DRINKING WINE IN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE WITH SEPTUAGENARIAN STEW
An Essay on Charles Bukowski
Critical designation of status among top-tiered poets operates from the principle of stratification implemented by one, maybe two-three academic poetry critics that review books in major periodicals and newspapers. Usually, after such notices awards follow and, finally, a celebratory essay or study that establishes the poet. Due to this stratification of establishment entitlement and stature, a sizeable number of poets deserving endowed publishers and critical reception therefore remain overlooked. Certain remarkably disgusted, humane, articulate, protesting voices containing original material remain outside the limited sensibilities of nearly all academic critics as well as the curriculum of the majority of English and Creative Writing Departments, which for the most part make up the Moral Majority of Literature. Charles Bukowski is foremost among these important outsiders and I’m sure Bukowski, one of our few anti-bourgeois poets, would be ashamed if he wasn’t. Moreover, because of his temperamentally inherent mockery and disdain of what stands at the top (most of the middle and the bottom) of the hierarchy of society and poetry, this is the only way it could turn out. Bukowski figures low in the stratum of official individual reputation and he is not associated with any of the contemporary literary movements or “poetry schools,” though Ann Charters tried to represent him in her Beat literature anthology with a pathetically unrepresentative piece of prose. It could easily be argued that Bukowski’s underground popularity is such that his inclusion was a guarantee of greater sales for Viking-Penguin and everyone else involved. With the exception of “crucifix in a deathhand,” Paul Hoover’s selection for his anthology, Postmodern American Poetry, is not characteristic of Bukowski’s gritty talent. To Hoover’s credit, Bukowski is appropriately well placed in chronological good company with Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, etc. in his generally comprehensive anthology (56-61). In the hierarchy of dominant poetry factions, Bukowski is neither Confessional, Deep Image, Objectivist, Surrealist, Black Mountain, New York School, nor Beat; his work contains elements of the above but he’s not easily slotted. It’s not solely the slack poems about drunken-ness, womanizing, and the race-track that are turn-offs to the academics (and other readers), what alienates Bukowski from the more established literary institutions is the very same annoyance inspired by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, and Allen Ginsberg or for that matter Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Rexroth, Thomas McGrath, and Kenneth Patchen: an uninhibited, insouciant, even contemptible sense of passionate critique of destructive social institutions is evoked by each of these writers. Though, with the exception of the dynamically indigestible Artaud, book sales for Celine, Miller, Ginsberg, and Bukowski allowed them to live off their writings, thereby conferring market status and the much desired rarely accomplished self-sustainability. However, given the choice, though Miller apparently craved the Nobel Prize and Celine who believed he invented the modern style of narrative—the genteel idea of being canonized would be incomprehensible to them. Paradoxically, what is indestructibly iconoclastic in literary tradition is implicit in their work, they exist with eminence whether they are formally integrated or not. It is not the overall disconsolation universally experienced within the human condition, but the direct opposition to a failed system that marks them.
From Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame to Septuagenarian Stew, Bukowski made an art out of the forthrightness, and often the lyrical skill, we associate with Catullus, Whitman, Artaud and Li Po, while at the same time disparately evoking what Erich Auerbach meant in describing Villon’s art as “The utmost perfection of a creatural realism which remains completely within the sensory and, for all its radicalism of emotion and expression, shows no trace of an intellectually categorizing power, shows indeed no will whatever to make the world any different from what it is” (226). Though he calmed down with age, fame, and domestic stability, through his “war all the time” sensibility, Bukowski epressed an unswerving steadfastness to the details of life from one of the last floors of the urban Hades. In United States poetry, almost single-handedly he was the representative voice of those whom the Egyptian writer Albert Cossery once referred to as “The Men God Forgot.”
