Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

pleasure.

Deep Jewels

Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod, Or Love in a golden bowl?

—William Blake, The Book of Thel

It is well that George Oppen’s Seascape: Needle’s Eye is of very few pages. For these poems, even more than those in Of Being Numerous, possess a surpassing density, a coordinate density of syntactic surface and of undistracted reflection. It is my sense that both densities devolve without constraint into each other, betraying no spot-welding; that the initial difficulties a reader may encounter are worth enduring for the reward of words put in unusual, often exhilarating combinations and of a thought process which is terrifying in its honesty. If the book were longer, we might be tempted to read for striking single lines or images—how most poetry is read most of the time—thereby missing the truly organic and iridescent density of Oppen’s poetry.

Density was not originated in poetry by Oppen. Our century has prided itself upon the refurbishment and near-idolatry of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. An indication of this is the denatured poetry of William Empson, a critic as poetaster whose work seems to have its single motive power in an admiration for metaphysical wit and complexity, so that his own poems read as literally senseless, voiceless puzzles, but not as poems. The object for the reader of an Empson poem, like the college student in a poetry class, is to figure it out. Its satisfactions are those of the crossword puzzle. If it, and the only slightly less arid work of Tate and Ransom, were restricted to the crossword pages of newspapers, they would occupy their proper zone and provide their proper pleasure of riddle solving. The density of George Oppen’s poetry, however, is of a wholly different order because his thought is of a different order. It is truly his own; he does not propose to entertain or to amaze by playing upon ideas already at hand, but to think, naked, in the poem to some purpose. To make the distinction clear, consider a metaphysical set piece, Marvell’s On a Drop of Dew, which may well have served as a model for the above worthies.

Marvell’s poem gains its density from complex variation and restatement of the equation: drop of dew = human soul, from tightly interlocked end rhymes with iambic lines kept supple by the ripple play of mono/poly syllable combinations within the line, and from frequent line-length alterations. The idea underlying the equation is a near-commonplace. Marvell links the dewdrop with the soul because it comes from heaven—the bosom of the morn—is whole and complete in itself, but is nevertheless restless and unsecure because so long divided from the sphere. And as the dewdrop lies within the blowing roses, so the soul—that drop, that ray / Of the clear fountain of Eternal Day—is within the human flower. In typical metaphysical conceit fashion, the dewdrop and Christian soul unite in

. . . how coy a figure wound,

Every way it turns away:

So the world excluding round,

Yet receiving in the Day.

Dark beneath, but bright above,

Here disdaining, there in love.

Marvell’s poem ends, having coyly assumed something of a literal sphere shape itself, by interpreting the dewdrop’s fragility as a soullike longing to leave this world—It all about does upward bend—and by identifying the dew with sacred manna, which congeals on earth only to dissolve and run / into the glories of th’Almighty Sun. Marvell’s density comes from the further and further outreaching series of variations made (and ending) on the first identification/equation, which in itself is simple. In fact, it is a principle of such composition that the theme, for its variations to affect, must be uncomplex. Bach’s Musical Offering doesn’t suffer because its fugue subject was dictated without forethought by a merely competent amateur, Frederick the Great.

Oppen is most commonly associated with Pound, Zukofsky, and Williams. Though the work of each man is whole and distinct, Oppen, as well as Zukofsky and Williams, writes within the technical understanding of Pound. It’s useful to look at the Cantos to see just how distinct Oppen’s density is from Marvell’s and from that of his most forceful contemporary master. Pound’s density develops from his ideogramic method. An example of this is the following excerpt from Canto LXXX:

as he walked under the rain altars

    or under the trees of their grove

    or would it be under their parapets

in his moving was stillness

as grey stone in the Aliseans

    or had been at Mt Segur

And it was old Spencer (,  H.) who first declaimed me the Odyssey

with a head built like Bill Shepard’s

on the quais of what Siracusa?

    Or what tennis court

near what pine trees?

