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David B. Hobbs on George Oppen ("Ballad")
1.8k Plays11 months ago
Why might a poet set poetry aside for more than two decades and then return to it? What would the return sound like? When, as a young man, George Oppen stopped writing poetry, it was because, in his words, "I couldn't make the art I wanted to make while also pursuing the politics I wanted to pursue." David Hobbs joins the podcast to discuss "Ballad," one of the poems Oppen wrote upon his return to poetry.
David B. Hobbs is an assistant professor of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, where he is working on his first monograph, What Can You Do Alone?: Lyric Sociality & the Global Depression. He is also the editor of George Oppen's 21 Poems (New Direcitions, 2017). You can read David's introduction to that volume in The New York Review of Books and his scholarly article on Oppen in Modernism/modernity.
Please remember to follow the podcast, and, if you like what you hear, leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And follow my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm really pleased today to have David Hobbs on the podcast.
Admiration for George Oppen
00:00:12
Speaker
David is here to talk about the poet George Oppen, a real favorite of mine and someone whom I've been wanting to have an episode on more or less since the podcast began.
00:00:25
Speaker
And for reasons that I think will become obvious to all of you, more or less since the podcast began have I hoped that the episode on Oppen would be an episode featuring David Hobbs. So I'm really happy to have him here with us today.
Discussion on Oppen's Poem 'Ballad'
00:00:41
Speaker
The poem that David has chosen to talk about is a poem by Oppen called Ballad.
00:00:50
Speaker
The poem first appeared in a December 1967 issue of Poetry Magazine and was later collected into Oppen's volume of Being Numerous. The poem will be available to you textually via a link in the episode notes, so please feel free to click on that and look as we talk.
David Hobbs' Academic Background
00:01:19
Speaker
Let me tell you more about David, though, before we get going. David Hobbs is an assistant professor of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, where he's working on a monograph called What Can You Do Alone? Lyric, Sociality, and the Global Depression. David is also
00:01:44
Speaker
the editor of a volume called 21 Poems, he is the editor, the author of that volume is George Oppen.
Discovering New Poems in Archives
00:01:53
Speaker
David had the very exciting experience, which basically no one has in literary studies, of having
00:02:05
Speaker
made a bona fide discovery in the archive of new poems by a much-loved and very important poet which he was able to bring
00:02:16
Speaker
to the many fans of Oppen in a volume. Like I said, the title of the volume is called 21 Poems. You can guess what the volume contains. It contains 21 poems by George Oppen.
Editorial Projects on Ezra Pound and Others
00:02:30
Speaker
That volume was published by New Directions in 2017 and is a really beautiful
00:02:40
Speaker
a little book which David not only edits but introduces with a lovely essay that I also quite admire and I will make a link to that book available to you as well.
00:02:55
Speaker
if you don't have it already, as maybe you do. David is also with Richard Seibert working on a book called Tempest to Kendi, the Venice Notebook, so that it's another editorial project. Those notebooks are by Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge and that
00:03:15
Speaker
that book is also forthcoming from New Directions.
Influence of New Directions on Poetry
00:03:20
Speaker
David is a scholar who is working on poets who fall in the kind of New Directions sphere of influence. And that itself is something I think that might be interesting for us to talk about as the episode goes on, that it's like, who were those poets? What sense does it make to talk about?
00:03:39
Speaker
a particular publishing house, a particular press as having a kind of sphere of influence in the field of modernist poetry.
Editing Work with Kristin Grogan
00:03:50
Speaker
That's something that we might talk about.
00:03:53
Speaker
David is also someone who edited with Kristin Grogan, a former Close Readings guest. You remember Kristin came on for this lovely episode we had on Nidacr. With Kristin, David edited and introduced a cluster on the poet Bernadette Mer for the contemporaries at post 45 website.
David's Scholarly Contributions
00:04:21
Speaker
And he has articles on a variety of poets, including, I was very excited to see recently, has a forthcoming article, scholarly article coming out on the poet Hanif Abdurraqib. Not only
00:04:38
Speaker
The poet, but the former Close Readings guest, Hanif of Durukib, a major claim to fame, I'm sure, for Hanif, but it's really cool, I have to say, to see the ways in which the podcast is spreading its tentacles or something in the poetry world so that we can't help now but have
00:05:02
Speaker
guests who have worked with other guests and who have written about other guests and so on.
Recontextualizing George Oppen's Career
00:05:07
Speaker
It's a nice thing to see. David works not only in the scholarly vein, but in a kind of public facing poetry criticism way as well. He's written reviews for The Nation magazine
00:05:22
Speaker
where, among other texts, he's reviewed another volume by a former guest of the podcast, Anahid Narsassian's book, Keats's Odes. David has a lovely review of that book at The Nation. And perhaps more to the point with respect to today's episode, I want to call your attention to an article that David wrote for the scholarly journal Modernism, Modernity,
00:05:52
Speaker
on George Oppen, where David uses the poems that he discovered, the book that I described a moment ago, 21 Poems.
00:06:08
Speaker
In his article on Modernism and Journey, David situates those poems in a way that not only recontextualizes the kind of narrative, the received narrative that we might have in mind of Oppen's particular career. And I think in ways that David and I will talk about in a moment, Oppen is someone whose career in poetry is
00:06:30
Speaker
is something that people who care about him are always wanting to narrativize in particular ways.
Oppen's Poetic Development Insights
00:06:37
Speaker
I think David sees how the poems that he found in the archive in the Beinecke Library ask us to tell a slightly, perhaps a slightly different story about the career.
00:06:55
Speaker
or to add something to the story that we've been telling about that career. But he sort of in one of the moves that I find most compelling about that article, he sort of zooms out from the particularities of the story of Oppen's poetic development to tell a larger story and to think about how those poems add something
00:07:24
Speaker
to the place held by the category of the lyric itself, a kind of highly contested and interestingly developing category, one that on the one hand
00:07:42
Speaker
And this, I think, is an observation made by people like Virginia Jackson, who I have to say, another Close Readings guest. The category of the lyric is one that is sort of how to say this, is going through a very crucial moment in its development into the category that we now call the lyric, I think,
00:08:09
Speaker
Jenny Jackson would say something like this in the modernist period, and yet is a term that doesn't get much purchase, generally speaking, in the modernist period. So most modernist poets don't seem to be, the term itself, lyric, doesn't seem to matter very much, at least in a kind of surface way, I think, to most modernist poets.
00:08:39
Speaker
David's work on Oppen, I think, reveals that there's more to the story than that and that Oppen has a place in that story.
Host's Enthusiasm for the Discussion
00:08:46
Speaker
And so I just think with all of this in mind, it's a rare thing to get to talk to somebody who is both sort of immersed in and conversant in the kind of minutiae of archival research
00:09:02
Speaker
and knows a poet inside and out like David knows Oppen, and yet who also seems sort of beautifully fluent and able to talk about poetic history writ large and the place that a poet like Oppen holds in that history.
00:09:24
Speaker
And so I'm thrilled to have David Hobbs on the podcast today. I'm thrilled to get to talk about George Oppen with him. David, welcome to Close Readings.
00:09:35
Speaker
You're joining us from your campus office, right? How are you doing today, David? I'm speechless. Thank you. I think I've joked with Cameron before that I'm maybe the first super fan of the podcast to be on the podcast. And so in preparation, I kind of tried to rehearse how I would respond to the signature
00:10:03
Speaker
beautiful, glowing, unfairly generous introduction, and I find myself speechless anyway. But thank you very much. It's a real treat to be here. I'm sorry that my windows don't face the coolies, which is this beautiful coiling, almost like river fjord structure in Southern Alberta. The other side of the building does. But if you want to see a... I mean, your listeners can't see the parking lot, but if you wanted to see the parking lot, I'd gladly show you.
00:10:31
Speaker
Well, my my listener, our listeners can't see them. I see your blinds, but I'm happy for you to keep the blinds closed. And and I and the listeners can imagine that behind those blinds are the coolies. Oh, yeah, that's we'll just imagine that. Please do filled with rattlesnakes and deer sometimes. Yeah. OK. David,
00:11:00
Speaker
I think I sort of intimated in the lead up in the intro, which I have to say wasn't unfairly generous. It was unfairly sort of not taking the full stock of your work so far, if anything. But I think I intimated in that intro that Oppen is a poet whom I love.
00:11:25
Speaker
He's for sure not a poet whom I know anywhere as well as you know him. And if anything, I think even as someone who I'm speaking now of myself, who my graduate training, such as it was, was in 20th and 21st century poetry, really in 20th century poetry.
00:11:50
Speaker
Oppen was not a poet that I read in college. I don't think I read much of Oppen, even in grad school. I think part of the reasons for that are the ways that
00:12:09
Speaker
20th century American poetry, perhaps in particular, has been divvied up into competing camps and schools of influence and so forth, and I happen to be in the other one or something.
00:12:26
Speaker
So, you know, I came to Oppen somewhat more recently and have been reading him with the admiration of a fan and seeing of course that those stories that we tell about schools and influence and so forth never quite capture the complexity of
00:12:49
Speaker
the actual poetic landscape. And so I see ways that Oppen is in dialogue with poets whom I have worked on and thought a great deal about. But all of this is a kind of preface towards my asking you to tell our listeners whom I don't want to take for granted. I don't want to take for granted that Oppen is a kind of household name for them. Who was George Oppen?
00:13:18
Speaker
where, generally speaking, would you situate him in a history of 20th century poetry, let's say? And maybe we can work up towards where the particular poem that you've chosen sort of fits into that story that you tell. But let's just begin at the general level. Who was Oppen
00:13:41
Speaker
And how should we think of his place in poetic history? Sure. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate that. I think probably you can't begin to introduce him without, I think, talking also about the poetic movement that he's generally associated with, which is the objectivist movement. This is a group of poets. It's sort of annoying that they have the same name as the Ayn Rand kind of thing.
00:14:04
Speaker
very different kind of objective very very different really quite politically engaged on the left very self-consciously Jewish albeit in often's case and actually that's sort of in the same way that like it's it's unfair to to
00:14:20
Speaker
you know, generalize completely about the New York school, I think, in some ways. Like, Laurene Niedeker, I think, is essential to telling the story of the objectivist movement as well. But often, for his part, grew up relatively secular, Jewish, in the Bronx until he was around 10 years old, and then grew up. Tell us when he was born, David. Absolutely. Sorry, 1908.