With the exception of Villon’s life of severe poverty, and Artaud’s and Celine’s due to madness, Miller, Ginsberg, and Bukowski seemed to have lived full lives while existing marginally or impoverished in the first part of their writers’ existence. There is in each writer a kind of reckless liberty, even the liberty to be estranged and unable to work or last long at any job that would make them part of the lie of the establishment. In the case of Artaud and Bukowski the estrangement manifested through excess of drugs or alcohol at times was pathologically self-destructive, and we are struck by a feeling for a part of the human condition that Baudelaire characterized in his statement, “Any form of existence, so long as it is out of the world” (57). The one significant difference in the quality of life since Baudelaire urgently proclaimed his desire to exit or at least remain exempt from social normalcy is that the processes of ecological catastrophe, working-class exploitation and disenfranchisement, general educational and cultural decay have accelerated, and the social “advances” of civilization have not kept pace for the vast majority of people. Whether the subject is personal poverty, workers’ alienation, prostitution, sexual liberty, the individual’s personal spiritual quest, or attacking the violent hypocrisy of State and Religious power—Celine, Miller, Ginsberg, and Bukowski have given a voice to these and other subjects related to contemporary human struggle in a time of aggressive tragedy experienced by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
And the affect on the writing itself, the voice of the style developed from his particular sensibility? In the phrasing and diction of American English unhampered by meters and rhyme, Bukowski’s lyric manner follows through the free verse styles realized by Pound, Williams and Sandburg. His contempt for genteel language is organic to his disposition. He didn’t work in the long poem, but in lyric stature he kept pace or extended the pace from Pound-Williams-Sandburg to the Patchen-Rexroth-O’Hara-Ginsberg traditions in Late Modernist American Poetry prevalent in the late fifties and early sixties up to his own death in 1994. Although he does not exhibit the sophisticated political awareness of Rexroth or Ginsberg, his poetry like Rexroth’s and O’Hara’s is not rhetorically elevated or suffused with Ginsberg’s sometimes hyperbolic surreal Bop imagery. Bukowski manages his own direct style with rancor, humor, self-deprecation and pathos, often he is elegiac; he maintains the persona of an outsider associated with Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground narrator, or Henry Miller’s works focused on living in the poor parts of Paris or New York in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. His use of imagism is not that of an impressionism that necessarily resonates with precious or precise evocations related to nature, emotion or myth as we understand them in earlier shorter poems and prose poems by Williams, H.D., Pound or in the later generation of the heightened “Deep” Imagism in the works of Robert Bly and James Wright. There is a clearly de-idealized “nature” in Bukowski’s imagism of concrete details, the emotion presents itself directly as, for example, in his poem from Septuagenarian Stew “the girls and the birds,” a portrait of whores in a poor man’s room:
the girls were young
and worked the
street
but often they couldn’t
score, they
ended up
in my hotel
room
3 or 4 of
them
sucking on the
wine,
hair in face,
runs in
stockings,
cursing, telling
stories…
somehow
those were
peaceful
nights
but really
they reminded me
of long
ago
when I was a
boy
watching my grand-
mother’s
canaries make
droppings
into their
seed
and into their
water
and the
canaries were
beautiful
and
chattered
but never sang. (70-71)
Bukowski’s style attracts or threatens. Through the juxtaposed activities of his grandmother’s canaries de-natured in cages, the closing stanza “drops” an image of the mess the whores unwittingly, or uncontrollably, made of their lives. The sexual, unattainable, down and out, and ultimately undesirable prostitutes signify an unromantic two-way failure in the human condition. Particularly now, when the fetishization of sex floods the magazine racks and the Internet with little more than sex manual, voyeuristic, or sexual curiosity value for the young, the horny or inexperienced, the suggestion of human unfulfillment in a supposed tantalizing sexual object, echoed in the unsinging canary chatter and the self-sullying of the imprisoned canaries’ cage, brings a much needed realism into the fantasized equations of fulfilled desire. Unless you’ve been there, you don’t think about where a prostitute actually lives or what she does in her down time. The canaries like the street walkers “never sang,” but the poem does. The poem, as we sometimes are inspired to say for particular modes of gutsy expression, tells it like it is.
The fact that there is a malodorous glut of common language idiomatic free verse dominating U.S. poetry should not take away the relevance of poems containing original subject matter and, at least for this reader, a sense of urgency, either intimately autobiographical or political. Bukowski’s language and the reality it conveys are an internationally recognizable language and reality of most of the urban world. Moreover, it is not so much a defense against or a disavowal of the prevailing value systems, but a raw display of what it’s like to be a conscious outsider within a society that fails with virtually unrelieved aggression those who are neither rich nor offer many services to the rich. Before Bukowski became secure through his writings, his first ten or so books continuously portray a world of unemployed people, people walking off the job, or people working low-end jobs, the ones who come home ready to drink—first thing—because if enduring the job all day hasn’t made them mean or dispirited it has definitely made them thirsty for something else and somewhere else. In the earlier books, the speaker and most of the characters are unmarried but it is not the singles world of hip clubs or lively bars or even jazz or rhythm and blues clubs of the “White Negro” subculture. It is mostly the nightlife (and daylife) of cheap neighborhood bars, dogfights, boxing matches, streetwalkers, one-night stands, week-to-week affairs, or the man alone in his one-room apartment. Aside from Miller, the representation and vitally expressed realism of an artist as a central character living such a life in our culture is close to zero. Other than occasional documentaries, aspects of the down and out or working-class life, not to mention one wherein an artist other than a future rock star is a central character, are generally unexposed in television programming and rarely presented in the movies. It is gritty, often it is undesirable, and Bukowski’s ongoing portrait-poems of struggling composers, painters, and writers such as Borodin, Van Gogh or Vallejo to name a few, point to the not so unusual parallel of identification he clearly makes about an outsider tradition of artists unconnected to academic institutions or wealth.
