My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

HINGE PICTURE 193
Which is to say that, in Of Being Numerous, the loss of the "transcendental
signified" does not necessitate the abandonment, or absence, of knowledge
but its location in history, in "people". This view entails both a rejection
of the crude materialism of things without history and the crude
idealism of history without things. Materials in circumstance, as Oppen
puts it (186): the "actual" realized by the manipulation of materials by
human hands, tools. It is this process that is played out in Oppen's poetry
by the insistence on the constructedness of syntax: the manipulation of
words to create rather than describe.
Of Being Numerous forges a syntax of truthfulness without recourse to the
grammar of truth-"that truthfulness / Which illumines speech" (173).
The poem's necessarily precarious project is the articulation of a form that
would address the commonweal, a project most fully realized in the two
long poems in Of Being Numerous. For Oppen, the demands of the articulation
of an ideal communication situation necessitate a winnowing of
vocabulary and tone that entails the exclusion of anything that would
extend, displace, amplify, distort, burst-indeed, question-the vocables
of an enunciated truthfulness. At his most resonant, Oppen creates a magnificent,
prophetic, imaginary language-less voice than chiselled sounds.
His writing evokes not the clamor of the streets nor the windiness of conversation
nor the bombast of the "dialogic" but the indwelling possibilities
of words to speak starkly and with urgency.
Yet Oppen's often claimed commitment to clarity, however qualified,
annuls a number of possibilities inherent in his technique. He hints at this
when he writes, "Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is the
heartlessness of words" (186). ("Clarity", he has just said, "In the sense of
transparence" [162].) In contrast, it is their very intractability that makes for
the unconsumable heart (heartiness) of words. Inverting Oppen's criticism
that Zukofsky used" obscurity in the writing as a tactic",3 I would say that
Oppen uses clarity as a tactic. That is, at times he tends to fall back onto
"clarity" as a self-justifying means of achieving resolution through scenic
motifs, statement, or parable in poems that might, given his compositional
techniques, outstrip such controlling impulses.
Oppen's syntax is fashioned on constructive, rather than mimetic, principles.
He is quite explicit about this. Carpentry is a recurring image of
poem-making. His poems, as he tells it, were created by a sort of collage
or cut-up technique involving innumerable substitutions and permutations
for every word and line choice. The method here is paratactic, even if
often used for hypotactic ends. This tension, which can produce the ki-
3. Burton Haden and Tom Mandel, "Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and
Mary Oppen", in George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Hatlen (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation,
t 98 1), p. 45.