Mark Noble
Havoc in a Small Voice: George Oppen’s Materials
I have always been puzzled by a stunning moment of lyric strangeness in George Oppen’s “Time of the Missile,” one of the central poems in his 1962 volume The Materials. While the poem’s title suggests a straightforward reflection on the anxieties introduced by nuclear weapons, Oppen’s final lines witness something even scarier appearing on the poem’s conceptual horizon. Here is the latter half of “Time of the Missile”:
My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space
Which is viviparous.
Place of the mind
And eye. Which can destroy us,
Re-arrange itself, assert
Its own stone chain reaction.[1]
I return again and again to the unsettling poignancy with which Oppen fastens our chance for rhetorical intimacy (“My love, my love”) to the fact of our total endangerment. But I never quite to come to grips with his image of “viviparous” space and the “chain reaction” it precipitates. How should we understand this speaker’s plaintive assertion that material objects as such—not just the missiles but the very atoms they split—usurp our talent for shaping reality with language? What can it meant to suggest that reaching for the limits of human sight admits this Lovecraftian hallucination in which space itself births our destruction?
Perhaps part of what makes “Time of the Missile” at once so intriguing and so disturbing is the sense that Oppen risks betraying his “objectivist” credentials by investing the poem with the sort of lyric subject he elsewhere tends to refuse. “The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials,” he once argued, “and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics.”[2] But isn’t the best part of this poem—“My love, my love / We are endangered / Totally at last”—pretty intensely histrionic? Throughout his writing career, Oppen argues that modern poetry succeeds by adhering to its “concrete materials.” And yet a moment like this one approaches the acute political urgency of its topic by investing itself in a fragile subjectivity threatened by a weirdly abstract materialism. Are we finally interested, I keep wondering, more in the stones or the selves they rearrange?
In what follows, I attempt an extended reading of “Time of the Missile” meant to explore the consequences of Oppen’s materialist histrionics. I find that The Materials designates a moment, not the only such moment in American poetry, in which ontological queries about what links thought to its materials coincide with political requirements for a historical materialism adequate to the present. Crazy as that might sound, Oppen’s return to poetry in 1962 marks an occasion for observing a fatal connection between ontology and politics. Tracing the features of that connection means grappling with the idea that a material foundation both constitutive and deadly now shapes (and limits) our capacity for belonging to one another. And while Oppen acknowledges that perhaps this has always been the case, The Materials proposes that our time of imminent catastrophe requires rethinking the vocation of the modern poet, compelling it to include a view history and ontology as weirdly and inexorably linked.
I: It floods in on us
Oppen begins “Time of the Missile” by rehearsing modernist techniques for encountering objects. The poem’s first half models an “act of perception,” as he puts it, determined to apprehend that “thing seen each day whose meaning has become the meaning of the color of our lives.”[3] Seeing in such terms means the lines of the poem become correlative objects, no less durable and no less fugitive than the physical objects encountered:
I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting between warehouses.
Difficult to approach the water below the pier
Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier
A steel wall: tons in the water,
Width.
At first, memory conjures a view of the Hudson fitted to a frame—a flickering square of the wider river glimpsed between buildings and approached only with difficulty. But those boundaries do not last long. That these opening lines insist on approaching the water’s edge attests to Oppen’s continued belief that a poem’s sincerity derives from its willingness to relinquish subjective frames that distill images from experience and, instead, summon objects in all their “swirling” complexity. “Time of the Missile” might begin with a “glinting” square of photographic recollection, in other words, but it wastes little time dispensing with that medium in favor of a more “difficult” proximity.
In this case, coming closer to material surfaces means encountering a shift in scale and perspective that confounds any simple distinction between objects and their features. “Width” sits curiously on its own line, for instance, at once a metonym for the “steel wall” of an anchored thing and itself a visual anchor—one of the poem’s “materials”—for the fluid syntax of the preceding lines. In a too-literal sense, “Width” here narrows what the speaker of the poem sees: the Hudson is displaced by those “tons in the water,” one syllable claims an entire line, and a single property overwhelms the field of view, as though we’ve moved too close for clarity or comfort. But in another sense, more germane to this poem’s widening gyre, “Width” becomes the fulcrum with which Oppen pivots to a breathtaking expansion of the visual field:
Width.