In the land of the Frontal Lobotomy of the Archetypes, the Amnesia of Vitality, Imperial Self-Satisfaction and the General Anesthetic in regards to exploring and artistically giving a voice to working-class poets,’ workers’ and unemployed peoples’ lives and imaginations, Donald Hall in what was for him an infrequent but typically resentful, academic, hothead statement, condescendingly referred to Bukowki’s poetry in the context of a “bogus proletarianism” (91). This comment came near the end of an article attempting to celebrate invective in Thomas McGrath’s remarkable long poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, about which Hall squeezed out a couple of pebbled nuggets of begrudging affirmation. Along the way, Hall puts down Kenneth Patchen for his “bogus populism,” but Patchen’s few strong poems (e.g. “The Orange Bears,” “The Fox,” “The Slums”) for anyone who takes the time to read them, and his innovative poetic-narrative hybrid work, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, convey the work of an authentic prophetic poetic and satiric voice of opposition to a sadomasochistic establishment of artificial values. Hall’s offended remarks evoke the McTaste of a genteel mind perilously at home in the world of academic prestige. In spite of the fact that Hall is way out of the refuge of his elite territory, the truth is Bukowski couldn’t care less about the proletariat, not to mention the middle-class or the aristocracy. Bukowski’s authentic connection to the hardships and general experience of working and unemployed people presents itself, either incidentally or with personal vehemence, throughout his poetry. As gripping or egoistic as his work can be it is not only about his personal struggle, as indicated by “the girls and the birds” or such poems as “drive through hell,” and “hard times,” from You Get So Alone (122, 164) or his humble ode to the great Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo from his book What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (“Vallejo” 98). The art of invective or political rage found in the poetry of Thomas McGrath shouldn’t be sought after in Bukowski in the first place. Hall’s comment is not a cheap shot but a dumb posture. What Bukowski accomplishes in his best poems is a way of telling about his own or others’ sense of personal terror, remorse, loneliness, desire, elegiaclly commemorative and absurd acceptance in the attempt to endure what is nightmarish and out of control. This is done in a language that is often passionate and clear. Bukowski is convincing when he tightly controls his anecdotal-lyrical form: bitterly comical, even endearingly so, the older poem “fuzz” from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is a solid example of the way he formally manages what he emotionally reveals:
3 small boys run toward me
blowing whistles
and they scream
you’re under arrest!
you’re drunk!
and they begin
hitting me on the legs with
their toy clubs.
one even has a
badge. another has
handcuffs but my hands are high in the
air.
when I go into the liquor store
they whirl around outside
like bees
shut out from their nest.
I buy a fifth of cheap
whiskey
and
3
candy bars. (55)
There’s an encrypted echo of George Orwell’s character Winston Smith’s ordeal with the children who are training to be Hitler Youth-like “Spies,” telling Smith to raise his hands, that he’s a “Thought-Criminal,” and a “traitor.” But the scene in 1984 is sinister, there is no redeemable link past the behavior of such children that can actually have you arrested and ultimately “vaporized” (22-24). In the Bukowski poem the speaker is the victim of children playfully acting out the pathetic powers they lack as means to control events in their world; and the way he has inter-spliced the image of the little boys whirling around with splendid but ambiguous and chaotic energy “like bees/ shut out from their nest” (15-16) should not be overlooked. The image conveys how these children too are enacting as best they can their invented roles as a kind of posse, in order to deal with the possibly threatening reminder of a drunken father, step-father, uncle, or mother’s boyfriend. To the poet’s credit, the man, sensing the innocent but helpless bravado of the boys, commiserates with a nurturing, kindly assurance.
Bukowski’s language is clear and non-figurative. Like William Carlos Williams (in his narrative lyrics) he sees and experiences the world as it is and he is adamant about writing in American speech. It is an anti-prosody that confirms Montaign’s dictum: “The speech I love is simple natural speech, the same on paper as on a man’s lips” (79). There are times when the mental contexts of the poems are framed in a drunken or hung-over condition. And what of that? If they are good poems like similar ones written by such Classic Chinese poets as Li Po, Mei Yao Ch’en, or Su Tung Po, who cares? He certainly doesn’t suffer from the guilty sentimentality and bathos of a reformed drinker like Richard Hugo. Furthermore, “The Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts” is a Holistic saint when you consider the New York Review of Books runs advertisements promoting nuclear power along-side the generally absurd, canon-making, book-promoting reviews and articles most American poets pant to be the subject of or favorably mentioned within. Bukowski isn’t part of that clan. It’s not even possible. Far into Septuagenarian Stew he honors the author “insane enough” to have written Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, two twentieth century classics that certainly had a strong influence on him. We sense the effect and the isolate affection through the speaker’s perceptions celebrating the enigmatically skilled doctor within the portrait:
company
the photo of Celine looks at
me.
he needs a shave.
looks like a pervert in the
movies.
the eyes see through walls,
walls of humanity.
the photo of Celine is good
to look at when
things go very wrong
here.
