First, the term "silence" with respect to the life and work of George Oppen requires a little pulling out of its suitcase. There is the indexical silence immediately confronting any Oppen reader: the twenty-eight-year gap between publication in book form of Discrete Series, in 1934, and The Materials in 1962. This is the silence which, given a biohistorical reading, presents itself as one among Oppen's texts.
The nonpresence of text (at the level of publication in book form) is an index of World War II, of political persecution and exile, as a bullet hole in cloth is evidence that the bullet has been there. But this silence further reads itself into the body of Oppen's work from 1962 onward: The Materials and later books enact a poetics marked by silence, coexisting with silence: a spare and paratactic language which opens onto the Buddhist idea of shunyaata, "emptiness" of self-existence partly because of interbeing with environment and universe. Famously, in Of Being Numerous, Oppen says:
Clarity
In the sense of transparence,
I don't mean that much can be explained.
Clarity in the sense of silence.
Or, as Oppen elsewhere, "no technique at all." Compare to this koan two passages, the first from John Cage, the second from Oppen's poem "The Hills" in The Materials:
1. The limited na-
ture of this u-
niverse of pos-
sibilities
makes the events
themselves compa-
rable to the
first attempts at
speech of a child
or the fumblings
about of a
blind man. The mind
reappears as
the agent which
established the
boundaries with-
in which this small
play took place.
2. That this is I,
Not mine, which wakes
To where the present
Sun pours in the present, to the air perhaps
Of love and of
Conviction.
In the first of those two passages, Cage is lecturing on his own compositions for prepared piano, but the text recycles admirably to describe the process of preverbal cognition enacted in the first stanza of "The Hills."
A coming to cognition inevitably involves sensing a boundary between self and other. There is a baby, for example, crawling on a floor, which looks up and into a mirror. It sees another baby staring and pulls its red wooden toy telephone toward itself protectively. The other baby does the same. At this moment, the baby has its first conception of self as not-other.
The first lines of "The Hills" open with precisely that cognition: "That this is I / Not mine, which wakes," in a flat, abstract few syllables that belong to a deictic and curiously depersonalized speaker. As the poem progresses, larger concepts and larger separations enter: a repetition and definition of "present," leading into the complexity "of / Conviction."
As Cage's commentary says, "The mind reappears as the agent which established the boundaries...." "The first attempts at speech of a child" are enacted in the first line, four words in four syllables; this cognitive exactness is impossible without a close understanding of the relation of silence to not-silence, an exploration of their border.
Oppen's "clarity in the sense of silence" is not far different from Pound's Imagist dicta-after-the- fact "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective," and "To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation." Apart from the physical spareness of The Materials and later texts, an indexical silence, a silence that witnesses war, where suddenly in "Eros," the city of Paris turns into
...a culture
Mined
From the ground . . .
As tho the powerful
Of their presence
And the great squares void
Of their dead
Were the human tongue
That will speak.
Beyond explicit treatment of the subject of silence, this evokes an archeological kind of memory. The sentiment is conventional, but its context, the landmarks and monuments of a constructed Paris, defamiliarizes the idea. Compare again the bullet hole in cloth.
Without going too deeply into the explication of "the poetry of witness," about which there is ample literature, it is worth noting that Oppen's postwar poetry makes an increasing number of gestures toward the inadequacy of language. "Power, The Enchanted World" ends by inverting another conventional sentiment: "The heart uselessly opens / To 3 words, which is too little"--which is, not the words, but the act of opening to words. And also, well known, in "Route," Oppen refutes at least one kind of discourse:
Wars that are just? A simpler question: In the event
will you or will you not want to kill a German. Because,
in the event, if you do not want to, you won't.
Oppen's poetics share with Charles Reznikoff's the grounding Judaic idea that the content of revelation--as in "Hear, O Israel"--is the fact of revelation. Of the two poetics, Oppen's go further into fracture--for example, the increasingly fragmentary language in Seascape: Needle's Eye, where speaker is exile. Compare Edmond Jabès, from The Little Book of Unexpected Subversions:
"Why," he was asked, "is your book just a sequence of
fragments?"
"Because the interdict does not smite a book that is broken,"
he replied.
Marjorie Perloff quotes Joseph Harris on the Eiffel Tower: "the wind has virtually nothing to seize. Otherwise stated, the real strength of the Eiffel Tower is in its voids as much as in its iron." Oppen's voids are a foundation for the later twentieth-century poetics of interruption,
dilations
of the heart they say
too much the heart the
heart of the republic skips
a beat where they touch it