No Things But Ideas

...He married while in college, from which he and his wife Mary were ultimately suspended because of their behavior...

...Zagajewski is undoubtedly a poet of ideas—he once taught philosophy—yet his form of expression is lushly musical...

...The view Oppen came to espouse was outlined by William Blake in "Auguries of Innocence": We are led to Believe a Lie Wlien we see not Thro 'the Eye Wliich was Born in a Night to perish in a Night When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light...

...In "Houston, 6 p.m...

...This is the level of art There are other levels But there is no other level of art...

...We were what Ovid feared in Tomi, we were the worshipers of gods with names you could not pronounce...

...Williams (Farrar Straus Giroux, 285 pp., $30.00), is as good an introduction to Zagajewski's lyrics as a non-Polish reader could hope for...

...Indeed, all the way down to the Beats of the 1950s theory ruled, and poets uprooted one set of ideologies only to plant a new crop...

...Solitude (1990), and a collection of poems called Mysticism for Beginners (1999...

...Without End: New and Selected Poems, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and CK...

...So is fancy language...

...Humanity may be caught in a cycle where "revolutionaries" overthrow corrupt governments only to find themselves establishing the next one...

...The Materials appeared in 1962, Thisin Which in 1965, and Of Being Numerous in 1968...

...No things but in ideas...

...He must somehow see the one thing...

...others include unattributed phrases from Virgil, Martin Heidegger and Ben Jonson...

...When Of Being Numerous appeared back in 1968, David Ignatow, writing in these pages, compared Oppen with such 20th century luminaries as Eliot, Williams and Wallace Stevens...

...He is a student of tyrannies and the dictators and social forces that bring them about...

...Griffith) and identified with what he saw as the underclass by becoming a Stalinist...

...A good example of what he meant is the work of George Oppen, whose New Collected Poems (New Directions, 433 pp., $37.95) has just been issued...

...Modernists, though, rapidly bifurcated into those committed to broad observations about the culture—think T.S...

...The third poem established Oppen's minimalist, fragmentary style, replete with the political (and sometimes sexual) comments that would become his signature: Thus Hides the Parts—the prudery Of Frigidaire, of Soda-jerking— Thus Above the Plane of lunch, of wives Removes itself (As soda-jerking from the private act Of Cracking eggs...

...Thus, just as the Great War was the catalyst for Imagism and Vorticism, the Great Depression spawned Objectivism...

...Zagajewski is always aware of the juxtapositions between Eastern and Western Europe, and how both appear in what he calls the mistrustful eyes of their younger sister, the United States...

...The poet then underlines his point, alluding to the great Roman exile whose bleak description of life in Eastern Europe has probably shaped the West's perception of Slavic cultures and languages to this day: We were those who lived in the dark forests...

...And 'the prudery/ Of Frigidaire.'" Michael Davidson's Introduction to New Selected Poems emphasizes the political: "This brief early lyric suggests the way that 'big-Business' hides its role in everyday life, much as Frigidaire hides its machinery behind white enamel or soda jerks hide the unseemly act of cracking eggs...

...Auden— and those who strove to engage us, as William Carlos Williams put it, with "no ideas but in things...

...You commented on our languages: they apparently consist of consonants alone, of rustles, whispers, and dry leaves...

...Born in 1908 in New Rochelle, New York, and raised in San Francisco by a wealthy father, he soon turned his back on his opulent years as a youth (he grew up next door to D.W...

...big-Business In a later gloss Oppen observed, "To masturbate is to convince oneself that a cushion is a pretty girl...

...Jesus...

...Many young poets involved in the protest movements of the time were intrigued with the link Oppen provided to another tumultuous era, and he acquired disciples...

...Eliot Weinberger writes in his Preface that the entire body of Oppen's work now seems like one long poem, reiterating certain talismanic objects and themes: "the Middle English [poem] 'Western Wind,' Blake's 'Tyger,' the boats of Maine [he and his wife loved to sail], people in cars, his foxhole in the War, Mary's beauty, Robinson Crusoe, city walls, city streets, crowds, the young, tools, ditches, glass, and the words 'little' and 'small.' His universe was an 'immense heap of little things' (Coleridge), and in his quest for truth he believed that the little things and the little words—pronouns, articles, prepositions, short declarative sentences—were the truest...

...Oppen had wanted the flyleaf inscribed with numbers referring to the subway stations on New York's East Side...

...You trembled before us in y our palaces...

...Wellknown in Europe for his contentious essays and novels, he is most familiar in English-speaking countries for one volume of essays, Solidarity...

...Most of all, he reminds us that "The prose of life spreads out around us,/ while poetry crouches in the heart's chambers," ready to shed light on the shadows and help us make some sense of the world we inhabit...

...So begins "To See," which goes on to describe a series of enchanted urban environments: Umbria's narrow streets like cisterns that stop up ancient time tasting of sweet wine, and a certain hill, where the stillest tree is growing, gray Paris, threaded by the river of salvation, Krakow, on Sunday, when even the chestnut leaves seem pressed by an unseen iron Elsewhere, he spots "slim cathedrals like herons" in the French countryside, and in an exotic locale somewhere south of the Pyrenees "Palms grow in the garden where/ they buried winter...

...From our vantage point today, however, we may find the work of the second group no less concept-driven than Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" or "Spain 1937...

...And yet we still keep hearing your weary voice —in an echo, a complaint, in the letters we receive from Antigone in the Greek desert...

...The sentiment seems more didactic than illuminating...

...His gnarled, oddball verses look like artifacts of the most idea-laden literary century—worth reading, perhaps, but more for period color than for pleasure...

...Placing him in their company strikes me as quixotic...

...Oppen reflected this psychedelic culture in Of Being Numerous, where he produced such dubious koans as One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands...

