# George Oppen

George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, most famous as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. 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 Prize in 1969.

## Quotes

* They have lost the metaphysical sense Of the future, they feel themselves The end of a chain Of lives, single lives And we know that lives Are single And cannot defend The metaphysic On which rest The boundaries Of our distances.
** from "Of Being Numerous" #26, 1968; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5
* 'O city ladies' Your coats wrapped, Your hips a possession Your shoes arched Your walk is sharp Your breasts Pertain to lingerie
** from "Discrete Series", 1934; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5
* And we saw the seed, The minuscule Sequoia seed In the museum by the tremendous slab Of the tree. And imagined the seed In soil and the growth quickened So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green Needles of a redwood until the tree Stood in the room without soil— How much of the earth's Crust has lived The seed’s violence! The shock is metaphysical.
** "Return" st. 2, 1962; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5
* The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo.
** "The Building of the Skyscraper" st. 1, 1965; Collected Poems of George Oppen", New Directions, 1976, ISBN 0-811-20615-7
* things explain each other, Not themselves.
** This in Which (1965), "A Narrative", 3

### The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990)

    The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990) edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
* Perhaps what I would like is a truly democratic culture. Not a polemic nor a moralistic culture in the arts but a culture which permits one man to speak to another honestly and modestly and in freedom and to say what he thinks and what he feels, to express his doubts and his fears, his immoral as well as his moral impulses, to say what he thinks is true and what he thinks is false, and what he likes and what he does not like. What I am against is that we should all engage in the most vigorous and most polemic lying to each other for each other's benefit. — Who could have the conceit, the self-confidence to believe that that is what we should do throughout all the rest of human history?
** Letter to Charles Humboldt (mid-1962), p. 64

## Quotes about Oppen

* Oppen believes that “Poetry has to be protean; the meaning must begin there. With the perception.” In his notebooks he says that “the present, the sense of the present arrives before the words — and independent of them.” He paraphrases Jacques Maritain: “we awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things.” But even as he recognizes that neither the self nor the objects of the world can be seen apart from the world that contains them, Oppen does not obliterate their differences. He avows, “a blurring of the distinction between subjective and objective — There has been no instant in my life when such a blurring was possible for me/ for one thing: too much a carpenter: I know what a blue guitar is made of”.
** Forrest Gander, in "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen", in A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (2005)
* Oppen writes in his notebooks, “I choose to believe in the natural consciousness, I see what the deer see, the desire NOT TO is the desire to be alone in fear of equality/ I see what the grass (blade) would see if it had eyes”. Instead of the traditional Western account of a consciousness that digests the external world, Oppen honors a consciousness interwoven with the world of objects, a consciousness that is nothing if not a collaboration with the world.
** Forrest Gander, in "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen", in A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (2005)
* In his poems, George Oppen wanted words to act out “truthful, lived experience.” His poetry is very literally a practice of perception. He even speaks of emotion “as the ability to perceive.” The syntax of an Oppen poem rivets our attention to both word and world in an enactment of intentional consciousness, the very act of perception and thought coming into being, of language and feeling arising as experience. His poems can be intricate, the syntax polyvalent, the disclosure nonlinear and difficult to render into anything like statement. And as such, his poetry might be considered an expression of life. As the Biblical Isaiah reminds us, “it shall be a vexation only to understand.” Clarity is not the same thing as simplicity.
** Forrest Gander, in "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen", in A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (2005)
* I've gone back more and more to Creeley, Duncan, and Olson in recent years. More recently to George Oppen, Robin Blaser.
** Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)

## External links
### Oppen exhibits, sites, and homepages

* Academy of American Poets: George Oppen A brief biography of Oppen, poems, and excerpts from a 1964 recording of the poet.
* George Oppen at Poetryfoundation.org this site includes links to a dozen or so Oppen poems & an article on the poet by Carl Phillips
* Oppen at Modern American Poetry
* Register of the George Oppen Papers in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at UC San Diego
* George Oppen Homepage at Electronic Poetry Center

### Others on Oppen

* "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen" by Forrest Gander, from his A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (2005)
* 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, first 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
* The Test of Belief: or Why George Oppen Quarrelled with Denise Levertov, an essay by Richard Swigg in "Jacket 2" (online),November 2012.

### Multimedia presentations

* 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
* Jacket Magazine Special Feature on George Oppen
* All This Strangeness: A Garland for George Oppen (Big Bridge Special Feature on George Oppen)