A reading at The Five Spot, 1964, Joel Oppenheimer standing in the doorway to the left, Allen Ginsberg reading with hand to forehead at the piano, Gregory Corso at front of Piano. Photo by the great Fred McDarragh.

Another lengthy email on Joel Oppenheimer on Saturday, this time from Bob Bertholf in Buffalo. I’ve corrected the spelling of some names. I’m tempted to ask why, if it’s true that language poetry “submerged the accomplishment” (a curious verb phrase that suggests drowning the baby or some such, I suppose) of Oppenheimer & his peers, is this discussion taking place here?

Ron Silliman’s comments about the disappearance of Joel Oppenheimer from the current discussion of poetry brings back an idea that bewildered me during the years I worked in SUNY at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection. No adequate answer or explanation came forward to explain or define the nature of literary fame or even notoriety. Literary notoriety seems not to be linked completely with literary accomplishment, but does have something to do with contexts and community: the group of John Logan, Robert Bly, and James Wright was strong in Buffalo and elsewhere, but after Logan and Wright died (and Bly went to the wilderness) requests for their works stopped, as if this well known group had fallen directly of the table. Despite the efforts of Ralph Maud and others, Charles Olson’s place as a poet and poetic thinker has slipped terrible. Here one could discuss the continued negating power of the Iowa workshop poems and the poets now in alliance with Poetry (Chicago) and the Poetry Foundation. But Olson and his associates—Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and Joel Oppenheimer—have produced a library of poetry and poetics which challenged literary conventions and released the active creative imagination. Yes, the persisting romantic imagination so scorned in the twentieth century first by T. S. Eliot and the New Critics and then later by Charles Bernstein, and powerfully by Marjorie Perloff.

          Joel Oppenheimer realized the maturity of his writing at the same time that Bernstein, Andrews and Language Poetry flooded the contemporary discussions of poetry and poetics with essay and after essay commanding poetics, and then another flood of poetry that was supposed to live up to and into the essays. The publicity was ponderous and its influence submerged the accomplishment of a group of poets which included Joel Oppenheimer, Ted Enslin, John Taggart, Nate Mackey, Michael Palmer and Susan Howe. Palmer and Howe were first claimed as language poets, but later declined its restricting appellation. Oppenheimer’s first serial poem, The Woman Poems, appeared in 1975; other serial poems followed— At Fifty (1982), New Spaces (1983), and New Hampshire Journal (1994). Oppenheimer knew that one poem did not define its own structural conclusion, and that he was engaged in writing one long poem with parts having separate names but no conclusion. He also cultivated, especially in New Hampshire Journal, a keen sense of the rhythm of the poetic line and the precise statement of perception. Lyric poetry was his medium. He was exemplify a process of living and writing which made the lyric poem the experience itself not the report of the experience.

The ideology of Conceptual Poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith, and Christian Bök and then the “Flarf” cloud of Gary Sullivan, Rod Smith and Christina Strong have taken over the weakening influence of the language program to offer a complete dismissal of the sentient life of the poet. Yes, right, another dismissal of the romantic imagination in its newest forms ploughed over again with an ideology at the same time that the controlling doctrines of Poetry the Poetry Foundation make and take the headlines and plot out the dubious notoriety of its poets.

No doubt I’ve begun and not finished a complex concept of literary history. There will be another time. But it light of what I’ve suggested it is no wonder Joel Oppenheimer and his poetry looks lost. But he is not; he is part of the great literary deposit under contemporary writing waiting to emerge. His books are also available on the home page of the Poetry Collection:

Robert J. Bertholf , ed. Collected Later Poems of Joel Oppenheimer ed. and intro. with eleven drawings by John Dobbs. The Poetry Collection, 1997.

Jonathan Williams ed. Names & Local Habitations (Selected Earlier Poems 1951-1972) The Jargon Society, 1988.

Robert J. Bertholf and David Landrey, eds. Drawing From Life: A Selection of Joel Oppenheimer’s Village Voice Columns. Moyer Bell, 1997.

Lyman Gilmore, Don’t Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer: A Biography. Talisman Press, 1998.

and

Robert J. Bertholf, Remembering Joel Oppenheimer. Talisman Press, 2006. (which will be available there).

 

Robert J. Bertholf
Charles D. Abbott Scholar of Poetry and the Arts, Emeritus
The Poetry Collection
SUNY Buffalo

Joel Oppenheimer & Francine Du Plessix Gray
at Black Mountain College 1951
(Photo by Jonathan Williams)

David Landrey sent the following letter after my note on Joel Oppenheimer last weekend. The Electronic Poetry Center has begun work on an Oppenheimer “page.”