I look at him tonight:
see his bones
dance.
the doctor from
Hades. (243)
Hades is a dual reality in Bukowski’s world. Celine is the doctor from Hades, the mythological hell which is this world and the underworld, because transformative knowledge about the inherent facts of personal experience are revealed as a result of having the guts to completely descend into exhaustive emotion. It is also the world of Jung’s wounded healer that comes to heal, and it is the healing, imaginative literature, of raw painful truths represented in Celine’s books that inspires the man admiring his “company.” The disease diagnosed as needing such treatment? From later works and those published after his death, a lifetime variety of sufferings and alienations related to the physical abuse of himself and his mother by his father appear to be at the basis. His struggle with alcoholism, possibly even the skin disease, acne vulgaris, could be related to the traumatic effects of these beatings; and what other day-to-day treatment by such a father figured into the loathsome stress of his “home life” as a child? Yet Bukowski was not as far gone as Artaud—brushing, slipping, crucially and excessively along that edge—Bukowski’s emotional daring and original anecdotal-lyric poems have been antidotal to the vast majority of books of poetry published by the major publishers, the conservative university publishers, or the independent (nonetheless mainstream market-oriented) small presses. There is a need and there is a dynamics for a personal poetry that embodies the daily existence of the historical period. Some experienced readers alienated from the Empire-internalizing sensibility of the mainstream and the sucking-and-biting mentality of pop-culture find their way to Bukowski’s work, as they do to the historical and linguistically more challenging poetry of Allen Ginsberg’s and Thomas McGrath’s best writing. Maybe the new radical poets aren’t there to be published. Or we are offered with critical seriousness the syntactical stutterings and willful or spurious incoherence of the Language Poets as examples of essential poetry in a Post-Modern age. What a disgusting reality. Maybe the exclusion of voices for the vast audience of semi-to-fully-educated people who have no voice in the crucial decisions of policies that make the world increasingly, violently dangerous, and the younger generation lacking worthy employment opportunities or affordable college education have been so marginalized—they lost interest. If they did then there is a conspiracy theory that is not one. But there has never been a time when the powers that be were interested in representing the parts of the news William Carlos Williams said “men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.” Power is policy. Poets that matter are anything but agreeable to this or any other manner of consent to unaccountable authority.
When Bukowski’s poetry doesn’t work it has a running at the mouth quality that includes a barely comical lame macho inflatedness, undisguised obsession with fame, an odd one-upmanship with other writers, excessive idealization of the raunchy, passé battle-of-the-sexes sexism, and a disappointing diction that generally rises no higher than formulaic Hollywood Movie-Think and the Tele-speak of weekly TV programs—and these factors blur the moments in his work when the speaker attains an original poignancy. In a conscientious and fearlessly edited edition of his collected poems, 300-350 pages, these works would be excised and possibly forgotten as predominating eccentricities. At worst these poems are harmless malfunctions in a larger and stronger body of work that readers should be willing to wade through, though sometimes the wading is strenuous beyond tolerance. In a condensed edition it would be clear just how many of Bukowski’s poems are capable of unpretentiously relating insight with unglamorous epiphanies about the involuntary effects of difficult, unavoidable circumstances that happen in life; some celebrating the experience with humility. Humility that enhances literary style is rare; few writers contain the talent. To survive without adding to the horror is sometimes the best we can do; it is at least an effort that makes sense as a starting point. There is courage, discipline, and cunning in the effort. Finally, what remains after a poet’s survival, which is not an inconsequential matter in our culture—is the art. In the art of Bukowski the most central theme, both comically and tragically, is simply the passion to exist, to take it as it comes, recount what it was all about, and, paradoxically, recount the butchery done to that passion, and the butchery endured, by humans.
Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of reality in Western
Literature. New York: Princeton UP, 1953.
Baudelaire, Charles. Twenty Prose Poems. Trans. Michael
Hamburger. New York: Jonathon Cape, 1974.
Bukowski, Charles. what matters most is how well you walk through
the fire. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1999.
---. You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense. 1991.
---. Septuagenarian Stew, 1990.
---. Burning In Water Drowning In Flame, 1975.
Montaigne, Michel. Essays. New York: Penguin, 1979.
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Classic, 1977.
Patchen, Kenneth. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions,
1967.
The Portable Beat Reader. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin
Books, 1992.
Postmodern American Poetry. Ed. Paul Hoover. New York: Norton,
1994.
FACETS OF "A LIMITED AND LIMITING CLARITY"
An Essay on George Oppen
1.
Although a seminal study has been done of William Carlos Williams's relation to cubism and the avant garde of the early part of the twentieth century in Bram Djikstra's Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams, no research, to my knowledge, has thus far related George Oppen's modernist poetic style to that of the cubists. This appears to keep Oppen historically relegated, or situated in, the "Objectivist" school of American poetry, of which he was a founder. And his historical placement as such has unfortunately limited critics to discussions that focus on "Objectivist" (and its antecedent Imagist) tenets only. In his essay "On Objectivism," Michael Palmer in discussing Oppen along with Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff points out that "within the fractured narrative of modernism, we can probably say that Objectivism begins with the perceived necessity to add active intellect to the verbal and visual economy of imagistic method" (121). This is an accurate statement concerning the Objectivists, especially in distinguishing their method from that of the Imagists, while at the same time stating how Objectivism extends the admirable qualities of Imagism. Still, when considered with earlier movements in literature and painting the roots leading to the practice of Objectivist technique are broader. In articulating his Objectivist concerns Oppen conveys his feeling about the significance of "the necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving the making of an object of the poem" (see Interview p.160). Although these are the common concerns of all serious practicing poets, beyond the "fracturing of the narrative" that Palmer speaks of, Oppen achieves this "forming" in his longer poems by breaking up the poem into sections which are not representationally associative, but that intertextually cohere. And these non-chronologically developed sections are essentially parallel to the planes and cubes of a singular object. That is, Oppen's technique induces an evocative fragmentary clarity similar to that of the cubist paintings of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Leger. It is Oppen's "cubist sense of clarity," his method of arranging the constituents of perception in such a way that subjects and objects are presented with a precise intention of giving expression to multiplicity that makes his poetry unique.