The hand for holding,
Legs for walking,
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air!
If the poem’s opening line characterizes sight as an effort to focus attention on an elusive object, this moment unravels every conventional way of talking about seeing, immersing us in a phenomenal flood of appearances that threatens the coherence of any “image.” While hands and legs have instrumental functions that facilitate a difficult approach, the eye that “sees!” outruns the human scale connecting bodies to their uses, or persons looking to objects seen. The difference between your body and your sight, in this account, is akin to the difference between the mediacy of a prepositional phrase and the immediacy of an intransitive verb.
I am suggesting that this is the moment in “Time of the Missile” when the bomb drops, illuminating New York with its ghastly incandescence and scorching sight itself. The “It” that “floods in on us” both is and isn’t the ballistic missile conjured by the poem’s title. Oppen calls to mind the apocalyptic instant of atomic vision that had become an everyday trope by the early 1960s: the sudden over-exposure of the visual frame; the melting film stock; the unearthly light before the blistering wave. But he also seems to imply that this flash flood of total sight, luminous but opaque, refers to the vocational challenge undertaken by modernist aesthetics. The blast that interrupts our effort to see the world as if without the subjective frames that mediate its “tangled” reality is in some sense also the culmination of that effort—as if seeing as poets labor to see were implicated in a historical event that annihilates the eye itself.
One straightforward way to explain this link between the poem and the bomb would be to say that Oppen means the correlation allegorically. In such a reading, the bomb offers a figure for the limits of the poet’s perception—a metaphorical analogue to our epistemological struggle to see without metaphorical analogies. But this is precisely the sort of move that Oppen dogmatically resists. “It is possible to find a metaphor for anything,” he argues in 1963, “but the image is encountered, not found.”[4] What the poem here encounters, if we take him seriously, should not be understood as mere figurative hyperbole but as a genuine encounter with those “concrete materials” that overrun the “glinting” square of the mind’s eye and reveal the devastating excesses of total sight. What makes this so shocking, in other words, is less the apocalyptic scale of Oppen’s metaphor, in which seeing summons a nuclear blast, than the poem’s reminder that what feels like it must just be a metaphor actually isn’t one at all.
What boggles the mind, in other words, is not the idea the poems could be like bombs, but the much stranger, scarier fact that the always imminent destructive potential of the bomb refers to the same ontological foundation on which persons (and thus poems) stake their claims to perception. Both concrete images and hydrogen bombs are events in material history, as Oppen knew well, and both are expressions of the fissile structure of matter itself. In the 1960s, Oppen finds that poetic claims to encounter images cannot but grapple, however helplessly, with the knowledge that these features of modern life (the materiality of history; the deathliness of materiality) have become inextricable from one another—tangled, as it were, “in the grey bright air.” Or, as he puts it in “Leviathan,” the final poem of The Materials:
What is inexplicable
Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights
Daily with that predominance
And we have become the present. (NCP 89)
Thinking the ground of the poem’s materials, a central mission of literary modernism since Oppen’s youth, here means attending to luminous objects that both exceed and explode the fragile conceit of a human vantage. It means seeing in a way that drowns in sight.
II: the realm of nations
But can Oppen really be serious that the total endangerment of human life introduced by the thermonuclear weapons is an instance of (not simply a figure for) poetry’s tragic effort to locate human value on a material ground? Can he really be saying that the poem and the bomb refer us to a common ontological problem? And what exactly could it mean to suggest we now live in the “time” of that problem?
At the center of “Time of the Missile,” he offers a single bewildering line meant to serve as a hinge linking the poem’s disparate halves:
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air!
Become the realm of nations.