The procedure is juxtaposition by displacement: or, or, or. The reader must locate he in a quick succession or montage of settings without indication whether first or last is any more the setting than any of the others. Pound’s lines are written so as to transform the reader into a camera operator constantly adjusting the focus as to follow an event, a movement, and as a consequence is moved in the process. The act of adjustment is maintained if the scenes are extremely opposite one another, an oppositeness made emphatic by word-sound syncopation: under rain altars, under trees, under parapets; Aliseans, Mt Segur, Spencer, Shepard’s, Siracusa; tennis court, pine trees. Pound’s density is generated by the cumulative scene/sound pattern or mesh (vortex/ideogram), a patterned energy in Hugh Kenner’s phrase, which is made up of rhetorical reversal displacements, abrupt juxtapositions of people and places not usually connected in their own space-time made to seem even more so by close repetition of single words and near-sprung-rhythm syncopation of subword sounds.

Despite the brevity of this example (from a canto that contains Washington, Debussy, Symons remembering Verlaine at the Rabarin, Santayana, Waterloo, Andy Jackson, the author’s curiosity that Mr. Eliot has not given more time to Mr. Beddoes, the obligatory Chinese ideograms and Greek tags, plus all the standard axes of Pound’s mind), the means of achieving density are no more complex than those found in Marvell. In fact, they are probably simpler. Pound’s variations are made upon Pound. As one reads through the Cantos, there are fewer and fewer surprises. Both themes and variations tend to assume, amid constellations of ever-multiplying exotic reference, fixed identities. Quantity and strangeness of reference with masterly control of cadence are the elements of Pound’s density.

My suggestion has been that Oppen’s density is somehow distinct, and therefore particularly valuable, from the metaphysical play upon received ideas and from Pound’s self-ideogramic method. To be sure, he is much closer to Pound than to Marvell. I think this is because Oppen has chosen to stand fast to the conception of image as center, foundation, and base for composition. Which, if not Pound’s original notion, is surely his emphasis. Oppen’s task as a poet sympathetic with this emphasis has been to avoid flat-out duplication, to turn it to his own use. What he, along with Zukofsky and Williams in their different ways, has successfully attempted is to construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry—from the imagist intensity of vision. (The statement comes from Oppen’s interview with L. S. Dembo in the Spring 1969 issue of Contemporary Literature.)

This is the necessary achievement, what every poet conscious of tradition and self-conscious, must manage: to adapt an existent body of technique and thus gain access into language and one’s own mind. The language is the poet’s to begin with, but only as a public trust; without a current, viable technique, it remains only as so much potential for the living writer, containing only what is already known. There is also the chance, then, not simply for expression, but rather for search and discovery in one’s own voice and through one’s own vision. Such an adaptation (of image from Pound, of overall form consciousness from Zukofsky) allows Oppen to think actively in his poetry. Is this not the true goal, beyond the superficial release from closed metrical writing, of Olson’s composition by field, of Duncan’s desire that the poem contain all the incidentals of its composition process? For if we cannot do this, no matter how fine the style, nothing will be done. Poetry will lapse, as it has lapsed with a Swinburne, with a Robert Bridges, with each gentleman’s present-day equivalents, from its high heuristic function to pinching the cheeks of a perennially debased beauty. Historically, Pound’s desuetizing and the whole modernist cleansing of tools have been useful. Now, however, the time has come to stop echoing no ideas but in things and to engage the poem directly that the searching mind may find there its rightful place for discovery. Let the poetics take care of themselves.

The peculiar density I would claim for the Seascape poems is a by-product of Oppen’s willingness to so engage the poem. Not endlessly to prepare for its never-to-be hyperpurified state, but to use it now. What finally distinguishes Oppen’s work from that of his immediate sources is the character of his own mind. I will evade psychoanalysis and argue that the mind most resembling Oppen’s is that of William Blake. What’s most striking about Blake is his incredible freedom of statement. The man is capable of saying anything in pursuit of exact statement. Who else in English poetry would write serious conversations between a clod of clay, a worm, and a daughter of beauty (Book of Thel)? Who else can put down such terrifying questions as in The Tyger or be as religiously vindictive (The death of Jesus set me free: / Then what have I to do with thee? in To Tirzah)? Who else can insistently point out social injustice (London, The Chimney-Sweeper) and at the same time write the flat-out platitudes that make up most of the Songs of Innocence? The answer is not George Oppen; it can only be William Blake.