00:14:41
Speaker
I find just some basic dates sort of useful to kind of get situated. Yeah, definitely, numbers, things, places. All of those things will be important in this conversation. Absolutely, and to his aesthetics. Yeah, right. Go on. Yeah, so the objective is with Louis Zukovsky, who I think is really the kind of
00:15:03
Speaker
animating kind of impresario of the movement, as well as Charles Resnikoff, who I sometimes joke is kind of like the Benjamin Franklin sort of elder statesman who's already kind of doing the politics that they love, but you know, right has an essential kind of mentoring role, but also very much are beginning to write poetry in the late 20s and early 1930s under the influence of in kind of
00:15:28
Speaker
not strictly an imitation of, but in an attempt to continue the kind of experimentation that Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams specifically were pursuing. So if imageism in HD certainly is part of the story too, although weirdly doesn't seem to show up in the correspondence all that often, if the image was kind of the thing for them for Oppen, Zukovsky, Niedeker, it's the object to kind of move beyond the surface to try to
00:15:57
Speaker
get your hands in as angular and abrupt and defamiliarizing poetic language as possible to the thing that produces the image. So we're going to necessarily, like you and I, David, are going to cringe at the too crude version of poetic history that we're telling here, but just for the uninitiated then. Of course. Imageism, a movement where, like you say, Ezra Pound,
00:16:25
Speaker
the poet HD, so those initials stand for Hilda Doolittle, right? And William Carlos Williams say, take his three, and of course, well, all three of those poets would go on to write other kinds of poetry over their long lives. But at this kind of early moment, let's say in the 19 teens, they're writing, they're experimenting with a kind of poetry in which the point isn't what a poem
00:16:56
Speaker
means the point isn't necessarily even to sound a particular way. The point instead is for the poem to be a medium that kind of transmits or encodes the image as its essential unit. And so we can think of a poem, I don't know, give people like what are the most famous
00:17:16
Speaker
Well, you know, I don't know, a poem like the Red Wheel Barrow or sorry, the Red Wheel, the Metro poem. Yeah. Right. In a station in a station of the metro or Williams's Red Wheel Barrow poem poems that that don't even sort of have predicates. That is, they just present you with an image. And the point isn't that something happens to the image or whatever. The point is to is to get the image presented to the reader whole somehow.
00:17:44
Speaker
for Oppen at least, this was what was distinctive about modernist poetry to him. He didn't write a lot of, or he didn't publish a lot of prose, but the one essay from 1962 that is generally regarded as being his kind of artist poetica, his statement is called The Mind's Own Place. It takes its title from Milton's Paradise Lost, but he offers this kind of
00:18:06
Speaker
potted history of what modernist poetry was for him that I think is quite useful and it contains just its two sentences and at the end of it is sort of the most famous statement that Oppen makes on poetry. So it goes, modern American poetry begins with the determination to find the image, the thing encountered, the thing seen each day whose meaning has become the meaning and the color of our lives.
00:18:27
Speaker
verse which had become a rhetoric of exaggeration, of inflation, was to the modernist a skill of accuracy, of precision, a test of truth." So that is, as often understood it retroactively from the early 1960s, the conditions on the ground in kind of poetic experimentation that he was encountering, entering into, and seeking to kind of continue and intensify.
00:18:53
Speaker
And okay, that's a lovely way to put it. And so Oppen is a poet who is maybe a generation younger than these modernist poets who, you know, we have come to think of as these sort of giants of the early 20th century, people like Pound, a generation younger than them. And yet, because only a generation perhaps sort of,
00:19:19
Speaker
coming up in a period in which they felt like very live presences and where he felt like he
00:19:27
Speaker
could capture something about what was so compelling about their breakthrough or their break with whatever had come before. And maybe he's thinking of sorts of like late Victorian kinds of poetry or something. I don't know. Anyway. Totally. And yet to sort of take those early energies of modernism and somehow extend them into his own
00:19:51
Speaker
career to remake them somehow, I don't know. One of my favorites, so Oppen does, and I said he didn't publish very much prose, but there's a beautiful edition that Stephen Cope edited with University of California. I think I should just flip to the front so I can give you the exact date.
00:20:06
Speaker
2007. And it compiles his daybooks or these, these strange kind of like scrap paper things that he would dash off kind of prose statements on and would eventually then bind together but with like pipe cleaners, they're like really odd artifacts that they have in the archive in San Diego. And one of the the tossed off phrases that comes kind of strangely after like a consideration of Amiri Baraka's poetry, Oppen writes, imaginary gardens with real Jews in them.
00:20:34
Speaker
which is, I think, his divigation, to use a Maureen McLean term, of Marianne Moore's famous statement about poetry, imaginary gardens with real toads in them. But just think about how it felt for him and Zukoski to kind of enter into this world. That's great. So where the figure of the Jew replaces the figure of the toad in the Moor.
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, Marianne Moore has a poem called Poetry, which famously begins, I too dislike it, and which winds its way towards telling us that what the
00:21:12
Speaker
The way we'll know we have real poetry is when the poets among us can present for inspection imaginary gardens, she says, with real toads in them. This sort of famous moment. Okay, I love that substitution that Oppen gives.
00:21:34
Speaker
Tell us a little bit, so you've given us a sense, David, of where kind of Oppen, of the poetic landscape into which Oppen begins to write poems and begins to care about poetry. But as I teased for our listeners in the intro, his is a career which I think is sort of ripe for narrativizing. So do a bit of that narrativizing for us. Like, tell us what happens.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah, I thought you would never ask. So I think it's very difficult to tell the story of Oppen's entire career without talking about the great love story of his life and his relationship with his wife, Mary. The two of them meet in a first year poetry class at the University of Oregon. And famously, the story of their first date is narrated in his poem, Forms of Love. But the real story was that the two of them went out for a drive. Wait, was that their first date, the forms of love? It was their first date.
00:22:31
Speaker
Oh my God. It was the first day. I know, right? That's one of my favorite. That's one of my favorite. I didn't realize that. Okay, sorry, go on. That's spectacular. So they go out for a drive in a canoodle and they come back to campus after curfew. And George is reprimanded, but the school's quite misogynist sort of variant policy results in Mary being expelled and she gets sent back to Grant's Pass where she is from. And George follows her.
00:22:56
Speaker
He drops out of school and the two of them begin this life live together When he turned 21 he received an inheritance As a result of his mother's suicide and the two of them decide that they're going to live quite intentionally and quite Sparely on the money that that provides and they end up kind of living bicostally for a little while Between New York and San Francisco and in fact There's a fascinating moment where the two of them are like fleeing the Pinkertons that his wealthy father has hired to pursue them and
00:23:24
Speaker
Before in 1929, the two of them moved to France to be close to the printer Maurice de Rontier, who was affiliated with Shakespeare and company. But because there were lessened import duties on paperback printing, he was quite good at it. And they were going to be the kind of overseers of the printing of this press that they were starting with Louis Zukosky, two publishers, which they always explained to like the date of case. And so for those of us who have Latin, it's kind of a funny joke.
00:23:53
Speaker
But for those of us who don't, it's a little obscure. And so make their ways as this sort of second generation kind of apprentice, but like quite politically convicted. They're falling in with leftist politics. They begin to read Lenin and Trotsky, borrowing them from Shakespeare and company, and return to the States in 1932.
00:24:13
Speaker
have this sort of disarming moment where they think that FDR is a Nazi because he uses the eagle iconography, and then become more and more involved in the Communist Party of the United States. And then in a sort of pivotal moment in the late 19th- So this is like in the 30s.
00:24:30
Speaker
Exactly. In either late 1934 or early 1935, George and Mary attend a CPUSA, a Communist Party of the USA, meeting in which the topic of discussion is, what is an adequate Marxist art?
00:24:46
Speaker
and their comrades are offering the example of Ernest Hemingway, spare sort of brusque action-oriented. And George speaks up and says, what about Henry James? What about rigorous psychological exploration? What about a really rich, detailed investigation of interiority and experience and gets shouted down and
00:25:09
Speaker
The way that he records this moment in a letter to a friend is, and I realized at that moment, I couldn't make the art that I wanted to make while also pursuing the politics that I wanted to pursue. And so as of early 1935, stops writing poetry and doesn't write poetry until the late 1950s. There's this crazy.
00:25:31
Speaker
The usual term is a 25-year silence, which I think is kind of officially true from a publishing perspective, but Lucas Mo, a brilliant recent graduate from the Yale PhD program who's currently teaching at Wellesley, actually recovered some poems from the the middle 1930s that trouble that dating. But he resumes writing poetry in 1958, and in part it is because
00:25:56
Speaker
No, it is because I'm going to be really serious about this. It's because his daughter, Linda, sorry, oh, I can't believe I got ahead of myself because in the middle of this sort of donut hole, this extended silence, he goes in any case from the 30s to the 50s. Right. Yeah. In the middle of which he acts as a campaign manager for the Communist Party in Brooklyn. He begins to train as a machinist and
00:26:24
Speaker
Effectively volunteers for World War two. Sorry go ahead
00:26:28
Speaker
No, I was going to say he would get to the part where he leaves the country. Right. Yeah. So he returns with one and a half feet. He has part of a foot blown off by a mine in World War Two, returns to the United States. And I believe they're living in Redondo Beach at the time when he starts being heavily surveilled by the FBI in the late 1940s. And the FBI makes clear that they are not going to leave the family alone. They're going to harass them.
00:26:56
Speaker
To these you know as much as they feel Entitled to and George and Mary and their daughter Linda sort of decide they can't make a life in America anymore With the politics that they they have any experiences they've had and so they they go into exile in Mexico City And they live in the expatriate community with Dalton Trumbo and many of the members of the Hollywood blacklist through the 1950s and in fact George and Mary don't return to the United States until 1961 but in the fall of 1958
00:27:25
Speaker
Their daughter Linda goes to Sarah Lawrence. And in a first year, I believe it's an essay writing class. She just randomly gets assigned to read poems that her dad had written that were published in his first book Discrete Series that was published in 1934. And just to be clear, like he hadn't written more than or published more than that. It wasn't like he was a her dad was a famous poet whom of course she would have been assigned in a college class.
