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A poem like “Bad Times,” for which the first of only five lines also supplies the title,
is exemplary in this respect. Oppen’s language, here as elsewhere, is stark, stripped
(“What I couldn’t write I scratched out,” he said, “I wrote what I could be sure of ”),
but in its starkness it positively requires us to be alert. This is a constructed world,
Oppen suggests, in which a word of great value (“elevated”) has been so devalued as
to be associated only with posts, and where “cars pass” as if their mechanism had
taken over the city completely. The only human activity involves dehumanization: a
man is reduced to a marketing activity, less important than a “post” (the repetition
of the word is intentional) or a machine.
Oppen did not publish a second collection until 1962. During the intervening
years he was involved in political activity, becoming a member of the Communist
Party in 1935. The second collection, The Materials, shows how Oppen gradually
extended his “position of honesty” from the instant of perception to sometimes
complex processes of thought. The result is philosophical poetry that retains what
Oppen himself has termed “the imagist intensity of vision” that explores the some-
times problematical relationship between language, thought, and things. “Psalm,”
for instance, presents us with an intensely realized vision of deer in a forest that
nevertheless subtly reminds us of their otherness. Nature is a stranger yet, here as it
is in Dickinson; and this portrait of an “alien small” world is juxtaposed with the
words naming it, “the small nouns / Crying faith.” “This in which” the deer occur, the
poet suggests, is at once “the small beauty of the forest” and the poem made out of
“small nouns”: two utterly separate objects that are, all the same, vitally attached.
Oppen’s allegiance is to them both, to the language human beings have made and
the world they have not made but share with other creatures; and it is to the
relationship between the two – the bridge built between world and language out of
seeing and speaking.
Two other notable poets who show the different directions in which the Imagist
intensity of vision could lead are Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) and Lorine
Niedecker (1903–1970). In Reznikoff ’s case, a general indebtedness to Pound was
combined with an almost uninterrupted residence in New York to produce what has
been called “urban imagism”: a poetry that alerts the reader to the loneliness, the
small ironies and amusements, and the numbness of the immigrant in the urban
tenement. In the best of his earlier, shorter poems, eventually collected together in By
the Waters of Manhattan: Selected Verse (1962), Reznikoff refuses to moralize, the
social comment is all the more powerful for being implicit. At some point in the
1950s, Reznikoff dedicated himself to a larger enterprise: a four-volume history of
the United States between 1885 and 1915, written in free verse, and consisting entirely
of testimony taken from the court cases Reznikoff had encountered in law books. He
chose the period because he believed that a social and psychic crisis in the nation had
occurred then; he was driven by the characteristically American assumption that
every life is worth remembering, the testimony of every person is worth attending to
in and for its own sake. The result is Testimony (1978–1979), an American epic that
draws its energy from its omnivorousness, the poet’s refusal to exclude anything from
his unselective eye, his attitude of wonder. Unlike Reznikoff, Niedecker was born and
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