George Oppen

George Oppen (1908-1984). Courtesy Wikipedia.

George Oppen (April 24, 1908 - July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as a founding member of the Objectivist poets .

Life

Overview

He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry — and to the United States — in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prizein 1969.

Youth

Oppen was born in New Rochelle, New York, into a Jewish family. His father was George August Oppenheimer (b. Apr. 13, 1881), a successful diamond merchant, his mother Elsie Rothfeld. His father changed the family name to Oppen in 1927.

Oppen's childhood was of considerable affluence; the family was well tended to by servants and maids, and Oppen enjoyed all the benefits of a wealthy upbringing: horse riding, expensive automobiles, frequent trips to Europe. But his mother committed suicide when he was 4, his father remarried 3 years later, and the boy and his stepmother, Seville Shainwald apparently could not get along. Oppen developed a skill for sailing at a young age and the seascapes around his childhood home left a mark on his later poetry. He was taught carpentry by the family butler; as an adult, Oppen found work as a carpenter and cabinetmaker.

In 1917, the family moved to San Francisco where Oppen attended Warren Military Academy. It is speculated that during this time in his life, Oppen's early traumas led to fighting and drinking, so that by the time he was reaching maturity Oppen was experiencing a personal crisis. By 1925, this period of personal and psychic transition culminated in a serious car wreck in which George was driver and a young passenger was killed. Ultimately, Oppen was expelled from high school just before he graduated. After this period, he traveled to England and Scotland by himself, visiting his stepmother's relative, and attending lectures by C.A. Mace, professor in philosophy at St. Andrews.

In 1926, Oppen started attending Oregon State Agricultural College (what is now Oregon State University). Here he met Mary Colby, a fiercely independent young woman from Grants Pass, Oregon. On their 1st date, the couple stayed out all night with the result that she was expelled and he suspended. They left Oregon, married, and started hitch-hiking across the country working at odd jobs along the way. Mary documents these events in her memoir, Meaning A Life: An Autobiography (1978).

Early writing

While living on the road, Oppen began writing poems and publishing in local magazines. In 1929 and 1930 he and Mary spent some time in New York, where they met Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, musician Tibor Serly, and designer Russel Wright, among others.

In 1929, George came into a small inheritance which meant that they had relative financial independence. In 1930 they moved to California and then to France, where, thanks to their financial input, they were able to establish To Publishers acting as printer/publishers with Zukofsky as editor.

The short-lived publishing venture managed to publish works by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, as well as An Objectivist's Anthology, edited by Zukofsky.

Oppen the Objectivist

In this situation, as in so many others, I remember with attentiveness the poetry and example of George Oppen, who wanted to look, to see what was out there, evaluate its damage and contradictions, to say scrupulously in a pared and intense language not what was easy or right or neat or consoling, but what he felt when all the platitudes and banalities were stripped away.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

In France, Oppen had begun working on poems for what was to be his debut collection, Discrete Series, a seminal work in early Objectivist history. Some of these appeared in the February 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry and in An "Objectivist's" Anthology.

In 1932 Oppen travelled to Rapallo, Italy, where he met Pound (who included Oppen in his 1933 Active Anthology.

In 1933, the Oppens returned to New York where, together with Williams, Zukofsky and Reznikoff, they set up the Objectivist Press. The press published books by Reznikoff and Williams, as well as Oppen's Discrete Series, with a preface by Pound. Oppen's book was mainly ignored, though Pound praised him as "a serious craftsman," and Williams wrote in a 1934 review Poetry of the work that, "by a sharp restriction to essentials, the seriousness of a new order is brought to realization."

"...Oppen found value in the not said, in the incomplete phrase, in the bare noun. His silence was political in that it represented the inability of art to provide an adequate image of human suffering. His return to writing was political by representing the inability of communal forms to account for individual agency. The meaning of being numerous is the conversation we continue to have about a poet's decision not to write."

Michael Davidson

Politics and war

Faced with the effects of the depression and the rise of fascism, the Oppens were becoming increasingly involved in political action. Unable to bring himself to write verse propaganda, Oppen abandoned poetry and joined the Communist Party USA, serving as election campaign manager for Brooklyn in 1936, and helping organize the Utica New York Milk Strike. He and Mary were also active for relief and Oppen was tried and acquitted on a charge of felonious assault on the police.

By 1942, Oppen was deferred from military service while working in the defense industry. Disillusioned by the CPUSA and wanting to assist in the fight against fascism, Oppen quit his job, making himself eligible for the draft. Effectively volunteering for duty, Oppen saw active service on the Maginot Line and the Ardennes; he was seriously wounded south of the Battle of the Bulge. Shortly after Oppen was wounded, Oppen's division helped liberate the concentration camp at Landsberg am Lech. He was awarded the Purple Heart and returned to New York in 1945.

Mexico

After the war, Oppen worked as a carpenter and cabinet maker. Although now less politically active, the Oppens were aware that their pasts were certain to attract the attention of Joseph McCarthy's Senate committee and decided to move to Mexico. During these admittedly bitter years in Mexico, George ran a small furniture making business and was involved in an expatriate intellectual community. They were also kept under surveillance by the Mexican authorities in association with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were able to re-enter the United States in 1958 when the United States government again allowed them to obtain passports which had been revoked since 1950.