00:27:52
Speaker
No, and it's a collection. I mean, it's a collection that's very important to me, but I don't think that they printed more than a thousand copies of it. It's like an actually kind of astronomical coincidence that it just so happened that Linda gets assigned this work in college. And she writes to her dad to say, you know, could you imagine if you still wrote any poetry today? And he writes back to her
00:28:16
Speaker
Linda Dear, this is fall 1958. His letters are almost never dated, so this one just says Friday, but Rachel Blyde de Plessy has offered the hypothetical dating, or the tentative dating, fall of 1958. And I should say, too, that
00:28:32
Speaker
Without the editorial work of Rachel Blede Plessy, Michael Davidson, and Peter Nichols, none of my work would be possible. And if there are any young grad students listening to this who are thinking about who to work on, they're just about the three nicest and most generous people in the entire world. And my work could not have happened without them. And so if you are not sure what to do, you could really do worse than to work on a poet whose most important critics are as wonderful and caring as they are. George writes to Linda,
00:29:03
Speaker
We continue to get printed stuff from Sarah Lawrence, which refers to us as new parents. They feel we never really were parents before we got in on these things. You write, quote, you'd write very differently if you wrote poems now. I send proof that it's not altogether so, somewhat to my horror.
00:29:20
Speaker
A difficulty about poetry or any such thing within a family is that one naturally expects that one's father or one's mother would say something clearer, more complete, closer to you, and more treasurable than, say, a Puritan stranger like Emily Dickinson. Can't always. Proving indirectly, the conversation is really not an art.
00:29:42
Speaker
he starts writing again, largely at the provocation of his daughter. And from that moment in the late 1950s, it's worth mentioning that his sister June was one of the founding editors of the San Francisco Review, which was sort of like, I think somewhere between the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice for the Bay Area.
00:30:03
Speaker
But was a funny mix totally I think but what I mean is that it was cooler I think Fair enough, but was a really influential Poet or an editor and critic and publisher and so she also is sort of drawing George back into this world But in relatively quick succession in the 1960s. He publishes three books of poetry and this in which the materials and then of being numerous which is
00:30:30
Speaker
a book anchored by a 40 section serial poem that takes the title of being numerous. This is generally regarded as a protest poem against the Vietnam War, and for which George wins the Pulitzer Prize. And it's a kind of massive moment for this really heavily politically engaged poetry, but also a moment in which many of the other objectivists who had been writing in the 1930s with him, Louis Zukovsky, Carl Ricosy, begin writing again, begin
00:30:59
Speaker
publishing again become kind of public figures again and in doing so are recovered as these figures of incredibly principled politically engaged leftist poets recovered from the 1930s into the sort of protest movement that was sweeping the United States in the 1960s.
00:31:19
Speaker
Shortly thereafter, George begins to show symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as Alzheimer's in 1978. But he's showing symptoms well beforehand. And the latter part of his career after of being numerous is marked, I think, by
00:31:39
Speaker
a return to some of the jarring syntax and sort of spare presentations that his earliest poetry were marked by, but at this point very much engaged with the experience of his illness before he eventually passes away in 1984.
00:31:58
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, God, what a fascinating biography you've just summarized for us. So two things stand out to me in preparation for the conversation we're about to have about this poem, Ballad,
00:32:24
Speaker
One is, I've always, I mean, I had always, I mean, as long as I've known about Oppen, I've heard the story of the silence, whatever, and have understood it to be related to and in some sense a product of his political convictions.
00:32:46
Speaker
The story you tell of his sort of coming to the realization that the politics he wanted to pursue weren't compatible with the aesthetics that he felt committed to is a fascinating one. And I guess what is the thought? The thought is something like,
00:33:19
Speaker
Well, for one thing, I can imagine other poets coming to something like that realization and sort of ditching the politics. And so that's not what Oppen does. And that's obviously, that sounds kind of heroic. And I think Oppen sort of plays that role and to the extent that poets now care about him, often that
00:33:47
Speaker
heroism has something to do with it, that kind of political conviction. But there's something even sort of weirder to me about it, which is that for all we know, it's not simply that Oppen said, well, okay, I guess I'm going to stop publishing these poems, which
00:34:04
Speaker
don't reflect well on the cause or aren't received well by my compatriots in the cause and so forth. It's that it genuinely seems, have I got it right, David, that by all accounts, like he stopped writing. I mean, the poems that Lucas has discovered notwithstanding, there's something
00:34:26
Speaker
I don't know, sort of more mysterious to me about the silence than simply a kind of pragmatic decision that the poems weren't going to find the right venues or that they were going to be politically disadvantageous or embarrassing or something. There's something more kind of pure about the decision than that.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it's the sort of like, so his, his first book 1934 is published with a preface by Ezra Pound and gets a glowing review by William Cross Williams and poetry. So like, could not be under the aegis of influential, admired, acclaimed poets more. But I don't think it's, it's the sort of like, as a neurotic millennial, there's a part of me that is like, well, if I can't do something excellently, I'm not going to do it. I don't think it's that.
00:35:13
Speaker
Oh, you don't think it's just that he's being precious. I did such a great job on my first book. I have second book anxiety or something. Yeah, I don't think that that's what it is. Right. I don't think so either.
00:35:25
Speaker
The conditions of their abrupt departure to Mexico were so sudden that I don't think that they took any papers with them. It's very difficult to know what, if anything, he wrote prior to the return to the United States. I don't think that he had a strong sense that he was living the kind of life that was going to be recorded in history.
00:35:48
Speaker
vexing things about working on often because he basically didn't save anything. His side of correspondence is pretty widely available because that's what people archive. If I were to send you a letter, that would be in your papers, not mine. But he didn't really keep what other people sent to him. So it's hard for me to feel totally definitive about that. At the same time, it does seem more or less like that's the case. The nature of the correspondence that Lucas uncovered with Westminster Review really does suggest that he kind of like
00:36:18
Speaker
decided, well, if there isn't a world for this, I don't know what to do. And if I can borrow for a second a kind of a reframing move that I think Peter Nichols makes around the book of Being Numerous that I think is really useful is that it's a transition away from that things are to what they are and how it feels to live within history in a kind of serious way. I think that there is a kind of
00:36:42
Speaker
um, a historicism or not a historicism, but an interest in language and experience outside of the immediate conditions of history that marks 1930s objectivism. And I do think that there's something kind of
00:36:58
Speaker
I'm doing a hand gesture that none of you can see, but my hands are kind of snaking towards each other with increasing proximity between his worldview and what was actually happening in the world as they sort of existed that created the conditions in which he felt like, oh, hey, actually, the art that I really care about does seem like it has a place in the world now.
00:37:18
Speaker
And this brings me to the second point, which is that in the story that you so touchingly tell, it's his daughter encountering his poetry in class.
00:37:33
Speaker
And then his desire, am I drawing the correct conclusion from the letter or the inference that you draw, David, from the letter to Linda, his desire to demonstrate to his daughter that actually maybe he hasn't changed that much
00:38:01
Speaker
that his poetry is not so different from what it once was. It's a really porous expression, but what he says is, you say, if I wrote poetry now, horrified to reveal that it's not so different. It's almost as though this is the kind of instigation, the catalytic moment that he needs to start writing poetry again and find, actually, it's not so different.
00:38:24
Speaker
The way that I feel about language as art and the kind of music that is baked inside of ideas as we express them, it's still there for me in a surprisingly familiar way.
00:38:36
Speaker
Yeah, so this idea that you could go 20 years, whatever, silent and return and sort of pick up the phone again or whatever, and it would be the same sound on the other end, something. There's something actually kind of magical about that.
00:38:56
Speaker
Right. I think you could either find yourself as a 50-year-old man who has seen war, has seen the world, who has seen what human beings can do to each other in the absolute worst and the absolute best that they're capable of, and you find yourself wanting to say the same things that you wanted to say when you were in your mid-20s,
00:39:18
Speaker
not as, uh, if I were to have that moment of realization, I would be like, Oh my God, I'm what a boring person I am. But for George, this is, this is something that does need to be said that the, the need for this to be in the world continues to exist in a way that has to be answered.
00:39:39
Speaker
Right. I mean, I get the worry that it would be a signal that you were a boring person, but I think the other signal that it might offer is one that like, oh, that stuff before it was real, you know, it wasn't, you know, because here it is again, you know, and the self is real. Yeah. Yeah. There's a sense that he was in touch with something that
00:40:04
Speaker
demanded expression that was not receiving expression, and that urgency was surprisingly durable. Yeah, that's lovely. That's a really lovely way to put it. Okay, so I'm just looking at the clock, David, and we gotta get to the poem. So just to remind listeners, the poem is called Ballad. It is the last poem in of being numerous. And in terms of the narrative that David has been laying out for you,
00:40:33
Speaker
Remember, so this is a poem then that he would write, let's say, a decade or so after the return to the US, after the return to writing poetry. We have a recording, in fact, there are several, there are a handful of recordings of Oppen reading the poem that are easily available through the good graces and good offices of
00:40:54
Speaker
the Penn Sound archive, and I'll link to that as well. The particular recording that we're going to listen to is from another decade or so on, from the late 70s. So I think you'll hear the age in Oppen's voice, but I think it's quite an interesting recording nonetheless. There are a couple of recordings that are closer to the composition.
00:41:17
Speaker
of the poem that you can also listen to on the Penn Sound archive. You may need to adjust your volume. I don't know. We'll see how this comes out on the back end to hear the recording well. But this is George Oppen reading the poem Ballad. Ballad. Astrolobes and lexicons once in the great houses, a poor lobsterman met by chance on Swans Island, where he was born,
00:41:48
Speaker
We saw the old farmhouse, propped and leaning on its hilltop on that island where the ferry runs. A poor lobsterman, his teeth were bad. He drove us over that island in an old car, a well-spoken man. Hardly real as he knew in those rough fields. Lobster pots in their gear, smelling of salt. The rocks outlived the classicists, the rocks in the lobsterman's huts and the sights of the island.
