My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

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George Oppen's Of Being Numerous is a poetry of constructive witness: the
witness of a social becoming that "presses on each"! and in which each, all,
are impressed.
Oppen's achievement has little to do with speech or sight, but with
speech as sight, site of the social. Not perception but acts of perception, not
the given but the encountered, as Oppen suggests in "The Mind's Own
Place".2 Sight in Oppen's work is not a passive looking onto the world but
a means of touching that invests the world with particular, site-specific
(historical, material) meanings. Without this touching-tooling, tuningthe
world becomes empty, voided.
"Near is I Knowledge" (176). Or, as H61derlin has it in "Patmos", "Near
is I And difficult to grasp." Oppen's engendering witness stipulates both
the integrity of things seen and their contingency-"the known and
unknown". "Because the known and unknown I Touch, II One witnesses-"
(172). The intersection of these vectors of response creates the "here" of
a "real" we confront, a real which we come to know by participating in its
making. ("Here still" [177].) This poetics of participatory, or constructive,
presentness-akin especially to Creeley's-is Oppen's response to "the
shipwreck I Of the singular" (151). The "singular" that has been lost is, in
one sense, a unitary system of value or knowledge based on reason or theology
("The unearthly bonds I Of the singular" [152]). For Oppen, there
is no neo-Nietzschean rejoicing in this loss. Rather, "The absolute singular"
is related to what Walter Benjamin has called the Messianic
Moment-out-of-time, out-of-history. "To dream of that beach I For the
sake of an instant in the eyes" (152). For Oppen, however, there is another
singularity, the potential for social collectivity: "one must not come to feel
that he has a thousand threads in his hands, I He must somehow see the
one thing; I This is the level of art I There are other levels I But there is no
other level of art" (168). "Not truth but each other" (173).
I. The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New York New Directions, 1975), p. 150. Subsequent
references are given in the text.
2. Kulchur(1963); reprinted in Montemora 1 (1975).