My love, my love,
We are endangered…
Even readers drawn to Oppen’s austere diction and casual relationship with syntax tend to find “Become the realm of nations” a difficult line to gloss. Commentaries on the poem typically avoid it, perhaps because the parataxis refuses to disclose an antecedent; perhaps because “realm of nations” feels like crass historicism following the gorgeous abstractions of the poem’s opening lines. I confess I too find it maddeningly abstruse.
But if we’re taking seriously this idea that modern poetry and modern history both address a material world inimical to human scale, then this cannot be a trivial turn in the poem. The line implies that the preponderance of objects igniting the sky not only poses an absolute threat to our lives, but that it also means any orientation toward such a threat is necessarily social. And yet the phrase “realm of nations” invites a peculiar ambivalence about this fact. On the one hand, it suggests an explicitly global context for social relationship, unique to modernity, tasked with representing everyone as members of a common body politic. On the other hand, it invokes the restrictive case of political representation embodied by the nation-state. For Oppen, the flash of sight in which matter turns on life itself belongs to a world organized as a generic political “realm” comprised of national particularities. Such a realm often seems like the only human bulwark against the deadly potential immanent in materiality. Of course, that same realm is the one in which the fact of total war becomes a fact of life.
It is worth remembering that Oppen new such facts intimately. In the 28 years separating the publication of Discrete Series (1934) and The Materials (1962), Oppen abruptly ceased writing poetry; renounced his upper-class childhood to join the Communist Party; organized for the Workers Alliance; served as a Home Relief worker; fought in the Battle of the Bulge; and participated in the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. After sustaining war injuries and returning to the United States 1945, he and his wife, Mary, expatriated to Mexico where they spend most of the 1950s as “known subversives” avoiding the reach of the FBI.
Throughout The Materials and often in poetry written during the 1960s, Oppen proposes that seeing in the ways that poems make possible requires scaling vision up to the geo-political level twentieth-century communism purports to address. Taking seriously the task that charters Oppen’s modernism—that is, encountering the image as only objective language makes it appear—now means tolerating this expansion of our perspective to fit a planetary frame. And that expansion compels one to acknowledge, without embarrassment or coy abstraction, the importance of political affiliation with an international Left capable of thinking the human on a global scale. In “Image of the Engine,” for instance, an ontological boundary becomes a longing for solidarity:
From lumps, chunks,
We are locked out: like children seeking love
At last among each other. (NCP 42)
In “Blood from the Stone,” recalling the economic devastations of the 1930s raises a series of question about the practical and poetic necessity of a politics adequate to modernity’s generic barbarism:
The Thirties. And
A spectre
In every street,
In all inexplicable crowds, what they did then
Is still their lives.
As thirty in a group--
To Home Relief—the unemployed--
Within the city’s intricacies
Are these lives. Belief?
What do we believe
To live with? Answer.
Not invent—just answer—all
That verse attempts.
That we can somehow add each to each other?
—Still our lives.
(NCP 52)
If the suffering Oppen witnessed in his 28 years between published poems becomes an indelible feature of “our lives,” then poems are now tasked with finding a ground for belief in whatever binds those lives together. We proceed in light of the precarity of human perspectives, later in the same poem, “because we find the others / Deserted like ourselves and therefore brothers.”
This attention to the immutability of experiences that tie persons to one another recurs in “Of Being Numerous” (1968), which occasionally transports its speaker to the decades preceding The Materials:
I cannot even now
Altogether disengage myself
From those men
With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,
In hospitals and shed and hid in the gullies
Of blasted roads in a ruined country.
(NCP 171)
Earlier in that poem, such moments of lasting solidarity are more clearly tied to the ontological emergency linking the poet’s vision to the bomb’s revelation—as in Oppen’s most frequently quoted lines:
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous
(NCP 166)
The choice referred to in this famous passage implies full knowledge that the inhuman ground of every image resembles a desert island—or the wrecked landscape of the hydrogen bomb. But the poem nevertheless posits, however improbably, that “the meaning / Of being numerous” can be the only sort of meaning adequate to our shipwrecked state.