00:42:17
Speaker
alleges in the rough seas seen from the road and the harbor and the post office. Difficult to know what one means, to be serious and to know what one means in Ireland as a public quality. His wife in the front seat in a soft dress such as poor women wear. She took it that we came. I don't know how to say, she said, not for anything we did, she said mildly from God, she said,
00:42:46
Speaker
What I like more than anything is to visit other islands. So that's George Oppen reading the poem Ballad. David,
00:43:03
Speaker
So two questions, I don't know if they're related to each other or not in the end, but I'm always interested in hearing guests share with our listeners what thoughts go through their mind as they listen when we have the good fortune of having a recording to play.
00:43:22
Speaker
what thoughts go through their mind as they listen to the voice of the poet about whom they care so much. So a question about what thoughts do you have about Oppen's voice as you hear it again today? I know you've heard it before. Actually, let me just pause there and let you answer that question before I get on to the next. Oh, thanks. Yeah, the first thought is
00:43:49
Speaker
man, I love him. He's just has such a wonderful voice and the, um, the kind of rhythmic peak and shallowing of intensity, you know, it feels a little too cute to say that it feels tidal or that there's something like the waves hitting the shore about the way that he delivers the poem, but it's not stressed in the way that like received speech feels like it is necessarily stressed. It's stressed in this kind of metronomic way, um, that I find really,
00:44:23
Speaker
I feel attuned to it as he's reading, if that makes sense. What was the word you said? I'm using sort of Oppenvernacular, but the Heidegger term stimung, attunement, how it feels to be kind of find yourself
00:44:38
Speaker
calibrated towards and together. Yeah, good. What do you think? Well, yeah, no. Well, who cares? You've heard this before too. I think...
00:44:55
Speaker
There's something kind of peculiar about the way Oppen reads, and I asked you because I'm genuinely curious and I've had a hard time putting my finger on it myself, but knowing what you've just said helps. Because on the one hand, it does not sound, I mean, if you play the recording, I think you would know better than to think it was prose or just somebody talking to you. It sounds different. And yet, it's surprising to me because it,
00:45:25
Speaker
doesn't sound like a poetry reading either, exactly. I mean, he's doing something which I think I understand I can explain as poetic. I mean, clearly, obviously in the poem, in the text, but I mean in his performance of it. And it has something I think to do with rhythm,
00:45:50
Speaker
And something to do with, I get the sense that he's sort of like, it's like he's got all the words on the page and he's sort of picking them up and putting them down like a child playing with blocks or something. Like it's playful, it's not necessarily
00:46:12
Speaker
overly concerned with fidelity to idiomatic expression or to, you know, to use the pound's phrase in the images, in the, you know, in his images statement, the musicality of the phrase, much less, of course, like the regularity of the metronome. I mean, it's not any of that. It's something else again, which is like,
00:46:42
Speaker
I hear it at line breaks. I hear it in his enjambments. I hear it particularly in the phrases. I think I'm sure we'll come to this, the she-saids that get repeated at the end of the poem, which remind me in a way of in the poem that we talked about in the intro, the
00:47:05
Speaker
poem that you told me, I'm so happy for this gift, is about the first date between George and Linda Oppen, which I think is one of the most beautiful love poems I know, a poem called The Forms of Love. In that poem, in the recordings I've heard of Oppen reading it, I hear it in the repetition of the phrase, I remember. There's a
00:47:27
Speaker
he's sort of, he's punctuating the poem in his reading of it and doing so not in a kind of straightforwardly grammatical sense but in some other kind of way which feels more mysterious to me.
00:47:43
Speaker
and makes of the poem a kind of object. Yeah, I'm nodding vigorously. Okay, good, good. My other question for you was going to be about the title of the poem. So the poem is called Ballad, which, you know, I guess what
00:48:02
Speaker
I guess the question for you is, can you tell David, the listeners of the podcast, what do people normally mean by valid in poetry? And what do you make of the fact that this poem is called that notwithstanding what people normally mean when they say valid?
00:48:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think quite often, and I appreciate it in the intro, your nod towards my kind of vicary, I don't know, I care about historical poetics, but I also, as a modernist, am like precisely in the period that historical poetics seems disinterested in or kind of mad at.
00:48:48
Speaker
And but but there is a magnificent essay, I think is sort of the paradigmatic work of historical poetics is Meredith McGill's essay. What is a ballad? And McGill is interested in where and how this term emerges kind of in two places, one in the kind of folk tradition, a primarily oral and then recorded tradition that typically is is narrative.
00:49:14
Speaker
it's typically kind of in media res and typically I think as a sort of mnemonic rhythm cooperates to the sort of 14er structure or the the meter in fact that I think most of us are familiar with is hymn meter however is more often rhymed like a b a b rather than a b c b there is also through the 19th century 18th and 19th century
00:49:40
Speaker
I think actually it really begins in the 16th but kind of comes to a kind of commodified head in the 19th century. A tradition of sort of broadside ballads, poems that are written to narrativize particular moments and events that are imagined as sort of
00:49:56
Speaker
artifacts to be read and sort of circulated as such. But this is neither, right? And instead, this is something kind of infelicitous that seems like it might be teasing one or both of those traditions. Certainly, there's a kind of aura of folk life in the poem, but it's not rhymed. I guess it's narrative, but the story is
00:50:20
Speaker
uh not much of a story certainly not um there's very little daring do right in the story um but the ballot is also and i think this is this is a wonderful sort of point that that mcgill makes in that essay um she uses the term para literary that she borrows from samuel delaney
00:50:41
Speaker
who coins it to talk about both science fiction and literary criticism as work that is heavily engaged with what we sort of traditionally think of as capital L literature, but that exists right on the margins and in fact sometimes and in some ways exists to kind of delimit or to announce the boundaries of what is and is not literary. And for McGill, that is also true of Ballad's relationship to capital P poetry,
00:51:07
Speaker
where the ballot is primarily to be understood as a sort of folk form without the new critical assumptions of, let's say, density, complexity, and genius, if that makes sense.
00:51:25
Speaker
do we, it's probably also worth mentioning that this is the third poem that Oppen writes that kind of takes an infelicitous title out of poetic history as well. The first one is Eklog in his book The Materials in 1962. It's a sort of
00:51:45
Speaker
odd poem that seems to be about a frustration with what people are and are not concerned with. And then the second from his book, This in Which, is Psalm. And Psalm tends to be, I think, the poem that contains the lines of options that are the most frequently quoted.
00:52:01
Speaker
It ends the small nouns crying faith in this in which the wild deer startle and stare out. So in those lines, you get the title of that book, this in which, but it's the small nouns crying faith that tends to be what people gravitate towards. And when asked, Oppen said,
00:52:22
Speaker
Well, it's the faith that there is something. It's the faith that the word means, that it points to the world, that it doesn't just exist on its own. But in all three cases, I think Oppen is interested in a long genre history of poetry and what it means for the moment that he's living in the world and encountering the people and problems that he sees in front of him.
00:52:53
Speaker
ballad, the poem might not feel immediately recognizable as a ballad in a way that's analogous to the ways in which eclog might not seem immediately recognizable as an eclog or psalm immediately recognizable as a psalm. Totally. He's interested in those categories. He's not dismissive of them, but he's
00:53:22
Speaker
What? Borrowing from, reimagining. Yeah, I think he takes very seriously the conviction behind any poetic utterance sort of through history. I think he believes very strongly that you have to believe in what you're saying in order to do it, which I don't know that I believe, but I think George does. And I think it is about trying to find your way into
00:53:49
Speaker
why what are received as genre conventions might have felt urgent and necessary as opposed to simply gestures that you're expected to make. That said, sorry for yelling. I also think, and this is sorry to bring into the podcast a kind of classroom trick,
00:54:08
Speaker
I think I often love to ask students to think about the relation of a title to the rest of the poem and what it's doing, right? Is it this sort of... Is it cueing us into a setting or a condition or a kind of key to open something up or is it acting as a first line? And I do think that this is a poem that actually offers the title as a
00:54:33
Speaker
away into the first line as well. I think that there's something to be said for the way that ballad as this historical folk form that gets recovered and anthologized says something to the astrolabes and lexicons as well.
00:54:47
Speaker
Say more about it. OK, so it's it's a really peculiar first line. Astrolabe's man, that's what what what a first word to lay down as a poet. Absolutely. I'm guessing that that many of the listeners don't even know what an astrolabe is. So it's it's a kind of a now I take it obsolete. Oh, yeah.
00:55:13
Speaker
navigational device that one would have used to navigate by means of measuring the stars, right? Exactly. It's displaced by the compass. To say nothing of GPS. Right, yeah. Or, you know, calling somebody for help.
00:55:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's no triple A for people sailing across the Atlantic in the 16th century.
00:55:47
Speaker
And then a lexicon is a collection of words, right? Exactly. Yeah. And I think typically a collection of words that has a particular point of reference, whether that's geographic, whether that's historic, whether it's professional, I think I often feel like I end up apologizing for how much I deploy a
00:56:10
Speaker
literary critical lexicon in inappropriate settings. Nobody wants to hear about metalepsis when you're watching a basketball game. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. So that would be a way to think of lexicon as maybe a jargon that's associated with a particular kind of discursive field or
00:56:30
Speaker
but also as a collection, right? And I think that there's something about this group of three terms, ballad, astrolabes, and lexicons that all feel as though they are tools who have transitioned from immediate everyday kind of utility into
00:56:53
Speaker
affectations even more than commodities. At the very least, that is how I read that transition into the second line of the poem, Once in the Great Houses. This is not astrolabes and lexicons. Boy, it sure was fun to use them in the world. This is astrolabes and lexicons as they existed on your mantelpiece, on your desk, as they had become curios.
00:57:18
Speaker
And maybe ballads are like astrolabes and lexicons in that sense. If you're a poet like Oppen, you read ballads or you have them in your collection, but they feel like markers of something rather than things to be used in their original sense.
00:57:40
Speaker
Yeah, even like, I don't want to say that it's probably where you first encounter a ballad because ballads still exist, people still sing them, people sing to their children, people sing them on the radio, which is actually maybe radios belong with astrolabes and lexicons. But probably the first time that you have encountered a collection of ballads, it was as a sort of folkloric anthology project rather than as a collection of
00:58:09
Speaker
I think as soon as something is collected, it probably doesn't feel like it's, you know, like, do you think of the tools in your toolbox as a collection of tools? No, you think of them as your tools, right? Right. Right. Right. A collection is a kind of repurposing of the object.