...He died of Alzheimer's disease in 1984...

...The book includes everything of his that has appeared in print, plus a number of never before published poems...

...Often Zagajewski employs a childlike method of description...

...An Oppen family trust fund enabled them to live wherever they chose and afforded George the freedom to do what he cared about...

...Although Oppen has often been praised as one of the few Communist poets who never prostituted his art in the service of propaganda, several of the book's poems condemn "big-Business," luxurious living, the rape of the land, and similar themes that might be seen as propagandistic if they were not so obscurely expressed...

...Oppen's first collection, published in 1934, was called Discrete Series...

...Even in his "new poems," this bard displays the rich diction and fantastical storytelling associated with the 19th century: Oh my mute city, honey-gold...

...We know—or at least we've been told— that you do not exist at all, anywhere...

...Williams, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff were among its chief proponents...

...A star of the Objectivism school, Oppen probably was its quirkiest member as well...

...and Carlos Castaneda...

...We may be agnostic about the soul in one context, yet in another refer to it as though it exists...

...Zagajewski's eloquent lyrics can be read as a history lesson, as commentary on contemporary cultures, as a mosaic of past and present...

...The Soul," about a concept largely frowned upon by 20th-century thinkers, is characteristic of the poet's wry, wistful manner: We know we're not allowed to use your name...

...In a sly reference to Constantine Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," in which an overcivilized culture actually hopes the marauders at the gate will come to stir things up, Zagajewski gives the barbarian role to his own ancestors—or, perhaps, to Soviet-dominated Poland before the collapse of the Iron Curtain: We were the barbarians...

...From Zagajewski's perspective, we cannot entirely disown notions like the soul, because our thinking has been shaped not only by our own era but also by what we have absorbed from the past—from Sophocles' Antigone, from thinkers we've admired, or from religious practices that were part of our upbringing...

...In the Past" becomes a meditation on the idea that in cultural and political life, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

...When he and Mary first moved there, shortly before the book's publication, she wrote that they used to explore their surroundings by riding the subway, getting off at random stops just to see what was there...

...He dreamed that we could escape from the trap which in every generation was set by Danton and Robespierre, Beria and the other ambitious disciples...

...All are rather confusing to the reader unfamiliar with the sources...

...Eliot, W.B...

...Davidson concludes: "The lack of any terminal punctuation hints that this process is incomplete and that 'big-Business' continues well beyond the poem...

...Their feelings, they believed, would strike a chord among readers...

...buried in ravines, where wolves loped softly down the cold meridian...

...At present, though we have largely lost the faith that helped us accept the Platonic archetype this life is merely a shadow of, we nevertheless believe in the past, just as the poor past used to believe in us, his great-grandchildren...

...from Mysticism for Beginners, the poet contemplates the time difference between Texas and Paris, imagining the countries of that other continent as children who have fought all day, but cuddle up to one another in their dreams: Europe already sleeps beneath a coarse plaid of borders and ancient hatreds: France nestled up to Germany, Bosnia in Serbia's arms, lonely Sicily in azure seas...

...You awaited us with pounding hearts...

...We know that you are not allowed to live now in music or in trees at sunset...

...One might reconfigure the sentence to read as follows: 'Big-Business sits above the plane of lunch (lunch counters, wives who sit at lunch counters, the cracking of eggs for egg salad sandwiches, etc...

...For the 28 years following his debut collection, Oppen wrote no poetry...

...From the teens to the 1930s, ideabased verse like Imagism and Vorticism began to flourish, and choked off the competition even as it was itself evolving into other "isms...

...Adam Zagajewski, who was bom in the Polish Ukraine city of Lvov in 1945 and published his first collection of poetry in 1972, provides an instructive contrast to Oppen...

...The gods may just as well be leaders with names full of hard consonants as deities of the primitive age depicted in Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring...

...He certainly knows how to embody ideas in "things...

...He and Mary had recently returned to the U. S. from Mexico, and the 1960s were underway...

...The visionary perspective appealed powerfully to youth already discovering Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Are You Running With Me...

...evocative images are at the heart of his verse...

...Lyricists tended to address the universal by tapping into personal emotions: love, disillusionment, the struggle between the impulse toward community and the desire to be unique...

...This is especially captured in the poems translated by Cavanagh...

...That portrait obviously bears a strong resemblance to Western Cold War notions about the Communist bloc...

...To inflate or to treat with contempt—is onanism...

...It is unclear why he fell into silence—or, for that matter, why he suddenly began waiting again...

...He did some organizing for "the Party," fought in World War II and traveled abroad, but beyond that his life is not well-documented...

...Ezra Pound supplied a boilerplate Introduction that was more about Pound than the younger poet...

...For a time that led to his being a carpenter in Mexico...

...Zukofsky described the aim of the movement as making the poem "an inclusive object" constructed of "historic and contemporary particulars—a desire to place everything—everything aptly, perfectly, belonging within, one with a context...

...He continued exploring political content but also cultivated a mystic strain, already intermittent in Discrete Series...

...The volume's title refers to a mathematical term for a list of numbers...

...Back in Krakow, "The great bodies of churches/ sway slowly like captive/ balloons, their bells, proud bronze/ hearts, emit spidery sounds...

...We know you're inexpressible, anemic, frail, and suspect for mysterious offenses as a child...

...DESPITE his preference for broken sentences that trickle down the page amid a sea of white space, Oppen's verses are as packed with allusion as Eliot's, The first poem in Discrete Series quotes from a little-known story by Henry James...

...Yeats, W.H...

...But there is nothing childish about this poet's astute political understanding...

...Zagajewski now divides his time between Paris and the University of Houston, where he teaches literature and creative writing during the spring semester...