntax (Speaking with George Oppen, 10). A month later, commenting on "Who comes," he is even less reverent: "The real question is simply, whether the poem is successful or not, and I can't quite make up my mind. That's specifically something I've said since, I think, of the vision of the raw land under that asphalt" (24). Oppen's "said since" refers to "Return" from The Materials (1962), which narrates a road trip with his family and a Sequoia tree bursting through the pavement.⁴⁸ Its conflation of poet and speaker, interpolation of Shakespeare's Richard II and W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming," fluid sentence construction, and pastoral epiphany have much more in common with his 21 Poems than Discrete Series.

In fact, Jackson's point about the first-generation American modernists "all wr[iting] short poems we now call lyric, though they tended not to use that description," helps us to notice how strange it is that Oppen begins to use the term frequently during his return ("lyric," 833). In one of Oppen's "Daybooks," hand-bound palimpsestic collections of his own notes and quotations from various sources, he includes a verse paragraph describing "the area of the Lyric":

There is the area of the Lyric—the    area in which one is absolutelyconvinced that one's emotions    are an insight into reality    and death    But values—as they say—⁴⁹

The passage breaks off at Oppen's em-dash in a manner similar to his early verse. Still, Oppen is suggesting that emotional epiphanies need to be scrutinized before they are credited with ontological insight. Along similar lines, the comment about a "lyric leap" that provides this article's second epigraph refers to "Generation of Drivers" (1958), one of the first poems that Oppen would write after returning to poetry and which he would ultimately leave unpublished. The poem features the same tight lines and abrupt stanzaic breaks as "The lights, paving—" though it seeks to explain the relationship between driving and "America, America, / Brand new America" in a decidedly didactic mode.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, Oppen's comment provides suggestive terminology for the fissures between stanzas in his early work—throwing the poem across a break to see what lands—even if the post–World War II Oppen is more concerned with legibility than innovation.

The way Oppen incorporates shards of these early poems into his later work has been even more significant for how we understand his modernism and its legacy. For example, he became fascinated that "The knowledge, not of sorrow" was written roughly coincident with Martin Heidegger's speech about boredom, which Oppen did not read until the 1950s.⁵¹ The discovery of this coincidence is the occasion for a retrospective interpolation, including an emended version of the seventh line from "The knowledge, not of sorrow" in section 37 of "Of Being Numerous" (1968):

'… approached the window as if to see …'

The boredom which disclosedEverything—

I should have written, not the rainOf a nineteenth century day, but the motesIn the air, the dust⁵²

As a result, Oppen's intuitive Heideggerianism has become one of the dominant theoretical lenses through which Discrete Series is viewed.⁵³ But Heidegger is not a reliable guide to these early poems, as evinced by the alterations that the later poem explicitly seeks, narrowing its attention from the unavoidable rain to the easily missed motes. Where the mature Oppen wishes that his early poem had been more attuned to minutia, bringing into sight the details that are ever-present but rarely noticed, the poem as written is more interested in the velocity with which sensory information allows us to understand the ordinary: "'approached the window as if to see / what really was going on'; / And saw rain falling, in the distance / more slowly."⁵⁴ Oppen's later version may honor Heidegger's understanding of "boredom," but it moves us further away from Heidegger's conception of mood as something in which we find ourselves, as opposed to something that we have.

Oppen's mature efforts also tend to repair the disjointed syntax that is his early hallmark. Here, for example, is "Memory at 'The Modern'" (1963), which interpolates parts of "The lights, paving—":

We had seen bare landAnd the people bare on itAnd men campIn the city. The lights,The pavement, this important deviceOf a race, I wrote then,Twenty three years old,Remains till morning. Nobody knows who diedOn the roads of that time, of the fact of roads.I am a man of the Thirties

'No other taste shall change this'⁵⁵

The second verse sentence reproduces the opening stanzas of the earlier poem with two alterations: "paving—" becomes "The pavement" and is moved to the line below, and "I wrote then, / Twenty three years old," is inserted between "Of a race" and "Remains till morning." The later poem discloses of the prior poem's historical and autobiographical frame, identifying problems within the early poem that the mature Oppen sees as representative of the period. If "Nobody knows who died / On the roads of that time," the new poem does not seek to name the deceased but to outline their unknowing. "[T]he fact of roads," then, refers to the unacknowledged inevitability of fatal accidents. Though we cannot predict who will die in car wrecks, that some will is beyond question, and the later poem suggests that this reality was not sufficiently considered at this earlier moment. Likewise, the opening verse sentence paratactically reminds us that a poem about car-racing was composed within view of the Depression's vulnerable urban homeless, such that Oppen appears not to be proudly reasserting his responsibility for the earlier poem, but doing so scrupulously. By subsequently declaring himself "a man of the Thirties," Oppen admits to sharing in the blind-spots that he attributes to the period.⁵⁶