00:58:25
Speaker
Yeah. Cameron is looking over my shoulder. A revaluing of it in a way. Yeah. Sorry. I would say that these issues of pieduma over my shoulder, that's a collection because if I need something from pieduma, I'm going to go on JSTOR and figure it out. But the rest of it, I don't know that I would call a collection, you know?
00:58:43
Speaker
Right, right, right. No, absolutely. That's beautifully said. And so what does it mean to think of the poetic form in that sense? Having said that, I mean, you did, I think, gesture earlier towards
00:58:59
Speaker
the very real way in which this poem, though it's not in the quatrains and it's perhaps not narrative in the way we'd expect the ballad to be, it does seem to be interested in, I think, what you called folk life. And I think we get, you know, in the third line of the poem, a poor lobsterman met by chance on Swans Island. And that figure seems to me as I sort of, you know,
00:59:29
Speaker
As I read the poem in preparation for this conversation, the thought that went immediately through my mind, and maybe this is a kind of tipping of the hand of my own education in poetry, was like, oh, this is like one of those characters that Wordsworth meets.
00:59:49
Speaker
when he's out for a walk. This is like the leech gatherer or something like that. And maybe it's a ballad in that sense. It's like a lyrical ballad or something. So talk about that figure as he appears, a poor lobsterman, David. Absolutely. Met by chance on Swans Island where he was born. Yeah. There is a sense, I think, of
01:00:17
Speaker
belonging and estrangement, right? So probably it helps to give a little bit of background to... No, no, no, I've given you loads of background. Let's talk about this as it erupts in the poem. I think we immediately get the sort of abrupt sense that the poor lobsterman is not in the great houses, that whatever the lobsterman is up to, it is probably not collecting
01:00:39
Speaker
outdated navigation technology, but is almost certainly navigation as a part of his life because we come to know him and meet him as someone who makes his living from the ocean, from the water, and it's a pretty tough one.
01:00:56
Speaker
Poor is, you know, I take here as being probably more economic than emotional, right? I don't think this is the woe begone lobsterman. I think that this is like the lobsterman who's scratching on his liver. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And there's, and for people who aren't looking, there's a real break between, I mean,
01:01:16
Speaker
grammatically, the beginning of the poem is odd. It to me seems often like, and maybe not odd in that sense, but in that it's sort of a
01:01:29
Speaker
The poem begins with two lines that sound like they begin a sentence, but then the sentence gets sort of broken off by a dash at the end of the second line, which is the end of the first stanza, and a poor lobsterman is the third line of the poem, the second stanza of the poem, all on its own, just one line. So there's a real kind of feeling of, I think, disjunction between those initial two lines and the sudden eruption, as you put it, of this character in the third line.
01:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, and thinking about looking at it now, and maybe this is... I don't know how this corresponds to the Wordsworthian gesture, but I do get the sense that...
01:02:08
Speaker
often is interested in how it is that these things came to be once in the Great Houses, but the lobsterman's not, that we admit into our homes things throughout history, objects, commodities, but don't always admit people what that kind of abrupt distance between hospitality means here. And then
01:02:31
Speaker
Yet the Lobsterman is, I think, a really real sense, hosting Oppen. I should probably totally put my cards on the table and say that I'm going to totally dispense with the lyric or the convention of the speaker of the poem. I think that there's way too much from George and Mary's life here for the poem to be a kind of persona or anything else. I think that this is very much George Oppen writing as George Oppen.
01:03:01
Speaker
and that this is an encounter met by chance on Swan's Island. He's from the place where they have arrived at. There is this sense of their dislocation as well as in the broader sweep of material history, the lobsterman's dislocation from that.
01:03:21
Speaker
George and Mary are tourists and the lobsterman is at home. That's the idea. So they had a place on Deer Island in Maine, in Penobscot Bay, and I'm fairly sure they came to Maine as a result of Linda being in Saratoga, or they sort of fell in love with the Northeast. But there's a moment where George talks about how
01:03:46
Speaker
Maine feels to him the way that New Rochelle in the Bronx, where he was originally born and spent the first 10 years of his life, felt to him in the first decade of the 20th century. And so in an odd way, even though Maine seems pretty far from the Bronx today, this felt like a sort of homecoming to him. And they had a very small boat that they would use to sail from island to island. But the nature of the sort of weather systems on Penobscot Bay are such that they would very often be kind of shut in by fog and have to
01:04:15
Speaker
dock and wait. So wait out until conditions lessened to the point that it was safe to sail again. And this feels, yeah, that they're sort of arriving here. In an essay, Mary Oppen, titled Remain, R-E-colon-M-A-I-N-E, talks about how this felt a little bit like science fiction.
01:04:37
Speaker
that even though these are all these islands in Maine, when they got trapped in a place by fog, it would suddenly feel like they had landed on another planet. And so I think that there is that sense of estrangement, alienation, the interest in trying to make sense of each other across the differences in their lives. I think that that's happening almost right away, that we need that sort of nomic strange opening and the
01:05:05
Speaker
It's not even quite an M dash. It's like a double M dash until we get the lobsterman to have that sense of estrangement. Oh, yeah. No, that's lovely. And I mean the idea of what an island is going to return as a crucial one by the end of the poem. But I love this idea of the
01:05:32
Speaker
of the islands or what you said about Mary thinking of it almost as a kind of science fiction of the island as almost a
01:05:44
Speaker
each island as its own world somehow, which of course also raises questions perhaps or the idea of the island as a kind of figuration of the self as I think of the jaunt on line, no man is an island.
01:06:07
Speaker
of the idea that one is tempted, at least potentially, to take the self as a kind of entire and enclosed and circumscribed kind of terrain, which seems
01:06:28
Speaker
I don't know, a temptation, but a kind of misreading of the geography of the poem.
01:06:37
Speaker
Yeah, and I think also is a temptation that the younger George Oppen was really interested in and engaged with. I think one of the lines of the long poem of being numerous that people often sort of pluck out is the shipwreck of the singular. And this continues and I think amends, even responds to the sailing motifs that saturate all of his writing. He's a really committed sailor, really good at it, really loved it, kind of felt at home on the water.
01:07:05
Speaker
And that early collection Discrete Series is filled with these sort of short poems that take as moments of disjuncture how it feels to be on the water. One of my favorites, it's really, really short. Can I read a six lines for you? You can, yeah. This is towards the end of the collection, untitled, it says,
01:07:31
Speaker
on the water solid the singleness of a toy a tug with two barges oh what oh what will bring us back to shore the shore coiling a rope on the steel deck so this this idea of separation these sort of distances inertia movement current the way that they carry us but they carry us away they carry us apart um and
01:07:59
Speaker
But he returns, when he returns to writing, all of this sort of, I almost want to say iconography, because at the very least to me, it's so sort of significant for his poetic lexicon. But at this point now, suddenly it's troubled, right? These distinctions, these moments become actually opportunities for connection rather than reminders of some sort of incompleteness or insufficiency.
01:08:28
Speaker
No, that's great. Can I push us right to the one that I had no idea what to do? Yeah, push us right off our moorings to, met by chance in Swan's Island where he was born, we saw the old farmhouse propped and leaning on its hilltop. The sense that the poor lobstermen also
01:08:51
Speaker
dwells within, comes from, maybe was even born in this farmhouse that has been in a state of slight collapse for goodness knows how long. How does it feel to encounter this propped and leaning farmhouse after these great houses?
01:09:11
Speaker
Well, I mean, sorry, are you asking me? I am. Well, maybe I'm asking the listener, you know. Sound off in the comments.
01:09:23
Speaker
Leave a five-star review. I mean, it raises a couple of things for me. One is, I mean, there's the clearer kind of feeling and maybe this part of it feels sort of consistent with what I was saying earlier about like the Wordsworthian sort of vibe here of the, you know, the lobsterman as the kind of rustic figure
01:09:47
Speaker
Who's very existence contrast with the kind of sophistication of the world that is.
01:09:58
Speaker
that exists on the kind of periphery of it, that we take it, the poem is written in and read in, you know? And that the kind of that figure of, that kind of rustic figure supplies is sort of, I'm giving this the most kind of cynical reading possible, but
01:10:26
Speaker
is sort of like mined or extracted for its life-giving vitality and gives the poem something of the kind of feeling of real life, which is the thing that poems need in the way vampires need, the blood of
01:10:45
Speaker
Young, healthy, living people. Yeah, I think this is almost exactly what annoys some of my peers about Oppen because he is living on this trust fund into his 50s and 60s. And there's this moment where he's meeting this person and is having this sort of encounter, this experience whose
01:11:11
Speaker
The idea of having spent your entire life living in a house that is constantly on the verge of falling down feels almost theatrically distinct from somebody who grew up, you know, his father owned the first chain of theatres in the San Francisco area. And this was, you know, when I showed my wife the poem that I was thinking about talking to you about, she read it, she was like, oh, what an asshole.
01:11:35
Speaker
This rich poet shows up and he's like, Oh, great. A poor person. Can I throw you into my poem? I don't know. I don't know if you ever watched the show 30 Rock, but there's a moment where the Tracy Morgan says to a janitorial staff member, Oh, can I please touch your rough hands? This was
01:11:56
Speaker
And here it comes back. A poor lobsterman comes back and then the next line, his teeth were bad. That's the detail you need to know about him. Totally. Yeah. Can you give this guy a break, please? You don't need his name. You need to know that his teeth were bad. His teeth were bad. But I should say,
01:12:16
Speaker
The ethics of a gesture like this were something that were really important to Oppen and that he took very seriously. And so in a later interview when asked about this poem and about this moment specifically, he said, you know, the first person I showed the poem to was the lobsterman, because I wanted to make sure that he was okay with me doing this, that he didn't, you know, that this didn't feel like an unfair characterization, that this didn't feel cruel. And the lobsterman said, No, no, this is this is
01:12:44
Speaker
What happened? This is as it existed, that he didn't have any issues with it. And in a strange moment, poor Lobster and his Heath are bad. He drove us over that island in an old car, a well-spoken man, but we don't get any of his speech. Right.
