223“That they are there!”
George Oppen’s Psalm of Attentiveness
t ’s... a lyric reaction to the world,”
says George Oppen (1908–1984), “a sense of awe, simply to feel that the thing
is there and that it ’s quite something to see.” Casual as it sounds, this bracing
view goes to the core of modern American poetry. William Carlos Williams had
reawakened us to “the New World that rises to our windows” every day:
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens...And before that, as if out of nowhere, Walt Whitman’s native tongue tapped
“Nature without check with original energy.”
Simply to sense “that the thing is there and that it ’s quite something to see”
is not simple, when it comes to making language actual, immediate. Again Wil-
liams: “So much depends” upon seeing afresh and saying anew
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens“
I