Before he was awarded the Pulitzer prize for Poetry in 1969, George Oppen worked in a variety of non-academic occupations such as house-builder, cabinet-maker, and pattern-maker in the aircraft industry—all occupations in which technique relies on precision, and the success of technique is reduced to how precise one is. With this in mind, it is not surprising that Oppen's poetry shows a clear sense of poetic precision in its handling of imagery as well as in the selection and placement of words within a particular poem, and that Oppen strove quintessentially for clarity in each poem he wrote. An example of the achievement he strove for is immediately apparent in his poem "The Forms of Love":
Parked in the fields
All night
So many years ago,
We saw
A lake beside us
When the moon rose.
I remember
Leaving that ancient car
Together. I remember
Standing in the white grass
Beside it. We groped
Our way together
Downhill in the bright
Incredible light
Beginning to wonder
Whether it could be lake
Or fog
We saw, our heads
Ringing under the stars we walked
To where it would have wet our feet
Had it been water (CP 86).
"The Forms of Love" equally justifies Oppen's comment that "poetry [is] a skill by which we can grasp the form of a perception achieved" (Poetry 331), and further supports the Ars Poetica section of the longer poem "Route":
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful
thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity
I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity. (185)
The kind of "clarity" Oppen refers to here is certainly achieved in such poems as "Sara in Her Father's Arms" (30), "Workman" (41), "From a Photograph" (47), "Zulu Girl" (130), "A kind of Garden" (182), "Route"(184) and several others. But if we are to judge Oppen's poetry strictly by his definition of clarity, then we must look beyond the Ars Poetica of "Route" and turn to a more complex definition deduced from poems that might challenge the notion of clarity.
For Oppen the experience of clarity is related to what Alfred North Whitehead meant when he expressed the idea that "for the percipient the perception is an internal relationship between itself and things perceived" (9). It is also at times complicated by the many-faceted literal relationship between the objects of perception and the emotional and fantasy-life of the percipient/poet. And it is in the structuring of the content of these relations in his poetry that Oppen, at his best, displays a clarity that has not forsaken complexity. In other words, for Oppen, it appears that clarity is not necessarily synonymous with simplicity as such, but, cubistically, with the angles and the depths of simplicity.
The complexity of simplicity, that is, a clarity that attempts to include the multiplicity of the world and a particular perception of it, can be easily seen in his poem "Image of an Engine," from the book The Materials. Oppen's method is to complicate the structure of the poem through sectioning, or juxtaposing, additional panels or facets ("sections" of poems) within a larger frame, attempting to create a simultaneous perspective, a clarity that exists within multiplicity. There is an unexpected dramatic instant in section #2 of the poem when "the engine" is viewed by the poet-narrator as dead: "The image of the engine/ That stops." And within that sudden perception, reflected out of the poet's introspective aloneness with the inanimate, "the image of the engine" serves as a perspective on mortality:
2
Endlessly, endlessly
The definition of mortality
The image of the engine
That stops.
We cannot live on that.
I know that no one would live out
Thirty years, fifty years if the world were ending
With his life.
The machine stares out,
Stares out
With all its eyes
Thru the glass
With the ripple in it, past the sill
Which is dusty--If there is someone
In the garden!