01:13:03
Speaker
right he doesn't he doesn't um what what you might expect is about to happen is that he's he's about to tell you let me tell you about my childhood and then it comes in sort of reported speech or something like that and it's a moving story and the poet goes home kind of moved by what he's heard and so on um no that doesn't happen
01:13:25
Speaker
This feels related to me in a way to the line that you were asking me about earlier, the farmhouse propped and leaning on its hilltop, which on the one hand, right, I think the idea is like, well, this is the place he's from. There's a kind of sort of grounding or sort of solidity to it, but it also feels kind of precarious and provisional, like it's sort of teetering on the edge of collapse or something. I get the same
01:13:55
Speaker
kind of paradox in, he drove us over that island in an old car, a well-spoken man, hardly real. There's on the one hand, he seems like...
01:14:11
Speaker
Right the gesture feels familiar and perhaps this is the thing that would annoy the the the friends or your wife or whatever the The kind of he oh, I know who this character is. He's like the salt of the earth real real person Yeah, who's rough hands. We want to feel so literally smelling it's getting a couple lines, right?
01:14:28
Speaker
on the other hand he's a kind of he's he's he's from the place he's from what's it called swans island if it sounds like a it sounds like a fairy tale kind of location and he himself is hardly real as I don't know if that makes it better or worse in a way the the ethics of it but it makes him seem sort of magical to me
01:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, even to offer a heretical paraphrase, you could call this farm at the falling down house, right? It suddenly sounds like we're in board book territory or something like that. The lobsterman in his falling down house feels like something that you might read to a niece or a nephew.
01:15:10
Speaker
Annoying to talk about line breaks in an auditory medium in which your it's crucial we do it in every episode David Yeah, go ahead But it is you know as we're talking through it I can't help but notice first of all that like quite often lines that seem like they they follow syntactically relatively comfortably from previous lines are very often interrupted by stanza breaks and This is a poem that you know if the ballads form
01:15:33
Speaker
One of the ways that we know it is in these quatrains. This is a poem that never gives us a four-line stanza. There's no risk of a quatrain on the page. But we get this abrupt shift from hardly real, as he knew in those rough fields, lobster pods in their gear, smelling of salt, the rocks outlived the classicists, the rocks and the lobsterman's huts. So whatever state of proximity to collapse this farm has existed,
01:16:00
Speaker
It and the rocks are outliving the classicists. There is some sense of permanency or durability. I think permanent feels like the wrong word for this poem, but durable. There is something durable about what is happening here that is, I think, hard to narrativize, but feels immediate and true. Yeah. What does it mean for a rock to outlive anything?
01:16:30
Speaker
Yeah. How much life is a rock really having? You know, I think that there's probably. Is there is there David, sorry to interrupt you, but is there I mean, you raised it earlier and I remember we talked at the beginning of this conversation for a moment or two about what images meant and your contention was, you know, not the contention, your very helpful
01:16:58
Speaker
summary of the literary history was that, you know, Oppen belongs to this group of this development in poetics that's related to images, but a kind of departure or development of it called objectivism. We never really stopped to say really what sort of the object as unit kind of meant to the objectivists, not again, not the Ayn Rand kind, but the George Oppen kind.
01:17:27
Speaker
Is this a moment to say something about that? I mean, I realize we're half a century later or nearly or decades later from maybe 20 or 30 years later. But the problem is still real for him, right? Yeah, so say something about it. Yeah, I think maybe a succinct way of thinking into the problem that the objectivist poets were interested in
01:17:50
Speaker
If I can make a kind of intermedial gesture, we might think about how, you know, if we want to represent like a cube on the page and we can draw the lines and we can sort of affect the sensation of depth, but we are also only presenting three of six sides, right? And I think the objectivists were interested in how to reform language to give the sensation of the apprehension of all six sides at once.
01:18:15
Speaker
what it means to take in the totality of the thing in such a way that acknowledges that the limits of our perceptual capacities render that perspective impossible. So where and how we have to manipulate language in order to make both the pursuit of that and its impossibility real and live. But also, you know, let's not
01:18:39
Speaker
totally take off the table, the idea that this sort of vexing problem that if George is thinking about Henry James as being an important kind of literary aesthetic precedent, when we talk about writing objectively, we're not really talking about something that feels saturated in emotional expression either, right? That what the poem is interested in drawing out and presenting for the reader
01:19:06
Speaker
exists within and needs to be excavated rather than being imposed upon or even, let's say, emotionally narrativeized. They're not telling stories, I think is probably a pretty succinct accounting of objectivist poetics. And they are also interested in where and how
01:19:25
Speaker
those problems were, I think, trans-historical in a way that the later George is not. In fact, you know, I said near the beginning of the episode that he has this kind of one prose statement that is often returned to by critics. But in fact, in the poem of Being Numerous, section 27 begins, it is difficult now to speak of poetry
01:19:45
Speaker
it is not precisely a question of profundity, but a different order of experience. And this is not, um, lineated in the way that his poetry typically is, it's written as prose. It is not precisely a question of profundity, but a different order of experience. One would have to tell what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is for us, what happens in time, what thought is in the course of a life, and therefore what art is and the isolation of the actual. I think
01:20:12
Speaker
Objectivism was really interested in that isolation of the actual but as george comes back to it and is interested in what those aesthetic techniques can do it is now with what the world is for us what happens in time what is that that layer of.
01:20:28
Speaker
the individual understanding themselves to be working, thinking, processing. And so I think this abrupt moment, the rocks, because I live the classicists, the rocks and the lobsterman and the huts, I think that there is a true way to take that, which is to say that if you're a human being, these things that I am seeing and encountering are going to be here after your life in all likelihood.
01:20:56
Speaker
But I also think that there is a question of what life is. What does it mean to live? And I think classicists here is well chosen. Certainly, we could take this as a critique of academia or of the rarefication of knowledge. But I also think that it's really specifically about this looking backwards, classicists as interpreters of a bygone past as
01:21:25
Speaker
of antiquity. Exactly, right? To cherish and to transmit, but maybe not to necessarily be present. And I think that that's probably unfair to the classicists in my life, but I think we can see what he's doing there, right? Right. And the lobsterman is a presentist or something?
01:21:48
Speaker
Well, the lobsterman, at least the structure of this two-line stanza, the lobsterman's huts are like the rocks, which feels a little weird because certainly those are different timescales that we were talking about. But yeah, you're right.
01:22:04
Speaker
I think there's a kind of paratactic suggestion that the lobsterman too is participating in a kind of active embodied lived life in a way that being a classicist is not.
01:22:19
Speaker
There's something also just I don't know if it's sort of dumb kind of intuitive sense I have that the level of the image or something that the huts, the rocks,
01:22:35
Speaker
And maybe the lobsterman is like a linguistic creation, lobsterman is one word. Yeah, right. You know, it gives one the impression, you know, it's like, what if the lobsterman were the lobsterman in the way like Spiderman is Spiderman, right? You know, it's like, you know what I mean? It's like,
01:22:55
Speaker
is somehow made into, right, has this kind of hard exterior, you know, this exoskeleton or something. Hardly real in a literal sense. Yeah, right, yeah. The way that he's real is by being hard. By being hard, that's how he's real, that's right. Yeah. And there's something, there's a kind of, that's the thing that the rocks, the huts and the lobstermen have in common is these sort of
01:23:24
Speaker
exoskeleton, this kind of rough exterior that maybe... I don't know what more to say about it than that. And then we're given this tour and the sights of the island, the ledges in the rough seas seen from the road, and the harbor, and the post office. That seems like...
01:23:54
Speaker
a kind of easy enough to follow sort of tour guide like presentation of what George remembers seeing while taken around by the Slopsterman on Swans Island. But then there is one of these interjections like you were maybe talking about earlier.
01:24:22
Speaker
that interrupts the tour, to my reading at least. So, and the harbor and the post office, those are two lines, and the harbor one line and the post office another that make up a little couplet. And then the next stanza goes like this, difficult to know what one means, line break. And then between two M dashes,
01:24:47
Speaker
as a line to be serious and to know what one means. So David, I'd want to know where that interjection fits into the tour of swan, you know, like why do we get those lines there and then in the poem?
01:25:10
Speaker
Well, or say anything about those lines, which are going to be a little obnoxious, which is to say that I think that the one thing that those lines I can say for sure do is they let me know that it's difficult to express this completely and satisfactorily. The way that I always kind of back into this moment is how strange it is to say to be serious and to know what one means in part because
01:25:33
Speaker
I don't know about you, but I don't really think of humor as being part of George's poetic toolkit. I keep saying his first name and I feel like I should be more scholarly about this, but I just feel like I know him so well. You're distinguishing him from Mary, too. Right. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.
01:25:52
Speaker
But he's not funny as a poet, as my science. So you're taking the implied alternative to being serious, being funny.
01:26:05
Speaker
I suppose it could be frivolous or to be superfluous or to be wilding or something like that, but these all feel like registers that he's not necessarily interested in occupying. I suppose they should say, I am taking as a given that we should read across that M dash that difficult is still applying, right? Difficult to know what one means, to be serious and to know what one means.
01:26:32
Speaker
in a poem as sort of jagged as this one is, I suppose that that in and of itself is a claim that probably needs to be at least acknowledged, if not necessarily substantiated. But difficult to know what one means, that feels almost idiomatic in ways that other parts of the poem are not, right? Difficult to know what one means. I think I probably know it that refers to the way that
01:26:58
Speaker
I think, first of all, language is unruly and can be uncooperative. You don't need Bakhtin to know that you can say something and have it be received differently by someone else. What happens between people can be unpredictable and can often be frustrating. But knowing what you mean does seem to be the goal here.
01:27:28
Speaker
Well, I want to, I want to stop and just ask in a more basic sense, what that line, because it seems to me that line could mean a couple of different things that just take the difficult to know what one means line. Like on the one hand, I think it could mean something like it's hard to understand each other. Right.
01:27:55
Speaker
Right? So in that sense, like the one could be like some other person. When one is speaking to someone else, it is difficult to know what one means, what that other one has meant in other words.