Return to poetry

In 1958, while entertaining becoming involved in Mexican real estate, and following a dream involving "rust in copper" and his daughter's beginning college at Sarah Lawrence, Oppen again began to write poetry. After a brief trip in 1958 to visit their daughter at university, the Oppens moved to Brooklyn, New York early 1960, initially returning to Mexico regularly. Back in Brooklyn, Oppen renewed old ties with Louis Zukofksy and Charles Reznikoff and also befriended many younger poets. The poems came in a flurry; within two years Oppen had assembled enough poems for a book and began publishing the poems in Poetry where he had originally published and in his half-sister June Oppen Degnan's San Francisco Review.

But what kind of poetry do you understand with one reading that you go on using and remembering all your life? I mean the poetry that's most important to me is poetry that's been important to me for most of my life. I want to go back to it, and I find new things in it.

Mary Oppen

The poems of Oppen's debut collection following his return to poetry, The Materials, were poems that, as he told his sister June, should have been written 10 years earlier. Oppen published 2 more collections of poetry during the 1960s, This In Which (1965) and Of Being Numerous (1968).

Last years

George & Mary Oppen in 1968. Photo by Rachel Bau DuPlessis. Courtesy Jacket.

Oppen was able to complete and see into publication his Collected Poems, together with a new section Myth of the Blaze, in 1975. In 1977, Mary provided the secretarial help George needed to complete his final volume of poetry Primitive.

During this time, George's final illness, Alzheimer's disease, began to manifest itself with confusion, failing memory, and other losses. The disease was eventually to make it impossible for him to continue writing. George Oppen, age 76, died of pneumonia with complications from Alzheimer's disease in a convalescent home in California on July 7, 1984.

Recognition

Oppen won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1969 for Of Being Numerous.

Publications

Poetry

• Discrete Series. New York: Objectivist Press, 1934; Asphodel Book Shop, 1966.
• The Materials. New York: New Directions, 1962.
• This in Which. New York: New Directions, 1965.
• Of Being Numerous. New York: New Directions, 1968.
• Alpine: Poems. Perishable Press, 1969.
• Collected Poems, Fulcrum Press, 1972.
• Seascape: Needle's Eye. Fremont, MI: Sumac Press, 1973.
• The Collected Poems of George Oppen, 1929-1975. New York: New Directions, 1975.
• Primitive. Black Sparrow, 1978.
• New Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 2002.

Non-fictione

• (Author of foreword) Paul Vangelisti, Communion. Red Hill, 1970.
• "The Philosophy of the Astonished (Selections from Working Papers)" (edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis). Sulfur 27 (Fall 1990): 212.
• Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (edited & with introduction by Stephen Cope). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

Letters

• Selected Letters (edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

Jack Marshall reads "Psalm" by George Oppen

George Oppen - Of Being Numerous (Sections 1-22)

• The Objectivist poets
• List of U.S. poets

References

• Hatlen, Burton, ed., George Oppen: Man and Poet (Man/Woman and Poet Series) (Man and Poet Series), National Poetry Foundation, 1981. ISBN 0915032538
• Heller, Michael, Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen, Cambridge UK: Salt Publishing, 2008.
• Oppen, Mary, Meaning A Life: An Autobiography, Santa Barbara, Calif: Black Sparrow Press, 1978.
• Shoemaker, Steven, ed., Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2009.

External links

Poems

• George Oppen 1908-1984 at the Poetry Foundation
• George Oppen profile & 14 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• George Oppen @EPC (Electronic Poetry Center)
• George Oppen at PoemHunter (11 poems)

Audio / video

*George Oppen at YouTube

• The Shape of Disclosure: George Oppen Centennial Symposium Audio from the Oppen Centennial symposium in NYC, held at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, April 8, 2008. Features Panel talks, presentations, as well as readings from Oppen's work

Books

• George Oppen at Amazon.com

About

• George Oppen in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• George Oppen at NNDB.
• George Oppen (1908-1984) at Modern American Poetry.
• Factbites website on Oppen 'dozens of essential quotes featuring direct source & links'
• George Oppen and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy and Poetry of Gelassenheit, and the Language of Faith essay by Burt Kimmelman, published in 'Jacket Magazine 37 (Late 2009)
• Seeing the World: The poetry of George Oppen essay by Jeremy Hooker, published in Not comfort/But Vision: Essays on the Poetry of George Oppen(Interim Press, 1987)
• George Oppen in Exile: Mexico and Maritain (For Linda Oppen) essay by Peter Nicholls
• OPPEN TALK by Kevin Killian transcription of The Tenth Annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture on Twentieth Century Poetics (1995) presented by the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives of San Francisco State University
• The Romantic Poetics of George Oppen thesis on Of Being Numerous
• "I was somewhere in the vicinity of 20 to 22-years-old when..." Here poet Ron Silliman recalls first meeting Oppen at an anti-war reading. This brief essay was published on April 7, 2008 before Silliman was set to attend "A Celebration of George Oppen’s 100th Birthday: 100 Minutes of talk & poetry" at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
• Jacket Magazine Special Feature on George Oppen
• All This Strangeness: A Garland for George Oppen (Big Bridge Special Feature on George Oppen)

Etc.

• the George Oppen Papers