So perhaps “Become the realm of nations” signals nothing but the occasion of total war invented for that realm. Perhaps the gnomic strangeness of that line depicts only our unmitigated losses in a world whose very elements have been weaponized against us. Nevertheless, these poems that return from decades of silence to encounter images of life in the time of the missile appear to choose otherwise.
III: totally at last
In the spring of 1959, Oppen sent a small cluster of the poems that would appear in The Materials to the screenwriter Julian Zimet, with whom he and Mary had bonded during their expatriate years in Mexico. Zimet’s reply, which included a critique of “Time of the Missile” for its proleptic anguish about the bomb, seems to have piqued Oppen. “I suspect that the real tale is on another level,” Zimet argues, “that missile time is just another way of saying we are all going to burn in hell, […] or here we are on a darkling plain.”[5] In his reply, Oppen confesses the poem reflects “a metaphysical agony in the back of my mind,” but contends that the twentieth-century inspires a brand of agony different in kind and scale than the “confused alarms” of Arnold’s darkling plain. The ontological fissure for which lyric poems have offered so many consolations (Oppen: “we didn’t make the atom we are made of, but all the rest is subjective”) now refers to an event in material history—to political nightmares of “total defeat and meaninglessness in the future perfect.”[6]
For Zimet, that assertion risks converting modernist poetics to a species of histrionics: “I don’t know how to make them go away,” he cautions, “and bring back the hand for holding, the leaping heart and its attendant rainbow, but if you’re going to cry havoc in a small voice…” Oppen cites this phrasing in full in his reply, as if to argue that Zimet’s diminution of his poem in fact helps explain what animates it: “no scout master every spoke so eloquently to me. If he had, I would have said with love and apology: I will cry havoc in a small voice. Sir.”[7]
Acknowledging this link between what seems like incommensurable features of the poem—the exigency of the cry, the smallness of the voice—helps address my own ambivalence about those weirdly moving lines in “Time of the Missile”:
My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space
Which is viviparous.
Of course, Oppen concedes, the “we” imperiled by the total present is a conceit of the poem, or an artifact of a lyric tradition in which rhetorical moves like “My love, my love” fashion the relations comprising a body politic. But the logic of total endangerment explored in The Materials repeatedly insists upon the diminutive status of persons represented by such a tradition. Where the poem records an ontological problem crashing into human history, in other words, it encounters an image of atoms arrayed against the small scale of human experience reaching as far as the eye can see:
Place of the mind
And eye. Which can destroy us,
Re-arrange itself, assert
Its own stone chain reaction.
The unnerving strangeness of viviparous space, which both affirms and overwhelms the poetic praxis that composes such an image, here submits to the autonomy of those other materials—to the monstrous flexibility of a stone universe now tangled up in human time.
“If one is going to say the very big thing, the enormous thing, What life is, what things mean,” Oppen argues in another letter from the early sixties, “it must be said in a very small art. Very small. Where the thing gets smaller than the light wave, and gets into all that difficulty.”[8] This suggestion that the images poems encounter must be calibrated to reflect the bewildering autonomy and miniscule volatility of material things helps explain the tension between the diminutive cry for solidarity (“My love, my love”) and the inexorable conditions of total endangerment (“Its own stone chain reaction”). In that sense, the volatile temporality into which Oppen immerses us might refer to the slow time of planetary crisis endangering the twenty-first century as much as the flashing immediacy with which the bomb first terrified his generation. The Materials thus finds that encountering images with poems means finding a voice small enough to cry the irremediable havoc now linking ontology and history—or what Oppen calls “the dead matter we came out of” and the numerous deaths it has in store for us.
Notes:
[1] Oppen, George, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New Directions Publishing, 2002), 70. The entirety of “Time of the Missile” appears on this pages; subsequent citations of Oppen’s poetry refert to this volume and will be cited parenthetically as NCP.
[2] Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 32.
[3] Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” 30.
[4] Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” 31.
[5] Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 375n16.
[6] Oppen, Selected Letters, 30
[7] Oppen, Selected Letters, 30, emphasis added.
[8] DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 8.