01:28:13
Speaker
But it also seems, and actually the first way I read it was not that way, but was to read it in some sort of, I guess, stranger or more private sense that like before one, you know, OK, cards on the table moment, right?
01:28:31
Speaker
The echo I heard as soon as I read the line was of the line in the Love Song of Jail for Prufrock, T.S. Eliot's Love Song of Jail for Prufrock, it is impossible to say just what I mean, right? That moment of frustration that Prufrock has. Like, he wants to say what he means, but he can't quite say what he means. And because of languages,
01:28:53
Speaker
insufficiencies or his own sort of special ineffability or whatever, right? Here, what I was hearing in the line is a kind of problem that is in some sense prior to that problem. Like Prufrock's problem presumes that you, David, before you speak, you know what you mean. It's just hard to say it. It's hard to express it accurately.
01:29:21
Speaker
Right, or that the conditions are such that I can't say it now. Yeah, right, sure. But the problem that I'm describing as potentially, at least being prior to that, would be the problem that I don't know what I mean even before I've tried to say it.
01:29:44
Speaker
So do you do you like I don't know my own mind in a way. Right. Right. And so do you do you then read that metapoetically to take and the sites of the island, the ledges and the rough seas seen from the road and the harbor and the post office difficult to know what one means to be. Why am I saying these things? Yeah. The poem almost talking to itself and saying these feel like things that had to be in this poem, but I don't know why.
01:30:10
Speaker
I don't get it. Yeah. Yeah. Difficult. What are these doing here? Right. I know what they were doing there on Swans Island in the world, but what are they doing here on the page in my mouth and my voice? That's great. The poem. Yeah. There's this moment I love. Yeah. Well, just to be serious and to know what one means. I think if we take the problem of the prior line seriously, sorry. Oh, just tautology.
01:30:38
Speaker
But if we take the prior line to be sincere, I think we are invited to understand that the poem is being serious and that part of the problem of meaning, part of the problem of interpretation that is both intersubjective but also reflective and almost meditational is that difficulty. Why, when I put these words down on the page, are these the words from this experience that feel like they need to be here?
01:31:08
Speaker
Right. So this is why I think the kind of alternative to being serious isn't being funny, but is actually something more like being frivolous or being unserious in a kind of, I don't know if that I'm just predisposed to think this because of what we've said about Oppen's biography, but to be like unserious politically or something or to be... Right. Or to you, like,
01:31:33
Speaker
To go back to that expression about what what it was that modern American poetry was seeking a corrective to, it was the idea of exaggeration and inflation. And I think he takes that economic and rhetorical sort of correspondence or harmony quite seriously. The idea that both one of the problems with poetry was that it is making a lot out of things that are not enormous, but are real and also that
01:32:01
Speaker
we're not being true if we're exaggerating. To exaggerate is to not be serious. That's good. It would be easier to, if you were content with bullshitting, then you could act as though you easily, you could act as though you knew what you meant. But if you're not content to do that, if you're not content to rely on the kind of thing one means in this setting,
01:32:31
Speaker
but if you're committed to saying actually what you mean now, then it becomes difficult. But to just sort of press on that meta poetic gesture that I think that you've brought us towards, it does rather suggest that people are quite often, poets are quite often frivolous with and about themselves in isolation, in reflection, in recollection, not just- Reclamation and tranquility.
01:33:00
Speaker
It's not just charisma and charm. It's actually a kind of aesthetically enabled delusion. Yeah. That sort of underwrites and makes possible the sort of sensible poetic utterance or something. Maybe you don't have to take 25 years away from writing poetry if you are comfortable with yourself being frivolous sometimes. I guess. That's right. Yeah, no, that's what I'm thinking of. Okay, so then he goes from there.
01:33:31
Speaker
The poem kind of, there's like a, I don't know, if it were a song, I would say there's a key change or something after that moment. That moment's a kind of bridge. Yeah, we're going up a fifth, yeah.
01:33:42
Speaker
I don't know enough about music to confirm that, but I'll take your word for it. An island has a public quality. That's a funny and paradoxical seeming kind of line to me because I would think that if an island had any quality, it would be a private quality. Explain the paradox or address the paradox, David.
01:34:06
Speaker
I think, you know, within the poem, we could certainly take that public quality to be a gesture to the ferry that runs to Swans Island. The idea that this is an island, however,
01:34:20
Speaker
topographically enclosed by the bay is nevertheless made available by the vehicular affordances of the—I don't know, sorry. This is annoying professor language, but you can get to it. This is a public island in the way the Deer Island maybe isn't. And this is, I think, probably a little contentious, but
01:34:44
Speaker
I can't hear this moment without hearing an Emily Dickinson echo in this moment. The poem that if I can do the sort of inhospitable gesture of calling back to a prior episode of your own podcast, of your conversation with Johanna Winant,
01:35:02
Speaker
But the poem, I'm Nobody, Who Are You, includes that great sort of non, kind of funny line, how public like a frog. Like a frog, yeah. And I definitely think that that is funny.
01:35:17
Speaker
I definitely think that Emily Dickinson knows what she means. And I do think that there is something happening in this moment in the poem where, and maybe it is only because I read that letter at the beginning of George writing to Linda and saying, if only my work was more transparent to you than a puritan stranger like Emily Dickinson's, but sadly it's not. But I think Dickinson is a really important poetic precedent for him in a way that
01:35:45
Speaker
generally, Oppen scholarship doesn't typically acknowledge. In that first year poetry class in which he meets his wife, the assigned textbook is Conrad Aiken's Modern American Poets. It's published in 1922. And the only poet who is not alive that is anthologized within that collection is Emily Dickinson, and by far the best represented poet in the book. This is a book that Oppen keeps with him for his entire life. And I think that
01:36:11
Speaker
in being interested in, you know, as that rocks outlive the classicist moment, this is a poem that is interested, yeah, in encounter and in estrangement in genres as artifacts of history as we receive and experience them. And it's probably worth mentioning that Emily Dickinson wrote in Him Meter, which is also called The Ballad Form. Right.
01:36:32
Speaker
but is also I think a poem that is interested in life and death right this is a poem that is interested in how long things last what it means as long as it lasts an island seems like something that lives in so far as a rock lives and so I think that you know
01:36:49
Speaker
But is it something about the island's insularness, insularity, that's the word, is it something about insularity that produces the public quality, which may seem paradoxical, but is actually sort of part of what Oppen is realizing in this moment. You mean because it is a space that that moment of encounter, that feeling of estrangement, that sci-fi feeling can be shared, can be
01:37:20
Speaker
individuating but also common, right? I guess so. Anyone else arriving on Swans Island, yeah, Swans Island, can have the experience of first arriving on Swans Island. And that's a kind of participation in the public. Right. Does that make sense? I think so. I think so, yeah. I don't know. What do you mean by an island has a public quality? I don't know. I think you said it better than I could, yeah. Well, but I actually did, I think, a kind of annoying thing, which was I like,
01:37:49
Speaker
sidestepped into interpoetic history and like meta poetic gesture rather than taking seriously on its face, which is exactly what the poem wants us to do at that exact moment, because it is talking directly to us and saying difficult to know what one means to be serious to know what one means. An island has a public quality. I mean, it is difficult. That is a difficult expression. Yeah, in a way, the poem is doing exactly what it has prepared us for. Why?
Emily Dickinson's Public Persona
01:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think a key word that you've used a couple of times here is encounter, you know, and, you know, well, of course it's like common, I mean, not to stay with Dickinson for too long, but I think it's a kind of commonplace to think of her as an insular kind of figure as sort of,
01:38:42
Speaker
Oh, inaccurate, ultimately, or incomplete as that mythical kind of impression of her might be. But there's something about the kind of encounter, you know, I think of like Higginson's narrative of like having met Dickinson for the first time and how strange she seemed to him and so on. Yeah.
01:39:05
Speaker
but there's something about the encounter with her that makes him wanna like write back to describe, it sort of produces this kind of public moment in a paradoxical way. She's also, I was in Amherst for the summer last summer and the fun paradox of Emily Dickinson is there's probably no more public Amherst resident in history than Emily Dickinson. Right, yeah, there you go.
01:39:34
Speaker
how it is that this sort of, however inaccurate or biographically incomplete it is to refer to as a kind of social island is also the most public of that place in time.
Introduction of the Lobsterman's Wife Character
01:39:50
Speaker
Yeah. So we get another character in the sort of concluding movement of the poem, David. It's not Emily Dickinson, but it's the lobsterman's wife.
01:40:03
Speaker
who, if I could just remind our listeners of these lines and then ask you to comment on them, this is how the poem ends. His wife in the front seat in a soft dress such as poor women wear, she took it that we came, I don't know how to say, she said, not for anything we did, she said, mildly from God. She said, what I like more than anything is to visit other islands.
01:40:33
Speaker
This is a character that I hadn't been prepared to meet by the poem before this moment. She sort of emerges and takes over the poem in a way. And there are a number of things that are interesting to me about these lines, but just sort of looking over them as a whole, I guess I want you to help us see our way into them.
Analysis of Character's Speech Patterns
01:41:01
Speaker
the only offsets of sort of orthographically on the page, the only words that are offset as direct reported speech are from God, right? The rest of it exists kind of in a space of paraphrase, although the fact that this is also the first time in the poem where we're getting things like commas and this sense of momentum, not just parataxis, but a relatively
01:41:32
Speaker
available sense of speech. She took it that we came, I don't know how to say, she said, not for anything we did, she said, mildly from God, she said. She's also talking about the same problem that that difficult to note one means problem is, right? I don't know how to say, right? She's having the same experience that the poem is having.
01:41:56
Speaker
And now rather than she, whereas in the first part of the poem, the lobsterman was the kind of object of attention and inquiry, now she's
01:42:12
Speaker
describing what the we who I take it are George and Mary or something often have come to her island. She's sort of, yeah, like writing her own poem about them or something. Yeah, they present to her the same problem that the poem is presenting to us, I suppose.
Exploring Character's Intentions
01:42:40
Speaker
I love, you know,
01:42:42
Speaker
His wife in the front seat, I can't help but hear this being sort of questioned over the shoulder. There's this real sense of being in the car, how it's moving, how awkward of an arrangement that is in which to broach a question like, what are you doing in my home? What are you doing on my island? And I love how odd, not for anything we did, she said, is as an expression.
