Poetry: Pure and Complex

...Literacy" is counted as a value in itself (and how terribly moving are those photographs one sometimes sees of adults in backward countries learning painfully, and with such longing, to read and write)—but literacy for what...

...I am not equipped to answer the question why, in fact, Reznikoff's poems have been so littleknown all these years...

...By the Waters of Manhattan is a selection from the six earlier books, and has set at least one reader to hunting up copies of them...

...THE MATERIALS By George Oppen New Directions/ San Francisco Review 52 pp...

...the very wind that blew upon him, too...

...I kept the book open and tilted for her to read more, and she seemed to get a kick out of other poems as well...

...He does not imitate Williams...

...Where did all the rocks come from...

...It presents no difficulties of vocabulary or metaphysics, nor do the poems of Jewish reference seem to me to put it out of the mainstream of the best poetry...

...It so happens that while I was reading this book on the subway an unknown young woman next to me, apologizing for reading over my shoulder, asked me to turn back the page so that she could reread something that struck her...

...The Materials is the first book George Oppen has published since his early work appeared in 1934...

...they don't always satisfy but they do stimulate...

...The rain is over, the wet pavement shines...

...contributor...

...In Oppen the influence of William Carlos Williams is apparent...

...even, in its wry way, "Pedestrian": What generations could have dreamed This grandchild of the shopping streets, her eyes In the buyer's light, the store lights Brighter than lighthouses, brighter than moonrise From the salt harbor so rich So bright her city In a soil of pavement, a mesh of wires where she walks In the new winter among enormous buildings...

...Reviewed by DENISE LEVERTOV Author, "The Jacob's Ladder...

...The illumined transparency of Reznikoff's poetry stems from a rare innocence which makes him unafraid to say the almost-ordinary, that which of all things is most seldom really said...

...This is not to say that George Oppen is no craftsman, but that his craft is involved in a desperate struggle with the intricacies of his sense of life...

...There is so much in By the Waters of Manhattan that, through its exact particulars, is (as generalities cannot be) universal: a speaking for those who cannot speak what they feel: My work done, I lean on the windowsill, Watching the dripping trees...

...The irony is that in an illiterate society where tales, poems and songs would be circulated orally, ReznikofTs poetry might well have been absorbed into the culture, been part of the common nourishment...

...there is nothing here that anyone of the most average education could not apprehend...

...1.25...

...Or the whole of "Te Deum": Not because of victories I sing, having none, but for the common sunshine, the breeze, the largess of the spring...

...It is," he answered: "This is the sun that shone on Adam once...

...Poetry," etc...

...I do, however, want to mention that though these two men are old friends there seems never to have been any overlapping or merging of their voices...

...And the letters came...

...And at times they have a powerful grip, as in "Survival: Infantry": And the world changed...

...Can this be Paradise...

...I do not propose to compare his poems with Reznikoff's simply because the two books have come out at the same time and from the same publisher...

...Among Oppens poems are some one could call affirmative— "Product," for instance, which speaks of the boatness of boats, the way a man realizing such a synthesis of form and function realizes, too, something of his own man-ness, selfness perhaps...

...but he is plainly indebted to him, which is closer to being a virtue than a vice...

...His poems are essentially of process, not tasteful artobjects...

...I asked surprised, for there were motorcars and factories...

...Reznikoff is a poet of such purity and simplicity—not naivete but a simple openness, tenderness, direct in feeling and language—that his lack of renown, or even of any readers to speak of up till now, makes one stop and think...

...Poetry like this is so patently not only for an "educated elite"—though it is for them too...

...I feel sure I've seen it before," she told me...

...how to live, what to do": It is with these complexities that Oppen wrestles, and he does so with passion and a sort of pervasive frustration that shows down to the last detail...

...And in tears In the same mud in the terrible ground...

...Or: As I was wandering with my unhappy thoughts, I looked and saw that I had come into a sunny place familiar and yet strange...

...and to say it in a language bare of ornament, revealing its intrinsic music...

...His punctuation, for example, is often imprecise or absent as if at times the poet threw up his hands helpless before the demands of the material...

...It is a human poetry for human beings, and in another age or society would surely be "popular...

...I must add a word about the covers of both books, designed by Gilda Kuhlman who also took the photographs: They are remarkable for their beauty and aptness...

...Where am I?" I asked a stranger...

...no, hardly ever, but when she came across it she liked it...

...Charles Reznikoff has published seven books of poetry since 1927, but this is the first to receive wide distribution...

...Not for victory but for the day's work done as well as I was able: not for a seat upon the dais but at the common table...

...The poem spoke for her...

...I asked her if she read much poetry...

...Or this: The winter afternoon darkens...

...People who addressed us thru our lives They left us gasping...

...I told her it wasn't too likely she had, and when she had read it she said, "I guess it's just because I've felt that way myself...

...Man in his environment, urban man, man with his machines...

...Paradise...

...And the smell of explosives Iron standing in mud We crawled everywhere on the ground without seeing the earth again We were ashamed of our half life and our misery: we saw that everything had died...

...or the romantic antiromantic "California...

...The shoemaker bends close to the shoe, his hammer raps faster...

...What is at the root of the incuriosity—masochism, even—that keeps a "literate" people from seeking out what is meaningful to them when they do stumble across it...

...From the bare twigs rows of drops like shining buds are hanging...

...There had been trees and people, Sidewalks and roads There were fish in the sea...

...But more typical are those poems that rise up with an effort out of inner conflict, coming to no facile resolution but pulling the conflict with them into the cruel daylight...

...An old woman waits, rubbing the cold from her hands...

...It does seem worth pondering, though, as a melancholy manifestation of the sickness about us, a sickness in which we are all in some way implicated...