''Time of the Missile'' By George Oppen, from NEW COLLECTED POEMS, copyright ©1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
I have always been puzzled by a stunning moment of lyric strangeness in George Oppen’s “Time of the Missile,” one of the central poems in his 1962 volume The Materials. While the poem’s title suggests a straightforward reflection on the anxieties introduced by nuclear weapons, Oppen’s final lines witness something even scarier appearing on the poem’s conceptual horizon. Here is the latter half of “Time of the Missile”:
My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space
Which is viviparous.
Place of the mind
And eye. Which can destroy us,
Re-arrange itself, assert
Its own stone chain reaction.[1]
I return again and again to the unsettling poignancy with which Oppen fastens our chance for rhetorical intimacy (“My love, my love”) to the fact of our total endangerment. But I never quite to come to grips with his image of “viviparous” space and the “chain reaction” it precipitates. How should we understand this speaker’s plaintive assertion that material objects as such—not just the missiles but the very atoms they split—usurp our talent for shaping reality with language? What can it meant to suggest that reaching for the limits of human sight admits this Lovecraftian hallucination in which space itself births our destruction?
Perhaps part of what makes “Time of the Missile” at once so intriguing and so disturbing is the sense that Oppen risks betraying his “objectivist” credentials by investing the poem with the sort of lyric subject he elsewhere tends to refuse. “The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials,” he once argued, “and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics.”[2] But isn’t the best part of this poem—“My love, my love / We are endangered / Totally at last”—pretty intensely histrionic? Throughout his writing career, Oppen argues that modern poetry succeeds by adhering to its “concrete materials.” And yet a moment like this one approaches the acute political urgency of its topic by investing itself in a fragile subjectivity threatened by a weirdly abstract materialism. Are we finally interested, I keep wondering, more in the stones or the selves they rearrange?
In what follows, I attempt an extended reading of “Time of the Missile” meant to explore the consequences of Oppen’s materialist histrionics. I find that The Materials designates a moment, not the only such moment in American poetry, in which ontological queries about what links thought to its materials coincide with political requirements for a historical materialism adequate to the present. Crazy as that might sound, Oppen’s return to poetry in 1962 marks an occasion for observing a fatal connection between ontology and politics. Tracing the features of that connection means grappling with the idea that a material foundation both constitutive and deadly now shapes (and limits) our capacity for belonging to one another. And while Oppen acknowledges that perhaps this has always been the case, The Materials proposes that our time of imminent catastrophe requires rethinking the vocation of the modern poet, compelling it to include a view history and ontology as weirdly and inexorably linked.
I: It floods in on us
Oppen begins “Time of the Missile” by rehearsing modernist techniques for encountering objects. The poem’s first half models an “act of perception,” as he puts it, determined to apprehend that “thing seen each day whose meaning has become the meaning of the color of our lives.”[3] Seeing in such terms means the lines of the poem become correlative objects, no less durable and no less fugitive than the physical objects encountered:
I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting between warehouses.
Difficult to approach the water below the pier
Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier
A steel wall: tons in the water,
Width.
At first, memory conjures a view of the Hudson fitted to a frame—a flickering square of the wider river glimpsed between buildings and approached only with difficulty. But those boundaries do not last long. That these opening lines insist on approaching the water’s edge attests to Oppen’s continued belief that a poem’s sincerity derives from its willingness to relinquish subjective frames that distill images from experience and, instead, summon objects in all their “swirling” complexity. “Time of the Missile” might begin with a “glinting” square of photographic recollection, in other words, but it wastes little time dispensing with that medium in favor of a more “difficult” proximity.
In this case, coming closer to material surfaces means encountering a shift in scale and perspective that confounds any simple distinction between objects and their features. “Width” sits curiously on its own line, for instance, at once a metonym for the “steel wall” of an anchored thing and itself a visual anchor—one of the poem’s “materials”—for the fluid syntax of the preceding lines. In a too-literal sense, “Width” here narrows what the speaker of the poem sees: the Hudson is displaced by those “tons in the water,” one syllable claims an entire line, and a single property overwhelms the field of view, as though we’ve moved too close for clarity or comfort. But in another sense, more germane to this poem’s widening gyre, “Width” becomes the fulcrum with which Oppen pivots to a breathtaking expansion of the visual field:
Width.