01:43:10
Speaker
I think I can take that as being you're not here for work, like you're not here also as a lobsterman, but for anything we did that the past tense also makes it feel almost like you get banished to this island or that it is a consequence for an action. You're not here because you did something, you're not fleeing something.
01:43:30
Speaker
The way I had taken that line, she took it that we came, it's as though she knows she wants to say, it seems to me you came from God. Right. But as she's saying it, she's sort of preemptively qualifying or apologizing for it. So she's saying, she's sort of interrupting herself to say, I don't know how to say, she said. And then I think she's saying, it's not because you're acting
01:44:01
Speaker
It's not because of anything that you did while you were here that I'm going to say the thing that I'm about to say. Right, right, right, yeah. That's how I take the not for anything we did. Right, it's not that you've come to this island. I'm not saying this because you were behaving in a kind of proselytizing way or whatever that would, whatever it would mean. Right, there were benevolent way, you didn't solve, you didn't deus ex machina out of some sort of problem.
Poem's Rhetorical Devices
01:44:24
Speaker
Right, right. But I also think that that, I don't know how to say is also like,
01:44:30
Speaker
Is it annoying to use a term like cringe? There is something about what needs to be expressed here that also feels to get back to the proof rock problem, right? Are the conditions actually appropriate for me to say what I need to say or what would be true to say? She took it that we came from God, she said.
01:44:52
Speaker
There's also something funny about the word mildly, which I think I want to take as an adverb that's modifying the way she says it. She says it mildly.
01:45:11
Speaker
It would be odd to come from God mildly, right? Yeah, right. You've been assigned a divine mission with indifference or with sort of half-hearted intent. And then I can't hear, especially in my memory now of hearing Oppen's reading of the poem, which I guess I tried to do my impression of as I just read the last lines that I did it differently, I'm sure.
01:45:34
Speaker
The repetition of that, she said, you know, whatever it's called, like the dialogue tag or, you know, the, I don't know how to say, she said, line break. Not for anything we did, she said, line break. Mildly from God, she said. So three lines in a row end with the phrase she said.
01:45:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's really- Each time they're punctuated differently, but yeah, go on, say something. Well, it's very directly rhetorical in a way, in the sense of rhetorical device, in a way that often typically shies away from. And even you could think about that moment up the page and the sites of the island, the ledges and the rough sea scene from the road, and the harbor, and the post office. It's almost like the second of the four lines there, the ledges,
01:46:20
Speaker
emerges just to take anaphora off the table, right? That the poem is not inviting you to read it in this sort of rhetorical logic, but we get by the end of this poem, and I think, you know, I said this to you over email before we had a chance to do this, that this is one of these moments where I actually understand epistrophe, that is to say, the repetition of a clause or word at the end of a line, to really be distinct from anaphora, in that it does feel like it's gathering, it's conclusive each time that we get to the she said, right?
Human Connection in the Poem
01:46:47
Speaker
This is...
01:46:49
Speaker
Yeah, it is letting you know that there are all of these different ways that arriving at this moment of, you know, wanting to convey to through the poem this. It's not really a conversation because we never hear from them, right? This statement, this hypothetical blessing that they receive. I think quite seriously that she's
01:47:18
Speaker
you know, sorry, can I use a word like miracle? Right? That there is something unanticipated and a reminder of the enormity of the unapprehendable enormity of the design in just getting to know each other, right?
01:47:37
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's great. And yeah, go ahead. Well, just that they're, you know, superficially, there are things about the Opens that could make meeting them and knowing them seem, you know, totally strange. And I can imagine that. But I think also, you know, they live on this another island in this Bay as well. So in a strict geographic sense,
01:47:59
Speaker
It shouldn't be so weird that they met each other. But it is, right? It is always a little bit of a miracle to meet another person. Absolutely. Especially if you think of people as islands of a sort. Yeah. And I mean, this is, I don't know whether you were going to go there, but the Dunne expression, right? No man is an island doesn't come from a Dunne poem. It comes from a bit of devotional prose that he wrote.
01:48:26
Speaker
I had initially thought that it was a sermon, but I don't know for certain that he ever read it or delivered it publicly. It has very much probably become the best known line of dones to the extent that I think that most people don't know that it's done when they say it or hear it. But this too is about how we understand ourselves to be part of something that exists far beyond us.
Storytelling Style in the Poem
01:48:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad that you said that, but I wasn't going to go there exactly. Instead, I was going to say something about how that she said moment. I mean, I think you're quite right about the way it's functioning at the end of the line. It also in a kind of
01:49:10
Speaker
more plain spoken way to me sounds like the way people tell stories. Like if I said to you, David, so I was talking to this other person and I said to her, I said, in the way that, so she says to me, she says. I have the annoying tag of using like, I was like this and they were like this. Yeah.
01:49:32
Speaker
Yeah, so there's something kind of remarkable, I think, about the way that it both feels like the poem at its most talky and kind of idiomatic, like storytelling. And yet it also feels kind of incantatory.
01:49:49
Speaker
at the same time, which is a hard trick to pull to be both things at once. And then we get those last, so then the final she said comes at a line break before the final stanza, but it doesn't have any punctuation, so it feels more sort of enjambed. She said, and we go right into the final two lines of the poem, what I like more than anything is to visit other islands. And the poem ends trails off in these ellipses.
01:50:15
Speaker
So there's something kind of like magically, I keep using that word here, I think, but or versions of it, but the sort of aperture opening about the end of that poem, those final two lines of the poem.
Significance of the Poem's Final Lines
01:50:28
Speaker
And I wonder as a way to conclude or before we wrap up the conversation, if you have anything to say about the last two lines of the poem, David.
01:50:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's an epiphany here, right? And I think that it's an epiphany that I know others have described as a little disappointing, or that there's maybe an obviousness or a sort of homolytic character to them that feels a little
01:51:01
Speaker
disappointing after the the scene and the the structure that's conjured but I just I disagree I think that um I'm not disappointed no no no I think um first of all that we the ellipses I think uh do a number of things but one of them is they flag the absence of the she said that gathering sort of conclusive but also authorizing gesture right um
01:51:24
Speaker
We certainly, by the punctuation of the lines, I think are invited to receive those final two lines as her speaking as well.
01:51:34
Speaker
But there's also a departure from a pattern that the poem has established in a way that feels like maybe this is how we share a statement, right?
Influences on the Poem and Wrap-Up
01:51:43
Speaker
That the poem is not saying, this is what she said and I'm going to leave it with her, nor is the poem saying, I'm pulling back from what she is speaking or saying to give you my, the poem's closer gesture, but to say that we're sharing this moment, right? This is a moment in which, yeah, I think
01:52:07
Speaker
The content of the moment is this statement about visiting islands, visiting other islands. Even in as much as the metaphoricity of the island I think is tempting here, it's literal and it's real. The fact that this is all taking place over the course of a visit to an island is a reminder that
01:52:31
Speaker
You can live the metaphor, right? It doesn't simply have to be abstract language. It doesn't simply have to be illustrative, but actually points at things that are happening in the world. Points at the world beyond language. Yeah. Can I do my... It's probably a better place to leave it than... I just want to work in that where I think a little bit of Earth that she said is coming from. Is that okay?
01:53:00
Speaker
Yeah, say something about where the she said is coming, where you think it's coming from, David. And this is, I think, one might be tempted to think that intensely leftist, Jewish, communist, politically active, resolutely American George Oppen exists quite far from T.S. Eliot, even in as much as I think that the gesture to Prufrock was incredibly useful.
01:53:30
Speaker
But just about a year before this poem is written, Oppen is asked to respond to a survey that a poetry magazine is circulating about writing poems for American or English accents and what kind of word choice, how are you composing with a particular accent in mind? And Oppen kind of dismisses the terms of the question by referring to
01:53:58
Speaker
the ventriloquisms of T.S. Eliot and the unanticipated cadences of the Beatles as two instances for why and how one might not want to limit themselves to a singular idea of accent when they write poetry. And so that this poem is written a year after the single, She Said, She Said, comes out, I can't help but feel like, and it is a poem and I feel like such a nerd for having done this,
01:54:22
Speaker
but like started to scan the poem and you can certainly make an argument that the Beatles song conforms to ballad meter. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. That's great. No, I love that. I love that. And I love the idea of bringing Eliot and the Beatles together in that way, sort of each traversing the Atlantic, but in opposite directions or something. Yeah. Yeah.
01:54:49
Speaker
And certainly the Beatles might help us think about what, you know, to go back to what you were saying earlier about the paramilitary qualities of popular, you know, forms. Yeah, we're really discouraged as professional critics from taking songs seriously as poetry.
01:55:12
Speaker
But there they are, right? Yeah. Yeah. She said. She said. David, send us out, please, by reading the poem yourself. Absolutely. Thanks. Ballad. Astrolabes and lexicons once in the great houses.
01:55:33
Speaker
A poor lobsterman met by chance on Swan's Island, where he was born. We saw the old farmhouse, propped and leaning on its hilltop, on that island where the ferry runs. A poor lobsterman. His teeth were bad. He drove us over that island in an old car, a well-spoken man, hardly real. As he knew in those rough fields, lobster pots and their gear smelling of salt, the rocks outlived the classicists, the rocks and the lobsterman's huts.
01:56:01
Speaker
and the sights of the island, the ledges in the rough sea seen from the road, and the harbor and the post office, difficult to know what one means, to be serious and to know what one means, an island has a public quality. His wife in the front seat and a soft dress such as poor women wear,
01:56:19
Speaker
She took it that we came, I don't know how to say, she said, not for anything we did, she said, mildly from God. She said, what I like more than anything is to visit other islands.
01:56:33
Speaker
Well, David Hobbs, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and spending so much time with me and with our listeners. And it was totally fascinating for me to get to learn about George Oppen with you. So thanks for being here. What a treat. This was so much fun. Thanks a lot.
01:56:52
Speaker
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you listeners for hanging out with us and please make sure you're following the podcast and leave us a rating and review and all that good stuff. Share more importantly, share an episode with a friend and stay tuned for more fun episodes coming up soon. Be well, everyone.