I am at once grateful for and guilt-ridden by the discussion of Joel Oppenheimer and his work: grateful that, 20 years after his death, there is renewed interest; guilt-ridden because I and some others who knew Joel in his later years (in my case through frequent visits to Buffalo, where, among many talks and readings, he delivered the 4th of the annual Charles Olson memorial lectures, following Duncan, McClure, and Sanders) have allowed those years to pass with relative silence.

As I point out (please excuse the self-promotion) in “Robert Creeley’s and Joel Oppenheimer’s Changing Visions” (in The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in our Time, Talisman House, 2001, 2002), Joel’s life and work changed utterly from 1970 on, as he stopped drinking and moved out into “New Spaces” (the title of perhaps his finest volume).

The comments so far in this thread—understandably, given the difficulty of acquiring his later work—are caught up in pre-1970. In fact: 1) his later work broke much new ground and grew stronger to the end; 2) his explorations of language and the worlds of politics and mind were huge and exciting; and 3) his poems were increasingly “supercharged with emotion,” and oh how they sing.

Kirby Olson asked if there are “any Oppenheimer poems that haunt the imaginations of any contemporary readers.”  What folks on this line have not seen is Collected Later Poems, published in 1997 by The Poetry/Rare Books Collection of SUNY Buffalo, wherein there is a gold mine of such work. Start with “The Woman Poems” (1975) and read on. Some particularly extraordinary pieces are: “A Village Poem,” “Lessons I & II,” “Acts,” “Cacti,” “Houses,” “The Uses of Adversity” (such a powerful presentation of his chemotherapy as to cause some of my Turkish colleagues to quit smoking); and “New Hampshire Journal.” I’ve seen many friends re-read Collected Later Poems and become torn by emotion, yet his reputation lags.

His reputation’s bad fortune can be illustrated by a Sunday book-signing at St. Mark’s Church in the Village in 1997. Robert Bertholf and I had published a collection of his Village Voice essays called Drawing From Life (Asphodel Press), but the books we were to sign had been sent to St. Mark’s Bookstore instead of to the church. The store was closed.

References to Lyman Gilmore’s biography are right on. The book is a profoundly insightful study of the man and his work. (Lyman has also written a superb biography of William Bronk: The Force of Desire. Both biographies are published by Talisman House.)

For a fine sense of Joel in the late years, read Robert J. Bertholf’s Remembering Joel Oppenheimer, also from Talisman. And try to find: 1) The Wrong Season, 1973 from Bobbs-Merrill, an immersion in the 1972 Mets; 2) Poetry, the Ecology of the Soul, 1983 from White Pine, a selection of Talks and Poems.

I hope that this discussion produces the awareness of Joel’s work that it richly deserves.

David Landrey, Buffalo, NY September 2008

One of the New American poets who seems to be receding fast from view is Joel Oppenheimer. A one-time student at Black Mountain & a contributor to Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, plus for many years a regular columnist with the Village Voice, Oppenheimer died at the age of 58 twenty years ago. Today there is a bare bones stub at Wikipedia, nothing at the Electronic Poetry Center and just 20 copies of all his books combined in the warehouse at SPD. If it weren’t for more copies of work available through the rare books network of Abebooks.com, and his papers at the University of Connecticut, plus one book you can read most of via Google Books, he’d have largely disappeared altogether.

Part of the problem, no doubt, is that Oppenheimer was part of the New York-Projectivist/post-Projectivist scene, that included Paul Blackburn, Armand Schwerner, Clayton Eshleman, Jerry Rothenberg, Michael Heller, Robert Kelly, Diane Wakoski, George Economou, Ed Sanders, Jackson Mac Low & others. This scene seemed to go in different directions after (a) Blackburn’s death, (b) the transformation of Caterpillar into Sulfur & (c) the diaspora of these poets away from lower Manhattan, especially to Southern California. I don’t recall that Oppenheimer was ever really a part of the scene around Caterpillar, tho, and it may be that his job with the Voice had already taken him away from the Blackburn-centric world around St. Marks before Eshleman’s journal really got going.

Still, like the Zen cowboy scene on the West Coast around Coyote’s Journal, which was quite apart from the Beat scene even if it included the likes of Gary Snyder, Lew Welch & Phil Whalen, New York likewise had a scene that was quite distinct from what one nominally thinks of as the New York School. Without somebody to step up to the preservation of Oppenheimer’s work, he in particular is at risk of becoming one of the disappeared.