Oppen, however, is equally capable of saying absolutely anything. For here is a veteran of all the make it new wars who can still write the near-sentimental Sparrow in the cobbled street, / Little sparrow round and sweet (Stranger’s Child—The Materials), who can register social protest: Now we do most of the killing / Having found a logic / Which is Control (Power, The Enchanted World—Of Being Numerous), and not least a poet who can write a poem of quiet affection for a woman Clear minded and blind / in the machines / And the abstractions and the power who

. . . sought for a friend

Offering gently

A brilliant kindness

Of the brilliant garden

(A Kind of Garden: A Poem for My Sister—Of Being Numerous). Oppen is also the poet of moral warning:

                      Wolves may hunt

With wolves, but we will lose

Humanity in the cities

And the suburbs, stores

And offices

In simple

Enterprise.

                                  (A Narrative— This In Which)

If Blake and Oppen mirror one another in a shared ability to startle by an unannounced directness, by an unreasonable pursuit of exact statement, which is not so much irrational as unmannered in traditional modes of procedure, there are also differences. The most important of these is Oppen’s refusal to construct a mythic universe, a reduction of the universe in which we all live, for a richer poetry. The splendor of, say, The Four Zoas comes from Blake’s mythic synthesis, which is a little familiar in its separate parts and yet remains strange as a whole. It is Blake’s preoccupation with his synthetic myth universe which makes Eliot’s remark that he did not see enough of the universe decently accurate.

Oppen is placed by his refusal to make such a synthetic construction at the disadvantage of continually refinding his subject in each new poem. (This may explain why he is drawn to serial organization, e.g., Image of the Engine, A Language of New York, the title poem from Of Being Numerous; the series permits any number of variations without forcing new beginnings and without losing sight of the object.) There’s positive gain, though, in that each poem demands great effort, each potentially as crucial as others of the past, so that a sense of the problem seen whole—there are no bravura rhetorical climaxes in Oppen’s poems—emerges.

Earlier I cited a section from Power, The Enchanted World as an instance of social protest. When quoted more fully, it becomes more complex.

Now we do most of the killing

Having found a logic

Which is control

Of the world, we

And Russia

What does it mean to object

Since it will happen?

It is possible, therefore it will happen

And the dead, this time dead

Complex is hardly the word. For the difficult question and its sad, hard answer offer us no relief—as they should not—there is no answer. This is what cannot be found in Blake, who has all the answers, and what, though the word sounds nearly freakish, makes Oppen’s poetry tragic. It is not Aristotle’s tragedy, nor a tragedy of any time other than our own, when neither heroic victory nor defeat can be had but only never-ending struggle, the terms of which are never quite clear.

One had not thought

To be afraid

Not of shadow but of light

Summon one’s powers

The tone remains brave, though none of Blake’s angels will appear to light our way. There’s no requirement for such a tone. It is a gift, humane and generous, from Oppen’s persisting mind. What good can it do? Only what all great art does: to lay out the human facts a little more clearly. Not salvation. We may see more if we listen closely to this man who has dedicated himself to the rare poetic of veracity.

That last phrase comes from West, one of the poems in Seascape. It belongs with another phrase, this one from a later poem in the same book, Song, The Winds of Downhill: out of poverty / to begin / again. Together, the two phrases define Oppen’s practice from Discrete Series to Seascape. Thus Oppen is always beginning again out of a relative poverty of poetic resources with each new poem. Relative because, while deliberately avoiding the multilayered richness of Blake’s myth universe, the clean slate per se is not really possible. All our acts have histories. The result of such a consciously assumed attitude is a density even more intense than that of the previous