A Test of Poetry (Page 2)

Did Oppen consider such devotion to language political? Generally, twentieth-century American poets recognized two strategies by which a poem might register a political effect: a poem might express a political position thematically or it might embody a position formally by disrupting aesthetic norms. Oppen rejected both these strategies as self-congratulatory, untestable: "We must cease to believe in secret names and unexpected phrases which will burst the world." Without fanfare, he refused the notion that a poet could fulfill his social responsibilities by writing any kind of poem, and neither did this refusal engender any contempt for poetry.

"Is it more important to produce art or to take political action," he asks in the daybooks.

Of course I cannot pretend to answer such a question. I could point this out, however, that art and political action are in precise opposition in this regard: that it can always be quite easily shown that political action is going to be valuable; it is difficult to ever prove that political action has been valuable. Whereas art is precisely the opposite case; it seems always impossible to prove that it is going to be valuable, and yet it is always quite clear that the art of the past has been of value to humanity. I offer it only as a suggestion that art lacks in political action, not action. One does what he is most moved to do.

What one is "most moved to do" may take different forms, all of them equivocal; it isn't possible to predict the efficacy of any human action, whether in politics or art. Oppen needed to stop writing poems in order to do what he was moved to do, but he never imagined that the terms of his own life could be transformed into categorical imperatives about the relationship of politics and art. In his "Statement on Poetics" he insisted that he could describe "how to write a poem. Or rather, how to write that poem." His sense of the power of any human action--writing, organizing, raising a family--was similarly consigned to its occasion.

This refusal of romance is what sometimes makes Oppen's admirers nervous. Especially for those readers who are prone to believe that writing itself constitutes political action, Oppen's silence is rankling. So is his lyricism: the poems are a little too pretty. To such a reader, Oppen's remark that "there are situations which cannot honorably be met by art" is problematic enough; more troubling is Oppen's sense that "some ideas are not politically useful, or useful to the childhood of a daughter"--as if to say that since we'll never know the ultimate value of our work, writing poems is probably less important than being a good dad. That wisdom may not be very glamorous, but everything Oppen did suggests that he believed it to be true.

Cope seems embarrassed that Oppen is not more glamorous, and his annotations are geared toward making the kinds of large claims for writing that Oppen avoids. One footnote suggests with weird evasiveness that a quotation is "likely" to be from Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, raising the possibility that the quotation may not be from Heidegger at all. Another note, while admitting that it is "highly unlikely" that Oppen knew Theodor Adorno's work, claims that Oppen echoes Adorno's contention that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." When Oppen references a well-known verse from the Gospels ("The truth shall make us free"), Cope's tendency to add unearned weight to the daybooks is given free rein: "The phrase that Oppen quotes was also used as an ironic slogan by German revisionist historians who wished to deny the Holocaust, as its German formulation--'Warheit macht Frei'--echoes the Nazi Party dictum 'Arbeit macht Frei' ('Work will set you free'). Given the context here, however, it is unlikely that Oppen is referring to the latter usage." Cope wants desperately for Oppen's words to be freighted with world-historical significance, but his wanly associational notes disregard the values most dear to Oppen himself--precision, clarity, integrity.

Cope's manner of reading Oppen is not unusual. In a study of Oppen's FBI file, recently published in American Communist History, Eric Hoffman rightly notes that Oppen and his wife insisted that they never served as spies for the Soviet government. But because Oppen became outraged when an FBI agent asked if he had ever engaged in espionage, Hoffman asks, "is it possible that...either of the Oppens or both were working in some way for Soviet intelligence? Was Oppen's tirade the result of his fear that they might be discovered as having been involved in Soviet espionage?" There is no way to answer these questions--except inasmuch as the questions are meant implicitly to answer themselves. While Hoffman does discover a record of messages sent by an agent named "Oppen," the messages were intercepted while Oppen was in basic training in Louisiana in 1943. Positing that the messages were sent by Oppen's wife, Mary, Hoffman wonders if the reference in the interception to Oppen as "he" may be "a typo." The argument feels desperate: because Oppen could have put his writing to political ends, only the most daunting responsibilities could have silenced him.

Peter Nicholls, the author of one of the first book-length treatments of Oppen's career, refuses this kind of aggrandizing logic. George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism is a densely written academic book, but it is not showy; it attends to Oppen's life and work with a modesty that feels seductive, not shy. For instance, Nicholls tracks Oppen's longstanding engagement with Heidegger meticulously, and while highlighting Oppen's one remark about the "danger" of Heidegger's fascination with nation and folk, he admits that "there is little evidence, published or unpublished, that Oppen himself was much concerned on this score." At the same time, Nicholls maintains rightly that Oppen did not simply exchange his Marxism for Heideggerian existentialism: "It was actually a matter of rediscovering politics, but this time in the 'existential world' of being and making rather than in that other world in which 'knowledge' had been devalued to the currency of conspiracy and surveillance." No matter what world he lived in, Oppen wanted the limitations of his language to be recognized.

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