The hand for holding,
Legs for walking,
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air!
If the poem’s opening line characterizes sight as an effort to focus attention on an elusive object, this moment unravels every conventional way of talking about seeing, immersing us in a phenomenal flood of appearances that threatens the coherence of any “image.” While hands and legs have instrumental functions that facilitate a difficult approach, the eye that “sees!” outruns the human scale connecting bodies to their uses, or persons looking to objects seen. The difference between your body and your sight, in this account, is akin to the difference between the mediacy of a prepositional phrase and the immediacy of an intransitive verb.
I am suggesting that this is the moment in “Time of the Missile” when the bomb drops, illuminating New York with its ghastly incandescence and scorching sight itself. The “It” that “floods in on us” both is and isn’t the ballistic missile conjured by the poem’s title. Oppen calls to mind the apocalyptic instant of atomic vision that had become an everyday trope by the early 1960s: the sudden over-exposure of the visual frame; the melting film stock; the unearthly light before the blistering wave. But he also seems to imply that this flash flood of total sight, luminous but opaque, refers to the vocational challenge undertaken by modernist aesthetics. The blast that interrupts our effort to see the world as if without the subjective frames that mediate its “tangled” reality is in some sense also the culmination of that effort—as if seeing as poets labor to see were implicated in a historical event that annihilates the eye itself.
One straightforward way to explain this link between the poem and the bomb would be to say that Oppen means the correlation allegorically. In such a reading, the bomb offers a figure for the limits of the poet’s perception—a metaphorical analogue to our epistemological struggle to see without metaphorical analogies. But this is precisely the sort of move that Oppen dogmatically resists. “It is possible to find a metaphor for anything,” he argues in 1963, “but the image is encountered, not found.”[4] What the poem here encounters, if we take him seriously, should not be understood as mere figurative hyperbole but as a genuine encounter with those “concrete materials” that overrun the “glinting” square of the mind’s eye and reveal the devastating excesses of total sight. What makes this so shocking, in other words, is less the apocalyptic scale of Oppen’s metaphor, in which seeing summons a nuclear blast, than the poem’s reminder that what feels like it must just be a metaphor actually isn’t one at all.
What boggles the mind, in other words, is not the idea the poems could be like bombs, but the much stranger, scarier fact that the always imminent destructive potential of the bomb refers to the same ontological foundation on which persons (and thus poems) stake their claims to perception. Both concrete images and hydrogen bombs are events in material history, as Oppen knew well, and both are expressions of the fissile structure of matter itself. In the 1960s, Oppen finds that poetic claims to encounter images cannot but grapple, however helplessly, with the knowledge that these features of modern life (the materiality of history; the deathliness of materiality) have become inextricable from one another—tangled, as it were, “in the grey bright air.” Or, as he puts it in “Leviathan,” the final poem of The Materials:
What is inexplicable
Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights
Daily with that predominance
And we have become the present. (NCP 89)
Thinking the ground of the poem’s materials, a central mission of literary modernism since Oppen’s youth, here means attending to luminous objects that both exceed and explode the fragile conceit of a human vantage. It means seeing in a way that drowns in sight.
II: the realm of nations
But can Oppen really be serious that the total endangerment of human life introduced by the thermonuclear weapons is an instance of (not simply a figure for) poetry’s tragic effort to locate human value on a material ground? Can he really be saying that the poem and the bomb refer us to a common ontological problem? And what exactly could it mean to suggest we now live in the “time” of that problem?
At the center of “Time of the Missile,” he offers a single bewildering line meant to serve as a hinge linking the poem’s disparate halves:
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air!
Become the realm of nations.
