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Wuhan Conference Talk on Oppen and Eigner (3)-1

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Wuhan Conference Talk on Oppen and Eigner (3)-1 1 Hank Lazer from Sybil, 2014 http://sibila.com.br/sem-categoria/lazer-oppen-eigner/10843 Two Recommendations: The Poetry of George Oppen and Larry Eigner (Or, The Peculiarities of the Making of Cross-Cultural Literary History) What I’m here today to do is to make recommendations and to give advice.1 I know that what I’m doing is a little bit (if not a lot) presumptuous and ridiculous, and that my talk, to some degree, mirrors consciously and unconsciously the very processes that I am talking about, particularly the idiosyncratic nature of the creation of literary historical representations in a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic domain. Of course, as someone who has visited China once before, in 1993, for a month, in association with the publication of a bilingual collection of poetry and essays,2 and who neither speaks nor reads Chinese, what do I know? Truly, very little. In truth, my sense of “the Chinese reader” or of students and professors in China reading American poetry is hazy, imaginary, ill-informed, and peculiarly partial. Yet, it intrigues me to open a conversation based on my limited knowledge. This spring (2013), I taught a graduate seminar at the University of Alabama called Black Mountain Extensions: George Oppen, Robert Creeley, John Taggart, and Larry Eigner. I am also in the process of working with Professor Nie, Professor Fuli, and several other translators on a bilingual edition of my selected poems.3 My own representation in Chinese versions of the history of modern American poetry, particularly in the heroically diligent work of Zhang Ziqing, has always struck me as somewhat humorous, for I am reasonably certain that once this bilingual selected poetry is published in China, I will have more readers here (in China) than in the US. (And yes, I am aware that there are more speakers of English in China than in the United States. But that’s another story…) But more important for today’s talk, because there was a very bright Chinese doctoral student – Xiaoshang Yang (an Assistant Professor at Ocean University in Qingdao, China) – in my seminar, I became interested in learning about how these four poets were being represented in Chinese histories and anthologies of American poetry. As I learned more about the idiosyncratic nature of that representation, I began to focus more carefully on the situations for Oppen and Eigner, discovering that 1 This essay is an expanded, revised version of a talk I presented in Wuhan at Central China Normal University, June 8, 2013, for The 2nd Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics & The International Symposium on Modern and Contemporary Literature in English. 2 Selected Language Poems, translated by Zhang Ziqing and Yunte Huang, Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, Chengdu: 1993. 3 See also “The Intellectual Mode of Thinking in American Contemporary Innovative Poetry: An Interview with Hank Lazer,” Liu Fuli, Foreign Literature Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2 (April 2013): 1-11. 2 in Oppen’s case, he is written about as “a minor Objectivist poet” (even though his major work follows many years after that brief movement), while Eigner is seemingly not represented at all. It seems to me – even with my own admittedly spotty and incomplete knowledge about Chinese anthologies and histories of American poetry – that Oppen and Eigner present stunningly exciting instances of a body of poetry that will probably prove to be of immense interest to Chinese audiences. George Oppen, was born in 1908 and died in 1984. Eliot Weinberger summarizes Oppen’s early writing life: “He had published a tiny book of enigmatic poems in 1934, then had joined the Communist Party and stopped writing.”4 In this first phase of his writing life, Oppen established friendships with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Oppen was a member of the Communist party who lived in exile from the US for a number of years in the 1950s in Mexico before returning (and resuming the writing of poetry after a 25 year silence) once the McCarthy era and its rabidly anti-communist persecutions died down in the US. His poetry offers, particularly in his Pulitzer Prize winning collection and its title poem, Of Being Numerous, an in-depth engagement with the complex question of how to reconcile our individual and collective identities. What could be a better tension and area of speculation to engage readers in China of the early 21st-century in its breath-taking cultural and economic transformation than a poetry concerned with what Oppen calls “the shipwreck of the singular” (as well as the enduring allure and appeal of singularity and the individualized poetic and artistic consciousness) and the compelling desire to be part of a larger collective entity. At the heart of Oppen’s poetics there are several famous passages of poetry and guiding principles for Oppen’s poetic investigations. In “Guest Room” (from This In Which, 1965), Oppen suggests that his poetry constitutes a way5 To go perhaps unarmed And unarmored, to return Now to the old questions – And that is exactly what Oppen’s poetry does – it returns to a series of metaphysical concerns: the nature of being and time (thus aligned with a similar return to “the old questions” in the philosophy of Heidegger); what are the essential elements of our language, and how might we write a poetry that is something other than merely clever; where should we direct our attention in this world; and how can we reconcile the competing and seemingly opposed claims of our singular and collective lives. For Oppen, the poetry that results is somewhat stripped down to essentials – few ornamental or “creative” flights of language-play, an ethically insistent poetry bent on seeing anew and seeing and understanding (to the extent that understanding is possible) what matters. In “Route” (from Of Being Numerous, 1968), he declares,6 Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful 4 New Collected Poems, p. xiii. (Subsequent references: NCP) 5 NCP, p. 109. 6 NCP, p. 193 3 thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motives of poetry But to achieve clarity Personally, I find that Oppen’s quest for clarity – particularly “a limited, limiting clarity” – links his writing to that of Larry Eigner and also to a long-standing Chinese tradition of nature poetry that pursues an intensified clarity of observation. As in much of the poetry in the Chinese classical poetic traditions, Oppen, though writing out of a radically different political and social culture, in “World, World – ” (the concluding poem from This In Which, 1965), makes the proper focus of our existence and our writing quite clear:7 ‘Thought leaps on us’ because we are here. That is the fact of the matter. Soul-searchings, these prescriptions, Are a medical faddism, an attempt to escape, To lose oneself in the self. The self is no mystery, the mystery is That there is something for us to stand on. We want to be here. The act of being, the act of being More than oneself. As an aside, I think that a fruitful topic for the cross-cultural poetics central to this conference would be a thorough exploration of the differences between a Chinese and an American sense of “self” and of the related concept of “interiority” (or an “interior world”). Oppen, writing at the height of an American economic boom in the early 1960s, at a time of bristling national confidence in the prospects of global capitalism and the seemingly endless path of a personalized, consumer economy, stands in opposition to an American (Western?) fascination with the self. As Confessional poetry began to emerge in the 1960s as an American cultural product closely aligned with an entire cultural turn toward an obsession with self-fulfillment, self-knowledge, and self-development, Oppen’s poetry turned our attention – or re-turned our attention, in the spirit of “the old questions” – toward the ground of our living and being.8 7 NCP, 159. 8 Oppen’s turn away from self-obsession and his decisive turn toward the world itself is remarkably similar to the central project of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Consider, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s remarks in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception: “The world is not an object whose law of constitution I have in my possession; it is the natural milieu and the field of all my thoughts and of all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not merely ‘dwell’ in the ‘inner man’; or rather, there is no ‘inner man,’ man is in and toward the world, and it is in the world that he knows himself” (lxxiv). Such a passage is also deeply resonant and consistent with the opening 4 That fascination with the self and with self-expression as the seemingly “natural” ground for American poetry persists to this day. Ever since my first trip to China in 1993, whenever I work with introductory poetry and arts classes, I will ask the students to complete this sentence: “when a poet writes, he or she tries to …” Inevitably, the overwhelming American response is “express his or her feelings.” Within American consumerist culture, it is assumed as natural and right that our poetry should simply be another element in a culture obsessed with my tastes, my interests, my personal history, my journey, etc. When I suggest to students that in fact there may be radically different ways to complete that sentence, some students are so unable to think of any other options that they will stop me after class to ask what other responses might be possible.
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