Outside, and so beautiful. (19)
Section #2, with its resistance to explicitly defining its theme of mortality, clarifies an insight made by Rachel Blau DuPlesis concerning Oppen's technique: "Presentations—not the rhetorics of self-expression or confession—become the poet's most exacting and comprehensive task" (DuPlesis 60). Oppen's "presentations" create a subtle tension between the predictable obsolescence of the engine, and the ineluctable though "endlessly" incomprehensible end of human life, with the constancy of "the garden." Here the attempted clarity is to depict the relation between these three images co-existing at the same time in the poet's reflections. In this context, the "garden" appears not only as an emblem of the "beautiful," as Oppen has proclaimed, but also as another index of "mortality." In contradistinction to the machine that "stops," the garden is sensually tangible in terms of its organic propensity towards birth, decay, and renewal. The alternate reality of the garden, perceived as a redemptive environment ("outside" of the factory, and "so beautiful") is typical to lyric poetry but, for better or worse, in the sparseness of its presentation Oppen's pastoral evocation is less related to Wordsworth's heightened delicacy of feeling over meadows, groves, and flowers that he reflects upon in his "Intimations Ode" (Wordsworth 176-81), or William Carlos Williams's "precise visual language" (Dijkstra 173) in his poem "The Pot of Flowers" (WCW 184), than to the uniformly lush trees that "beautifully," though incidentally, line the street (almost as a visual notation) in the distance behind two men smoking in the cubist painter Fernand Leger's "Smokers" (see plate #1 http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_87_6.html). In a similar manner another organizing influence on Oppen's style, especially as it concerns the juxtaposition of industrialized images with natural ones, may also be related to Pablo Picasso's early cubist painting "Factory at Horta de Ebro" (see plate #2 http://www.artchive.com/artchive/P/picasso/factory.jpg.html) with its geometric clutter of factory buildings and warehouses in a purposively cramped arrangement with the three lush palms that persist, as a kind of organic relief, in the background. As in the two cubist paintings with their attempt to simultaneously reproduce the multiplicity of the surfaces of streets or factory buildings without privileging the pastoral element—the inert "engine," the obsession with "mortality," and "the glass/ With the ripple in it" are merged into language-surfaces with the "garden" at the parameter of the presentation, while claiming (like Leger's and Picasso's trees) centrality in the content. It is in the two unobtrusively adorned fragments, "If there is someone/ In the garden!/ Outside, and so beautiful," that this indirect "claim" is made possible and, however quiet, achieves a vitality distinct from Wordsworth's declarative affection for "Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves" (Wordsworth 181), or Williams's "precise visual language" (Dijkstra 173) in the untitled poem from Spring And All known as "the Pot of Flowers" (WCW, 184).
Arguably, in the closure of "Image of an Engine," there are problems concerning the way "presentations" do not work. In section #4 of the poem, Oppen seems really to have reached his closure with the image of "The gull" that can watch a "ship and all its hallways/ And all companions sink." There is a strong possibility, though it remains speculative, that Oppen refused to conclude his poem (published in 1962) with an image embodying nature's indifference to mortality because it showed a slip toward closure which might have evoked a more than similar theme previously accomplished by W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" (79), published in 1938. Auden's poem resolves in its closure the theme of the indifference of man and nature to suffering, and how the "Old Masters" conveyed that fact by not emphasizing or monumentalizing actual catastrophe. Auden's poem, however brilliant, reinforces the code of such a theme by alluding directly to Brueghel's painting "Icarus," which concludes "and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on" (80). Concerning Oppen's resistance to "the poets of right thinking and right sentiment" (quoted in Palmer, p.122) Michael Palmer has noted that "By speaking againt literary contrivance, Oppen argues both for the possibility, or necessity, of an immediacy of poetic engagement or intervention, and against the poetic, that is, against the devices of a passive and acculturated representation" (123).
Perhaps concluding the poem with the indifference of nature to suffering exemplified a "passive and acculturated representation" descending from Brueghel and Auden in this instance. But ending the poem at that point, letting it resonate with the stillness of "the gull" before the drama of shipwreck and death, might very possibly have shown a masterful handling of subject-matter. This is not an attempt to place Oppen within the tradition that modernist judgement has, in Palmer’s phrase, pronounced as "passive and acculturated." A closure of this kind, however predictably existential, would not necessarily be similar to that of Auden's or any of the other probable poets of "right thinking and right sentiment" that may have been present in Oppen's considerations. Instead, to the discredit of "Image of an Engine," Oppen imposes upon the suggestiveness he has created about the meaning of mortality by dragging in lines shaded with a desire to prophetically ameliorate the alienation of city-dwellers with a sentimental and unconvincing passage:
But even the beautiful bony children
Who arise in the morning have left behind
Them worn and squalid toys in the 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. (21)
Ironically, Oppen's reliance on a formal, even a prophetic utterance in the closure to "Image of an Engine" contradicts one of the most vital aspects of his style which, as Mark Linenthal noted in his "An Appreciation," is to have created "a poetry of language rather than statement, a rendering of experience which keeps the process of rendering in view, authentic personal presence among the circumstances of its unfolding" (38). Although there is something to be said for the consonant and vowel music of the morally evocative lines in which the detritus of a neighborhood is depicted as "a crumbling/ Rubble of our roots," the closure arrived at here obfuscates the difficult complementing "presentations" he achieved in sections 1-4 in which concrete images of the engine, reflections on mortality, the fortuity of a garden's beauty, and the indifference of nature to human mortality are presented with a multifaceted clarity.
2.
The use of sections (much like surfaces presented in facets or planes) in "Image of an Engine" can be seen to be foundation work for the kind of successfully complex forms that will later occur in the poems "A Narrative" (132) and "Route" (184). In relation to the verbal "architecture" of such language, Kenneth Rexroth's definition of cubism in poetry offers a clear perspective on how Oppen uses sectioning in his poems to complicate the sense of clarity: "What is literary Cubism? It is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture" (Rexroth p.vi). Distinct from Pierre Reverdy, whose work Rexroth focused on in formulating his ideas about literary cubism, Oppen is involved more with the proof of the image rather than the creation of the image. Reverdy expressed interest in "an art of creation and not of reproduction or interpretation" (in Balakian 88). Each uses the "dissociative" technique toward their own preferences. And Oppen's method of "making an object of a poem," or of seeking to attain "the imagist intensity of vision" (Interview 161-2) is not related to Reverdy's sense of "creation" or the sense of "rapture" Rexroth attributes to Reverdy's poetry.