My love, my love,
We are endangered…
Even readers drawn to Oppen’s austere diction and casual relationship with syntax tend to find “Become the realm of nations” a difficult line to gloss. Commentaries on the poem typically avoid it, perhaps because the parataxis refuses to disclose an antecedent; perhaps because “realm of nations” feels like crass historicism following the gorgeous abstractions of the poem’s opening lines. I confess I too find it maddeningly abstruse.
But if we’re taking seriously this idea that modern poetry and modern history both address a material world inimical to human scale, then this cannot be a trivial turn in the poem. The line implies that the preponderance of objects igniting the sky not only poses an absolute threat to our lives, but that it also means any orientation toward such a threat is necessarily social. And yet the phrase “realm of nations” invites a peculiar ambivalence about this fact. On the one hand, it suggests an explicitly global context for social relationship, unique to modernity, tasked with representing everyone as members of a common body politic. On the other hand, it invokes the restrictive case of political representation embodied by the nation-state. For Oppen, the flash of sight in which matter turns on life itself belongs to a world organized as a generic political “realm” comprised of national particularities. Such a realm often seems like the only human bulwark against the deadly potential immanent in materiality. Of course, that same realm is the one in which the fact of total war becomes a fact of life.
It is worth remembering that Oppen new such facts intimately. In the 28 years separating the publication of Discrete Series (1934) and The Materials (1962), Oppen abruptly ceased writing poetry; renounced his upper-class childhood to join the Communist Party; organized for the Workers Alliance; served as a Home Relief worker; fought in the Battle of the Bulge; and participated in the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. After sustaining war injuries and returning to the United States 1945, he and his wife, Mary, expatriated to Mexico where they spend most of the 1950s as “known subversives” avoiding the reach of the FBI.
Throughout The Materials and often in poetry written during the 1960s, Oppen proposes that seeing in the ways that poems make possible requires scaling vision up to the geo-political level twentieth-century communism purports to address. Taking seriously the task that charters Oppen’s modernism—that is, encountering the image as only objective language makes it appear—now means tolerating this expansion of our perspective to fit a planetary frame. And that expansion compels one to acknowledge, without embarrassment or coy abstraction, the importance of political affiliation with an international Left capable of thinking the human on a global scale. In “Image of the Engine,” for instance, an ontological boundary becomes a longing for solidarity:
From lumps, chunks,
We are locked out: like children seeking love
At last among each other. (NCP 42)
In “Blood from the Stone,” recalling the economic devastations of the 1930s raises a series of question about the practical and poetic necessity of a politics adequate to modernity’s generic barbarism:
The Thirties. And
A spectre
In every street,
In all inexplicable crowds, what they did then
Is still their lives.
As thirty in a group--
To Home Relief—the unemployed--
Within the city’s intricacies
Are these lives. Belief?
What do we believe
To live with? Answer.
Not invent—just answer—all
That verse attempts.
That we can somehow add each to each other?
—Still our lives.
(NCP 52)
If the suffering Oppen witnessed in his 28 years between published poems becomes an indelible feature of “our lives,” then poems are now tasked with finding a ground for belief in whatever binds those lives together. We proceed in light of the precarity of human perspectives, later in the same poem, “because we find the others / Deserted like ourselves and therefore brothers.”
This attention to the immutability of experiences that tie persons to one another recurs in “Of Being Numerous” (1968), which occasionally transports its speaker to the decades preceding The Materials:
I cannot even now
Altogether disengage myself
From those men
With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,
In hospitals and shed and hid in the gullies
Of blasted roads in a ruined country.
(NCP 171)
Earlier in that poem, such moments of lasting solidarity are more clearly tied to the ontological emergency linking the poet’s vision to the bomb’s revelation—as in Oppen’s most frequently quoted lines:
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous
(NCP 166)
The choice referred to in this famous passage implies full knowledge that the inhuman ground of every image resembles a desert island—or the wrecked landscape of the hydrogen bomb. But the poem nevertheless posits, however improbably, that “the meaning / Of being numerous” can be the only sort of meaning adequate to our shipwrecked state.