Oppen's inclusion of his own earlier poem is exemplary of his mature approach to a "poetics of quotation" in which, as Nicholls explains it, "[t]he poet may recall a past experience, then, but that experience is fundamentally recast, perhaps so as to be almost unrecognizable, when caught up in the force-field of present perception."⁵⁷ While the texture of this recasting differs according to situation and source, when Oppen quotes his early work he emphasizes absence over presence. The later poem's prosody quite literally fills the gaps—in syntax and layout—with exposition, erasing its remarkable awkwardness and eliminating the ambiguity that allows words like "race" and "Remains" and "usual considerations" to gesture outside of the poetic narrative that Oppen's later poem stabilizes. Where "race" is understood as "[car] race" in the later poem, "The lights, paving—" not only permits multiple possibilities but invites them, about the persistence of segregation or about the mediation of any relationship through competition. It furthermore fixes those lines into a past tense, whereas the earlier poem exists in a moment between when "He has chosen a place" and the result of that choice. The mature Oppen imposes a strict referential boundary and an evaluation onto a poem that, in its original, is more interested in breaking down the connection between the words in grammatically constative statement. The emphasis of this "recasting" is on the casting not its prefix, on the forcing into one particular shape rather than retaining its malleability.

Effectively, Oppen creates a confessional reading for an experimental modernist poem, indicating a kind of "lyric shame" outside the scope of Gillian White's recent account of contemporary American poetry's sheepish attraction to directly expressive modes. White's description of Elizabeth Bishop's mid-1930s "political leanings ma[king] her feel embarrassed about the class implications and lack of social conscience that being a poet could be taken to imply" reminds us of Oppen's own renunciation.⁵⁸ But whereas Bishop pursued a "tradition of likenesses" by exploring canonical modes while seeking other ways of understanding the world, and thus is described by White as a lyric poet "[Who] Ought to Be Ashamed (but [Wasn't])," Oppen entered the 1960s as an experimental poet who saw failure in the obscurity of those experiments (White, Lyric Shame, 52, 42). Divagating White's chapter title, we might say that Oppen "Ought Not to Be Ashamed (but Was)." His early poems did not lack historical specificity but evaded it through a concentration on language and mood, and they did not lack theoretical heft but supplied their own complex understanding of the relationship between person and place. But such is their focus on deflating lyric poetry and its version of the modern city, they fail to fully comment on the Depression in a way demanded by Oppen's later "poetics of social engagement," which focused on announcing the imbrication of the Vietnam War and global poverty with the minutiae of everyday life. Thus, his modernism was obscured.

With the aid of 21 Poems, we can now see Discrete Series as an important aesthetic development in the history of poetic modernism. But there is an unappreciated political efficacy in Oppen's early formal experiments as well, even if he did not notice it. Oppen's treatment of lyric convention as a reservoir of contexts for questioning resonates with recent reappraisals of the lyric, and these reappraisals help us to understand what this work can do now. I want to end by suggesting a close point of contact with another contemporary poet who has foregrounded lyric experimentation as an avenue for "social engagement." And fittingly, she has offered Oppen as a model for a poetry that "enters into alliance with that class whose historical mission is the abolition of all classes."⁵⁹

Juliana Spahr also began experimenting with the lyric during geopolitical crisis. In a prefatory note from 2005, she describes living in Hawaii and feeling far away from the United States' post–September 11 military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, even as she knew that the military economically supports the island: "I had to think about my intimacy with things I would rather not be intimate with. … This feeling made lyric—with its attention to connection, with its dwelling on the beloved and on the afar—suddenly somewhat poignant, somewhat apt, even somewhat more useful than I usually find it."⁶⁰ Like Giménez Smith, Spahr sees the lyric as connective, but she is interested in uncomfortable connections as well as allegiances across space and time. Spahr traces the ways that Americans benefit from the atrocious and the unpleasant, the ways that the distance between us and "the afar" can protect our sense of self:

Beloveds I haven't been able to write for days.

I've just been watching.

Days ago North Korea unsealed its nuclear weapons reactors.

Days ago troops were moved into various positions. Gathered at various borders.

I traveled around the East Coast of the American continent hoping it would never beginbut watching it begin at the same time.⁶¹

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is striking in its directness and even occasional awkwardness. It contains hundreds of specific details, but primarily those provided by the television—these horrible fait divers are available to anyone, the opposite of Poundian arcana. There is still the syntactic shape of declaration, but much of its content is diffuse and provisional even when it refers to dire events. Charles Altieri has called this feature of Spahr's writing "thin subjectivity": "'thin' in the sense that her 'I' … is, instead of the fictive speaker of traditional lyric, a generic subject position that could be inhabited by anyone."⁶² Spahr's writing doesn't look like Oppen's, but this evacuation of the fictive speaker to create possibility of inhabitation—of entry—reminds me strongly of his early writing. That we cannot imagine many of the poems of Discrete Series as an individual's utterances, and yet, the fact of their being poems, pushes us to inhabit them. Once there, we find questions that we still need to ask. The fact that many poets are asking these questions now should enrich our understanding of what a "modernist lyric tradition" might be.