The Washington Post changed its online format over the weekend, so that I couldn’t find Edward Hirsch’s weekly poetry column until I got my (also weekly) email from Poetry Daily with a proper link. It should come as no surprise to my readers that Hirsch & I have different views of the world of poetry — he represents the school of quietude (SoQ) at its most hushed — but I do check out his column every Sunday. He takes his responsibility as a reporter on poetry for a mostly non-poetic readership seriously & the column on occasion is an opportunity for me to check in on older SoQ poets that I haven’t thought about in awhile, as well as to learn about new ones. 

 

As it so happens, his column this past Sunday focused on a poet for whom he & I both share an enthusiasm, George Oppen. But in his reading of Oppen — he quotes portions of two poems from This in Which, one from Of Being Numerous — Hirsch creates a poet rather unlike the man I knew in San Francisco. He sets up his revisionist interpretation instantly in his opening sentence:

 

George Oppen (1908-1984) is widely known as an Objectivist poet, but I think of him more as an American solitary, akin to Edward Hopper. (emphasis added)

 

Thus this Communist organizer, this partaker of literary & political movements, turns out secretly to have been that libertarian icon, the Rugged Individual. It’s an odd, but interesting, twist to give to the man & his work, and I can’t help but think that Hirsch must have some idea what he is doing here.

 

His argument is anything but gratuitous. Particularly given that Hirsch has only some 530 words in which to make it — and that a second (if unwritten) rule of his newspaper column is to quote a certain amount of poetry* — Hirsch’s waltzes through a deft series of critical moves, taking on poems that can be seen as central to Oppen’s project. In Hirsch’s reading, Oppen envisions the natural as radically Other & opaque, but that words fail people because they cannot make themselves transparent & thus bring that Other clearly to us. Oppen’s goal, in this reading, is to establish “clarity in relationship, for the ‘this in which,’ the determination of the human in relation to the Other.” So far as this goes, I have no great problem with it.

 

But Hirsch takes it a step further — “Oppen's self-reflexive poetry of consciousness strives to restore meaning to language by faithfully using it to refer outward to a world of things” — and this seems not at all accurate to my sense of Oppen. For one thing, to restore meaning to language imposes a narrative to the conception of meaning that feels foreign to Oppen’s sensibility. And the idea that one might use it “faithfully . . . to refer outward to a world of things” cascades a series of assumptions over the conception of language that the Oppen I read would have some trouble recognizing, precisely because it is wrong.

 

Hirsch’s evidence, the poem this is leading up to, is “Psalm,” one of Oppen’s anthology pieces, which the online version of the Post makes a hash of, obliterating indentations, stanza breaks & the distinction of the epigram’s font.** [A correct printing of the text can be found here.] “Psalm” provides the title for This in Which, Oppen’s third collection (and second after the 25 year hiatus between Discrete Series & The Materials). It’s something of an unusual work for Oppen, in that he uses a more fixed, reiterative stanza than was generally his practice.*** After an initial three-line stanza setting up an image of deer bedding down in a forest, each of the other stanzas is introduced with a single indented line announcing its focus. The progression is worth noting:

 

·         Their eyes

 

·         The roots of it

 

·         Their paths

 

·         The small nouns

 

After these announcements, each stanza follows with three lines in what appears to be free verse. Yet each of the next three stanzas also proceeds by focusing the reader’s attention on a single anomalous word positioned near or at the end of the stanza’s next to last line:

 

·         the alien small teeth

 

·         the strange woods

 

·         the distances

 

Such nebulous, judgmental terms as alien & strange seem out of place for a poet whose “ethical imperative is to reach for the actual,” in Hirsch’s terms. These words do the exact opposite of reaching “outward to a world of things.” They are, by both position & content, the most telling & important words of their respective stanzas. They are the terms on which each stanza pivots.

 

It is when we recognize the function of these pivot terms that the stanzaic symmetries come into focus – not just the number of lines, but that every second stanza ends in a period (which means also that every stanza beginning with Their ends without punctuation). This poem is as far from the organic mimicry of forms as Oppen will ever get in his writing – it’s a closed pattern as tight as any of Zukofsky’s.

 

So it is worth noting what comes in that same position in the next to last line of the final stanza: the wild deer. This positioning does two things at once – first it refocuses our attention onto the ontology of deer-ness in the first place; second, & more important, it underscores that the adjective wild is every bit as strange, conceptual & ultimately empty of content as the terms used in each of the three preceding stanzas. It is the opposite of natural, the opposite of being “rooted in the thing,” it is cultural . . . almost in the anthropological sense of that word. The term wild has no meaning in the context of deer other than as an index of the distance from our own realm, the not wild.

 

Which is why the announced topic of the final stanza is so critical – The small nouns. The deer, these deer certainly & in some sense all others, exist not in “the wild,” but rather in this in which they stare back at us – through language. Escher-like in its process, the poem unveils itself at last not to be about deer, but about language. That they are there! – the final line of the first stanza now takes on a powerful new meaning that both is & is not an assertion of nature’s immanence.

 

The poem literally stands Hirsch’s assertion – that Oppen seeks “to restore meaning to language by faithfully using it to refer outward to a world of things” – on its head. The poem is an analog to Wordsworth’s crossing of the alps in The Prelude, looking into nature only to see his mind, unable to get beyond. The poem argues against the restoration of something that never existed in the first place, a transparent language.

 

So Hirsch gets the poem exactly backwards. And it’s a misreading, I would argue, that occurs in good part because he wants to take Oppen out of context, right there in his very first sentence, to make of Oppen something he never was. For to take Oppen at his word would be to challenge everything Edward Hirsch holds dear. Edward, you must change your life.

 

 

 

 

 

* Which is why, I suppose, the column is not the newspaper standard 700 words.

 

** Why can’t newspaper typesetters get this right, even on the web? The mangling of poetic form seems to be journalism’s primary contribution to the history of poetry. 

 

*** Indeed, it is an anthology piece for Oppen in part for the same reason that “The Yachts” is one for Williams – it is the poem those who don’t like his more “extreme” works can get into, because it looks deceptively familiar.