So perhaps “Become the realm of nations” signals nothing but the occasion of total war invented for that realm. Perhaps the gnomic strangeness of that line depicts only our unmitigated losses in a world whose very elements have been weaponized against us. Nevertheless, these poems that return from decades of silence to encounter images of life in the time of the missile appear to choose otherwise.
III: totally at last
In the spring of 1959, Oppen sent a small cluster of the poems that would appear in The Materials to the screenwriter Julian Zimet, with whom he and Mary had bonded during their expatriate years in Mexico. Zimet’s reply, which included a critique of “Time of the Missile” for its proleptic anguish about the bomb, seems to have piqued Oppen. “I suspect that the real tale is on another level,” Zimet argues, “that missile time is just another way of saying we are all going to burn in hell, […] or here we are on a darkling plain.”[5] In his reply, Oppen confesses the poem reflects “a metaphysical agony in the back of my mind,” but contends that the twentieth-century inspires a brand of agony different in kind and scale than the “confused alarms” of Arnold’s darkling plain. The ontological fissure for which lyric poems have offered so many consolations (Oppen: “we didn’t make the atom we are made of, but all the rest is subjective”) now refers to an event in material history—to political nightmares of “total defeat and meaninglessness in the future perfect.”[6]
For Zimet, that assertion risks converting modernist poetics to a species of histrionics: “I don’t know how to make them go away,” he cautions, “and bring back the hand for holding, the leaping heart and its attendant rainbow, but if you’re going to cry havoc in a small voice…” Oppen cites this phrasing in full in his reply, as if to argue that Zimet’s diminution of his poem in fact helps explain what animates it: “no scout master every spoke so eloquently to me. If he had, I would have said with love and apology: I will cry havoc in a small voice. Sir.”[7]
Acknowledging this link between what seems like incommensurable features of the poem—the exigency of the cry, the smallness of the voice—helps address my own ambivalence about those weirdly moving lines in “Time of the Missile”:
My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space
Which is viviparous.
Of course, Oppen concedes, the “we” imperiled by the total present is a conceit of the poem, or an artifact of a lyric tradition in which rhetorical moves like “My love, my love” fashion the relations comprising a body politic. But the logic of total endangerment explored in The Materials repeatedly insists upon the diminutive status of persons represented by such a tradition. Where the poem records an ontological problem crashing into human history, in other words, it encounters an image of atoms arrayed against the small scale of human experience reaching as far as the eye can see:
Place of the mind
And eye. Which can destroy us,
Re-arrange itself, assert
Its own stone chain reaction.
The unnerving strangeness of viviparous space, which both affirms and overwhelms the poetic praxis that composes such an image, here submits to the autonomy of those other materials—to the monstrous flexibility of a stone universe now tangled up in human time.
“If one is going to say the very big thing, the enormous thing, What life is, what things mean,” Oppen argues in another letter from the early sixties, “it must be said in a very small art. Very small. Where the thing gets smaller than the light wave, and gets into all that difficulty.”[8] This suggestion that the images poems encounter must be calibrated to reflect the bewildering autonomy and miniscule volatility of material things helps explain the tension between the diminutive cry for solidarity (“My love, my love”) and the inexorable conditions of total endangerment (“Its own stone chain reaction”). In that sense, the volatile temporality into which Oppen immerses us might refer to the slow time of planetary crisis endangering the twenty-first century as much as the flashing immediacy with which the bomb first terrified his generation. The Materials thus finds that encountering images with poems means finding a voice small enough to cry the irremediable havoc now linking ontology and history—or what Oppen calls “the dead matter we came out of” and the numerous deaths it has in store for us.
Notes:
[1] Oppen, George, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New Directions Publishing, 2002), 70. The entirety of “Time of the Missile” appears on this pages; subsequent citations of Oppen’s poetry refert to this volume and will be cited parenthetically as NCP.
[2] Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 32.
[3] Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” 30.
[4] Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” 31.
[5] Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 375n16.
[6] Oppen, Selected Letters, 30
[7] Oppen, Selected Letters, 30, emphasis added.
[8] DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 8.
''Time of the Missile'' By George Oppen, from NEW COLLECTED POEMS, copyright ©1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.