Fundamentally, Oppen, like William Carlos Williams and, to some extent, Marianne Moore, before him, introduces into his poems a strong concern for exact reproduction, a structuring of the syntax and juxtaposition of images that can be paralleled with what Picasso said when he spoke of how he and other cubist painters had "introduced into painting objects and forms that were formerly ignored" (Picasso, 59). Picasso's statement sheds light on the further significance of Oppen depicting the "flywheel," the "manifold," and the "idle cylinders" in "Image of an Engine." Closer to home for Oppen in the visual arts are some of the paintings of the American artist Charles Demuth, especially his painting "Machinery" (see plate #3 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prec/ho_49.59.2.htm) in which the painter depicts "the metal of pipes and machinery" in such a way that "they take on a steely illumination which brings us directly to tactile and visual reality" (Dijkstra 156). In section #1 of "Image of an Engine," consider Oppen's lines
Likely as not a ruined head gasket
Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft
Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver
A machine involved with itself. (18)
The engine-parts in themselves fulfill a continuity of dimensions to the poet. Not only do they denote the visual autonomy of a machine and an image of it and its parts "involved with itself" (59), they also have indirect but precise metaphorical nuances, such as the already discussed "the image of an engine/ that stops." Hung from its hoist and inoperative, it reflects mortality to the poet amidst the monotony of factory work. But Oppen has not completely settled for that as a conclusive revelation; he also puns on the word "foundered" in section #3: "all embarkations/ foundered" (18). "Foundered" is not only the foundering of shipwreck that the gull witnesses in #4 (mortality again being inserted, or cubistically juxtaposed), but also the subtextual fact that engines and their parts (flywheel, manifold, etc.) are cast, foundered. Manufacturing and the manufacturing/writing of the poem are fused in the interplay of "production" and "invention." The machine "spitting at every stroke [and] knocking at the roots of the thing" is therefore a trope for the pleasures and the vicissitudes of the imagination.
The complexity of Oppen's form and thought is understood in the context of another of Picasso's statements: "All of this [cubism] is my struggle to break with the two-dimensional aspect" (61). Or as Oppen himself said in his journal: "OBJECTIFICATION" it creates a simultaneity of vision, a simultaneity of statement" (Sulfur #26, 148). An instance of the skill of simultaneity is evident in the poem "Route" from which I have selected the final section #14:
There was no other guarantee
Ours aren't the only madmen tho they have burned thousands
of men and women alive, perhaps no madder than most
Strange to be here, strange for them also, insane and criminal,
who hasn't noticed that, strange to be a man, we have come
rather far
We are at the beginning of a radical depopulation of the earth
Cataclysm...cataclysm of the plains, jungles, the cities
Something in the soil exposed between two oceans
As Cabeza de Vaca found a continent of spiritual despair
in campsites
His miracles among the indians heralding cataclysm
Even Cortes greeted as revelation...No I'd not emigrate
I'd not live in a ship's bar wherever we may be headed
These things at the limits of reason, nothing at the limits
of dream, the dream merely ends, by this we know it is the
real
That we confront (196).
It is as though Oppen, in these more discursive passages written in the 1960s during the Vietnam war, is driven to shape his content in quick associations because of the "limits of reason" he himself was morally driven to. Oppen's "simultaneity" in this poem (not completely unlike his French precursors Apollonaire and Cendrars), his method of sudden theme-variation as compared to parallelism in the succession of his stanzas or lines, his inserting of passages or complete sections in order to create the effect of "simultaneity," succeeds in creating a solemn and disturbing ambience of lenses and fractures.
Many of the rudiments for the technical approach in Oppen's poetry were already present in the various aesthetic positions of the Simultanist, Cubist, or Imagist movements in poetry or painting in the early part of the 20th century. These movements were themselves dramatically influenced by the more imagistic—sometimes photographic—lyricism of Walt Whitman's shorter poems, as well as his collage-like "sectioning" in "Song of Myself." The artists and poets influenced by the Simultanist, Cubist, and Imagist movements set the precedent for breaking with styles and forms (such as French Impressionism in painting, the indirect use of images among the Symbolist poets, and especially iambic pentameter in English and American poetry), which were deemed conventional around the period of 1909-1914. Of course what Oppen (or any other artist or poet) accomplishes in their more original works is not so easily related to a specific "school." But one can find a line of descent from W.C. Williams (especially from the period of Kora in Hell: Improvisations and Spring And All). Williams stated in Spring and All,
According to my present theme the writer of imagination would
attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are
disassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when
they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by
transposition into another medium, the imagination. (97)
Williams does not mean abstraction (see Perloff 113), but the capacity for perceiving subjects and objects in "forms that were previously ignored" (Picasso 163). Williams's slightly older avant garde contemporaries in photography and painting, Alfred Stieglitz and Charles Sheeler, corroborate the ideas of Williams and Picasso and provide a similar angle to view the technique Oppen used. This becomes clear when we consider Bram Dijkstra's assertion that it is their penchant (Stieglitz's and Sheeler's) for representation that is "to a direct attention for the position of the object as such within nature...a concept of realism which [has] nothing to do with the familiar romantic concept of a return to nature." (Dijikstra, 24).
