Poet of the City

...And if those paths Of the mind Cannot break It is not the wild glare Of the world even that one dies in...

...Amid the aimless rush and noise of his environment, he means to function as a person upon that seedless asphalt bed where he was born...

...The tragedy is compounded as people become anonymous to one another and form the mass...

...The rest of the book consists of six relatively short poems...

...From which escaped, barely—if it fails We will produce no sane man again...

...The difference resides in the conception of the poet's role in reacting to the kind of crisis the city represents...

...Oppen is in the line of cur best contemporary poets: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound—carrying the point a step beyond them in time, close to our very skin...

...For Oppen, no man can divorce himself from the crisis to lead his own unique existence...

...He could experience their spiritual incoherency and fragmentation, finally to project it as the metaphor of being itself in this country...

...It is now a shorthand of the poetic act, with masterly strokes to underline meaning...

...For us Also each Man or woman Near is Knowledge Tho it may be of the noon's Own vacuity —and the mad, too, speak only of conspiracy and people talking...

...For those who have read William Carlos Williams' Paterson, one of the great modern American epics, Of Being Numerous will have striking parallels...

...These are the words of a man determined to live with or without the shield of his esthetic sensibility, for the crisis has eclipsed that possibility and must be faced and lived with in all its ugliness and threat to life itself...

...Williams would set the man apart who can form a way independent of the disparate, disorganized, unformed elements that are the city...

...Tho the world Is the obvious, the seen And unforseeable, That which one cannot Not see Which the first eyes Saw...

...Oppen's is the voice in which all is held in tension, there being no choice for him, a man of the city: 'Whether as the intensity of seeing increases, one's distance from Them, the people, does not also increase' I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man's way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry...

...As a doctor practicing in the slums of Passaic, New Jersey, Williams was able to associate empathetically with the men and women trapped in that life...

...Williams was profoundly sensitive, but he felt himself to be ultimately independent of his environment...

...Nothing more real than boredom-dreamlessness, the experience of time, never fell by the new arrival, never at the doors, the thresholds, it is the native Native in native lime...

...A civilized poem, a lone being, it's true, but one for which we may feel ourselves fortunate...

...Revieived by DAVID IGNATOW Author, "Rescue the Dead," "Say Pardon," "Figures of the Human" This is George Oppen's fourth book of poetry and his best...

...The language, like that of the title poem, is terse, aphoristic or realistic by turns from section to section...

...In the flux of city life, often wrenching and violent, the individual is subjected to the pressure for perpetual change simply to survive, only to become unrecognizable even to himself...

...And since that is the desired result of the use of consciousness, it is to Oppen a successful exercise: Because the known and the unknown Touch, One witnesses?It is ennobling If one thinks so...

...The title poem gathers up his major themes into a single vision: man in his city, the city as an expression of man at a given time that is now...

...Route" is the longest of the six and treats the identical theme taken up in "Of Being Numerous," but from the standpoint of love in its public and historical manifestations...

...I am referring to Book Five of Paterson with its central image of the Unicorn as sexual, life enhancing, therefore free to do its own will (though Book Six, still in the note-taking stage at Williams' death, was already beginning to abandon that image as essentially limited in its relation to the complex, impersonal city...

...I write "love" advisedly, for the subject undergoes bitter, resigned treatment in Oppen's hands: Not the desire for approval nor even for love—O, that trap...

...Once he understands and accepts his own involvement with this crisis, however, he may rescue the self through the consistent exercise of consciousness which is the self in being...

...They see the crowd and its mass movement through the streets as a futile, wasted energy in which the uniqueness of the individual, as Oppen has it, is obliterated by the sheer weight and density of numbers...

...For these poets, communication no longer exists between persons, for the sense of self, that strength and stability that could support enduring personal relationships, has been shattered...

...What is so remarkable here is that Oppen has been able to resolve the very pressures of disintegration in the writing of such a deeply integrated poem...

...If the city is the expression of man, then Oppen's poem surely is its finest exponent, in its capacity to think and to take pride in its judgments...

...The poet progresses from self-doubt and self-searching through the artifacts of the city, to a moment in which his mind is revealed to itself as its own strength...

...A comfort among the ashes...

...Stylistically, "Of Being Numerous" goes far beyond Oppen's earlier works in the power evoked through condensation and ellipsis...

...In this respect, the entire book is of a piece...

...Technically, the title poem is divided into 39 brief sections, each virtually a poem in itself but related through subject and, primarily, by a transitional mode of writing...

...Oppen, in the poem "Of Being Numerous," finds his solution by determining to remain exposed to the city...

...Williams resolves them in the symbol of traditional esthetic content...

...Crusoe We say was 'Rescued.' So we have chosen These lines point up the important difference between the two poets in their view of the city...

...It is at this point, however, that the two poets diverge significantly in their solutions to the problems raised...

...It is the work of a man who rests his faith in the mind as a value in itself on which the individual may depend...

...Its very sound, movement and the frequent first person standpoint —elliptical and muted like a man bending before a storm—draws us into his struggle to survive: We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens And the discovery of fact bursts In a paroxysm of emotion Now as always...

...He could characterize the situation objectively through a large number of dispersed images, such as the park preacher, the various letter writers, Mr...

...Paradoxically, it is this intense participation in, and grappling with, chaos that forges the title poem...

...If to know is noble It is ennobling...

...Paterson, the Giant (waterfalls), the poet, the doctor, and so on...

...Williams' was a multiple of juxtaposed voices, dramatizing his despair of communitas, even for himself...

...Concurrently, there is an awareness of disaster and chaos, this awareness being an affirmation of the possibility of order...

...Both Williams and Oppen concentrate upon the anonymity and incoherence of city life...

...Route" could be set beside "Of Being Numerous" as a powerful commentary upon the main subject matter in that poem: as in "Of Being Numerous," the intelligence and clarity, or consciousness, with which one views oneself and one's times prevails to form a triumph of its own...

...It becomes an exhilarating exhibition of strength in complexity that one is drawn to with enthusiasm and hope...