Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen (review)

Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen, edited by Steve Shoemaker of Connecticut, serves as a worthy and necessary addition to the library of anyone studying either the poet, specifically, or post-modern American poetics. The volume is comprehensive, exploring Oppen in terms of philosophy and theory, his relationship to other great thinkers of the twentieth century, and even to his own protégées. Divided into five major sections, fifteen essays comprise the collection, providing students of Oppen with both solid as well as more creative theoretical takes on his poetics. A good blend of historicism and philosophy also makes this text useful for those seeking either biographical or philosophical work about the poet.

In Section I of this very thorough volume on George Oppen, "Working Papers / The Mind Thinking," readers find Michael Davidson's essay titled "Palimtexts: Postmodern Poetry and the Material Text." The essay provides excellent insights into the material nature of Oppen's poetics, primarily as fund in his notebooks and journals. Davidson reminds readers of poetry that, in ways similar to those surrounding Dickinson and her fascicles, Oppen's work comes with a host of "archeological" matter. He writes that this manifests "the gradual accretion and sedimentation of textual materials, no layer of which can ever be isolated from any other" (27). Davidson continues on to explore Oppen's work as a poetry that is more participatory than it is demonstrative in terms of thought. Indeed, Davidson explains the poet's palimtextual work reveals itself to be in conversation with itself, words and phrasings tacked upon one another, rising up off the page, proving its own dialogue, materially. One of the most useful aspects of Davidson's essay is the comparative poetics in which he engages toward the essay's close, exploring the technical relationship of Oppen's work to other the poetic geniuses of his lifetime, Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg, Pound, Williams, and others. Overall, the essays provide a nice grounding in the techniques and practices utilized by Oppen, and end by situating him firmly within the modern poetic tradition.

Section II of the collection, "On Discrete Series / Of the World, Weather-Swept," is made up of two essays, one by Shoemaker himself, and the other by near-legendary experimental poet Lyn Hejinian. Hejinian presents a "Preliminary to a Close Reading of George Oppen's Discrete Series," beginning with a bit of publication history. She recounts the ways in which New Directions published New Collected Poems initially, making it "at times difficult to know where one poem ends and another begins" (47). She notes the ways this problematizes a reading of the poetry's "contrapuntal development," which she deems vital to Oppen. Citing Mary Oppen's biography of Oppen, Hejinian also examines several influences on Oppen, including, significantly, Marxist and Heideggerian philosophy (it's worth noting, no few of the essayists in the volume examine Oppen in light of Heidegger), as well as Virginia Woolf, Proust, and Henry James. Hejinian also takes time in her essay to explore Oppen's social justice orientation toward the world, especially in light of his own intersection with both WWII and later, the Vietnam War. Shoemaker's essay, "Discrete Series and the Posthuman City," provides insight into Oppen as Imagist / Objectivist poet of the postmodern. The essay highlights a "modern landscape ... subjected to an act of dis/closure, revealing itself as a vanguard site of the post-human order of things" (61). Shoemaker also describes Oppen's "serial topography," in which the poet concerns himself with the fact of a world not created by the poem, but already extant. Oppen's poetic, Shoemaker explains, concerns the nature of objects as opposed to their function in the world. While the essay includes some jargon that can be difficult to wade through if one is no a student of poetics, its value lies in that Shoemaker always brings his observations around to the work and words of the poet himself.

"Among the Philosophers," the collection's third section...