Oppen, in section #5 of his poem "Of Being Numerous," without creating a "familiar" referentiality for the images of the "great stone," the "moonlight," and "consciousness" has nonetheless created neither clarity nor obscurity, but what might be referred to as an evocative opacity in viewing "the position of the object":
The great stone
Above the river
In the pylon of the bridge
'1875'
Frozen in moonlight
In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness
Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,
Which loves itself (150).
Something is hinted at having a fertilizing capacity in the surfaces or planes of inanimate objects, in the images "frozen in moonlight;" something that allows for a kind of integration that permits Eros to occur. Although Oppen's imagery remains on the surface in the above-quoted section, there is an element of "implied" interiority, of an equivalence of emotion with the arrangement of the objects of perception, where the line pauses at the end, "In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness..." Concerning the "consciousness" of Oppen's sense of his interior world, Rachel Blau DuPlesis has remarked that "A sense of void is, of course, hard to describe. I am talking of an illuminated blankness before an image, an accident, an event. This is a defining moment in which the self is elected (out of its own resistances) as the explorer of that silence in which it is dissolved" (80). According to DuPlesis, it is that defining moment before an image, and the poignant but ambiguous qualities of "consciousness" which Oppen seems to be conveying about his experience beside "The great stone/ Above the river." Moreover, since Oppen is dealing with the images of "The great stone/ and "the pylon of the bridge," we are not only reading his poetic notation of an experience of "illuminated blankness" (mirrored by "The great stone") within which he is "the explorer," we are also dealing with a mass of material which has been "worked" (the chiseled date "In the pylon of the bridge").
Earlier I mentioned the context of poetic "invention" and industrial "production" mirroring each other in the way Oppen structured his themes and images in the poem "Image of an Engine." But in the passage quoted above (from "Of Being Numerous"), it seems that Oppen is speaking from the context of poetic ecstasis, of being transported, of a full state of "consciousness" which is mirrored by the illuminated stillness of the date "in the pylon of the bridge/ Frozen in moonlight," which is perhaps a transpersonal reflection of the percipient himself. There is also an echoing of a Vorticist theory of Pound's that "The image is itself the speech [in the frozen air over the footpath]. The image is the word beyond formulated language" (A Memoir, 88). This idea seems especially true in Oppen's illumination of the banal in which he describes: "In the pylon of the bridge// '1875'// Frozen in moonlight." The sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, a member of the Vorticist group and a friend of Pound's, discusses aspects of Vorticism in relation to defining the characteristics of "materials" and how they may reflect "interiority," and invention/production, when he writes in his Vortex statements that
Sculptural energy is the mountain.
Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses
in relation.
Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses
by planes (in A Memoir, 20).
Following the logic of Brzeska's statements, it may well be that sculptural dexterity is the way Oppen works with language, and its unapparent philosophical links within his poems, creating a kind of erosion into meanings that lie beneath the surface of the images and the words ("beyond formulated language"). The "consciousness [which] awaits nothing,/ which loves itself" is the embodiment of language eroding into contemplative fulfillment of the intimately and actually seen, the clarified emotion resulting from the conjunction of the percipient with the perceived.
This "erosion" into meaning, the occurrence of the unexpected and the transformative, contains a further and specifically philosophical link in Oppen's relation to Martin Heidegger’s conception of personal immanent presence. Regarding Heidegger's existential instance of "being-in-the-world" (Dasein), Oppen writes in a letter from 1968: "a poem is really about my self. It is an instance of 'being-in-the-world'" (177). Here Oppen paraphrases Heidegger's "Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein [being in the world]" (Heidegger 112), by substituting "metaphysics" with the act of creating poetry. Oppen's illumination of the banal, his cubistic arrangement of images creating a sense of simultaneity, often allow his poems to essentially "attain to unconcealedness" (178), Heidegger's designation of the metaphysical instance in which it is possible for "Art [to let] truth exist" (186). In fact, Oppen's experience of a poem being "an instance of 'being-in-the-world,’ " of being about a "consciousness// which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,/ which loves itself," transcends the Heideggerian proposition of the riddle-like instance when "...an answer becomes impossible or the impossibility of any answer becomes clear" (98).
There is a primal element of intensity then for Oppen in the making of a poem, in the connection of emotionally fused language with the material of images and words, and the care given to their syntactical arrangement which, when it is evoked, suggests what D.H. Lawrence understood as an "ungraspable sheer present...life surging into utterance" (Lawrence 183). Oppen's wording, imagery and structuring of his poems enforces a de-conventionalizing of perceptions. His motive throughout his work, the way he recombines subjects and objects to permeate a deeper, unpredictable and previously unapparent clarity, becomes vivid.
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