Objectivist Poetry

Rabbis Golden, Rosenfeld and I are hoping to begin teaching a series of classes on Jewish literature this summer. As I am, somewhat against my will, considered the Americanist among the bunch, American Jewish literature is my assigned purview. I thought I would begin with a group of Twentieth Century poets: Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. Together they were referred to as the “Objectivist Poets.” None were particularly happy with the name, though they were united in a desire to bring the real world into poetry. They all corresponded with Ezra Pound, who was a strong advocate for them, William Carlos Williams and Harriet Monroe of the journal Poetry.

Oppen and Zukofsky were involved with the Communist Party. Rakosi worked at the Minneapolis Jewish Children's and Family Service from the 1940s until the late 1960s. Reznikoff published only a novel between 1940 and 1958. Both Oppen and Rakosi stopped writing altogether from the mid thirties until 1958 for Oppen and 1965 for Rakosi. (I asked Rakosi whether he wrote anything in this period and he told me something like, “You can’t work a job and try to write on the side. It just makes you crazy.”) Beyond that, their poetics was subject to criticism from the reactionary cultural attack on modern poetry that accompanied the political purges of the post-war McCarthy era. All of them had a reputation among well-versed readers for their work in the twenties and thirties, but their reemergence in the 1960s was the poetry world’s version of the blues revival, with legendary figures reappearing to address an entirely new generation having been forgotten by the intermediate generation.

Oppen came from a German Jewish family in San Francisco, originally the Oppenheims. It was a wealthy family. Oppen was uncomfortable with that wealth and with his wife Mary lived a proletarian/bohemian lifestyle. Oppen served in the US army during the Second World War and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. He cast off his dog-tags so as not to be identified as Jewish if he was captured. Before being drafted he had been working in the munitions industry in New York and Detroit as a machinist and pattern-maker. In the post-war period George, Mary and their daughter Linda fled to Mexico to avoid having to testify against friends before HUAC and the expected political harassment, returning to the US only in 1958 when Linda enrolled in Sarah Lawrence. They eventually settled back in San Francisco where they were active participants in the flourishing poetry scene there, building relationships with many young poets. The Objectivist poets had a strong influence on the L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poets who were numerous in the Bay Area assisted by the presence of Oppen and Rakosi. The Oppens and the Rakosis were close at that time.

It is important to mention Mary Oppen, because as a couple the Oppens were very close and deeply involved in each other's works. George met Mary at Oregon State College. They stayed out all night which led to Mary being expelled and George getting suspended. They met in a poetry class. Mary was a poet, painter and collagist. In 1978 she published “Meaning a Life: An Autobiography,” which is considered the only important work of Objectivist prose. (She is worthy of her own study, but as a non-Jew perhaps outside of the specific purview of our classes. Lorine Niedecker, who was brought to the attention of the poetry world by Louis Zukofsky was long underappreciated, is now recognized as the only other poet to fall within the Objectivist group. She wasn’t Jewish either and unlike Mary Oppen lived almost exclusively in entirely non-Jewish parts of the US. She had a lifelong relationship with Zukofsky that had been intimate in the 1930s.)

“New Collected Poems,” includes in one volume almost all of Oppen’s writings from the early collection ‘‘Discrete Series,” through “Primitive,” his final collection.
An untitled poem from that first collection:

Town, a town,
but location
Over which the sun as it comes to it;
Which cools, houses, and lamp-posts,
    during the night, with the roads---
Inhabited partly by those
Who have been born here,
Houses built---. From a train one sees
    him in the morning, his morning;
Him in the afternoon, straightening---
People everywhere, time and the work
    pauseless:
One moves between reading and re-reading,
The shape is a moment.
From a crowd a white powdered face,
Eyes and mouth making three---
Awaited--locally--a date.

From “The Materials,” Oppen’s first collection, 1962, after the long break:


Image of the Engine: 5

Also he has set the world
In their hearts. From lumps, chunks

We are locked out: like children, seeking love
At last among each other. With their first full strength
The young go search for it,


But even the beautiful bony children
Who arise in the morning have left behind
Them worn and squalid trash


Which is a grimy death of love. The lost
Glitter of the stores!
The streets of stores!
Crossed by the streets of stores
And every crevice of the city leaking
Rubble: concrete, conduit, pipe, a crumbling
Rubble of our roots

            But they will find
In flood, storm, ultimate mishap:
Earth, water, the tremendous
Surface, the heart thundering
Absolute desire


And from “Primitive,” his final collection:

Gold on Oak Leaves

    gold side her golden

young poems for she sleeps and impossible
truths move

brave thru the gold the living
veins but for gold

light I am lost


in the gold


light on this salt and sleepless

sea I haunt an old

ship the sun

glints thru ragged
caulking I would go out
past the axioms

of wandering


timbers garboards keelson the keel full

depth

of the ship in that
light into all

that never
knew me alone

in the sea fellow
me feminine

winds as you pass