George Oppen's Poetics of the Commonplace

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Preface

Monographs devoted to a single author are often structured around a roughly linear chronology which follows the production of the work and its reception—a life’s work and the work’s life—leaving the reader with little by way of justification beyond the relevance of said author, whether it was meant to be demonstrated, questioned, or whether relevance must quite simply be assumed. Multiauthor monographs may seem to present something a little different, yet they too will often prove equally linear, if in a slightly subtler way, by imposing the linearity of a conceptual framework on a reluctant variety of texts and contexts. This book hopes to offer an alternative; however, even if successful, its outline may come across as somewhat unsettling. Although this is a single author monograph, which focuses on the reception of the work of George Oppen, it is not essentially concerned with historiography. This book is an empirical investigation into what literary criticism can hope to achieve and into the fabric, and fabrications, of literary knowledge—how it is made, assembled, and why it sometimes tells a lie. I have therefore chosen to present this exploration as such, with its occasional digressions and repetitions, instead of packaging my findings into more readily digestible precepts. If my reader is kind and patient enough, I firmly believe this explicitly experimental method will prove most adequate for a study devoted to issues of methodology. For methodology is not only a crucial aspect of this book, it is the very subject of this book. What “the commonplace” means for Oppen’s ← vii | viii → poetics and how this translates into a common awareness of a shared history is a question that cannot be answered by literary critics unless the commonplaces that make up the critical consensus are also discussed. I will go as far as to say that this analogy is inherent in Oppen’s own practice and in the poetic goals he set for himself, that require critics to engage with his work from the communal perspective of a common language, which puts great pressure on the truthfulness of one’s own critical discourse. I insist on the matter because I must address the perhaps unusually critical slant of this piece of literary criticism, which could lead some to believe that my remarks are at times directed ad hominem. They are not. When I question specific positions and specific critical beliefs, I aim at clarifying these positions and beliefs as objectively as possible for the sake of methodological progress, and not in the name of a competing school, coterie, theory, or out of personal preference. I can only hope that my carefully detailed close readings of the secondary sources, which make up a large part of my primary sources, will testify to the integrity of my endeavor.

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Acknowledgments

I am immensely grateful to Michael Heller for his time and kind notes, and to Hélène Aji and Denis Lagae-Devoldère for their precious advice. Warm thanks are due to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who encouraged me to revise and improve the initial manuscript. This book would not be without the support of Elisabeth Angel-Perez, head of the VALE research center at Paris-Sorbonne University, and the help of the Paris-Sorbonne University commission for research.

Copyright Credits

By George Oppen, from NEW COLLECTED POEMS, copyright ©1934 by the Objectivist Press, copyright ©1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1981 by George Oppen, copyright ©1985, 2002, 2008 by Linda Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

“Eighth Elegy” By Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. B. Leishman, from POSSIBILITY OF BEING, copyright ©1977 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Fragile & Lucid (1975) in Poems & (Lewes, Allardyce Book ABP, 2012) Copyright © Anthony Barnett 1975, 2012, and Oppen’s letter to Anthony Barnett of March 12, 1973, courtesy Anthony Barnett.

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Abbreviations

ON DuPlessis, Rachel Blau and Quartermain, Peter, eds. 1999. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press.

MP Hatlen, Burton, ed. 1981. George Oppen: Man and Poet. Orono: National Poetry Foundation.

FM Nicholls, Peter. 2007. George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

NCP Oppen, George. 2002. New Collected Poems. Edited by Michael Davidson. New York: New Directions.

CP Oppen, George. 1975. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions.

SP Oppen, George. 2007. Selected Prose, Daybooks, And Papers. Edited by Stephen Cope. Berkeley: University of California Press.

SL Oppen, George. 1990. Selected Letters of George Oppen. Edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

ML Oppen, Mary. Meaning a Life. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979.

TP Shoemaker, Steve, ed. Thinking Poetics. Essays on George Oppen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.

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Introduction

In the Land of Uz

Are you interested in commonplaces? If so, you know that some commonplaces are trivial trite truisms, every-day stock-phrases, barely one step away for full-blown prejudice, while others are generally accepted statements, notable examples of widely shared opinions about which a community has reached a consensus. Once, they might be written down in what used to be called a book of common places, or a commonplace book. For commonness, like ordinariness, or plainness, evokes all at once the quality of being undistinguished and democratic. What one calls common may be vulgar, coarse, second-rate, it may also be elementary, familiar, something we all share—sometimes it is both. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, that ambiguity was celebrated by Walt Whitman: