Month: June 2007

I think George Oppen: New Collected Poems ends on a high note with “Selected Unpublished Poems” as I found some of my favorite Oppen poems here, so many that I’d never think of publishing them here and deprive you of the pleasure of discovering them yourself. Let me just say that if your library doesn’t have a copy of this volume, they should have as it ranks right up there with William Carlos Williams’ works.

One of my favorites, for obvious reasons is this one:

[The Old Man]

The old man
In the mirror
Startles
Me
But the young man
In the photograph
Is stranger
Still

I imagine you have to reach a certain age to appreciate this poem, but even if you don’t appreciate it yet, you can use it to keep your life in perspective.

Not surprisingly, this is another favorite:

She Steals Birds

It is known.
She saw a baby chirping sparrow
In the grass and kneeled
To rescue him. The infant bird

Opened his beak wide
Dropped his wings and made
Little rushes at her finger
While his parents shouted from the bushes.

In many ways this poem seems to represent Oppen’s poetic genius, his ability to find concrete images or scenes to convey complex ideas.

I’ve nearly finished George Oppen: New Collected Poems, having just finished the section entitled “Uncollected Published Poems,” a section I actually enjoyed more than many of the previous ones. Of course, since these poems have been selected by various magazine editors, the only surprising thing is that they didn’t make it into one of his previous collections.

This is probably my favorite poem of the section, though perhaps not representative of the section as a whole:

MEMORY AT “THE MODERN”

We had seen bare land
And the people bare on it
And men camp
In the city. The lights,
The pavement, this important device
Of a race, I wrote then,
Twenty three years old,
Remains till morning. Nobody knows who died
On the roads of that time, of the fact of roads.
I am a man of the Thirties.

‘No other tastes shall change this.

As I’ve looked back, I’ve realized that I, too, am very much a man of my time, though I’m not sure if that time is the 40’s, the 50’s, or both. Certainly my view of the world must have been profoundly influenced by World War II, even though I have little or no memory of it, and by the Korean War, which I only have limited memories of.

I grew up with very little, as most of our country’s production in WW II was devoted to the war effort. I got one pair of shoes and two pair of pants in a year, and if I got a hole in the knee from crawling around, I wore a patch on the knees for the rest of the year. I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown that idea, not that I want to. I don’t donate my clothes when I tire of them; I wear them until they’re no longer wearable. I buy clothes when I go to the closet and find I no longer have anything to wear.

I got one or two toys per year as a child, and it still bothers me to see grandkids with toys strewn all over the house or yard. I doubt they will ever treasure their toys like I did, which probably explains why I’m more apt to give them money for a college fund than toys when I visit.

I know what it’s like to be “poor,” at least by modern standards, know what it means to go without.

Of course, I also shared in the sudden prosperity of the 50’s and lived in the suburbs in a tract home. I know what it means to expect a little more each year than the year before.

I will probably never totally reconcile those two worlds. Perhaps that’s what it means to live in Post-Modern World.