In Oppen’s poems, there is a depth of sight. Meaning, the poet understands the world by seeing others in ways that feel specific and idiosyncratic. Like maybe the person seen by Oppen’s poem wouldn’t think of themselves in that light. But, reading his poems, I feel like that person would feel that he’d really seen them. They’d been seen. For instance, in the poem “Bahamas,” the arrives to see the bay, the water. He sees what’s appealing to the tourist. But then the poem sees past that, all the way to a barefoot boy kicking at coconuts on a fishing boat. It operates the way I’ve come to expect the poems from this collection to work.
There is a world. And the world is peopled. And each of those people operates as humans. They carry a humanity. I keep wanting to stress this, because Oppen observes people so intently. I’ve heard him described as a political poet. And he is. Capable of recognizing what political structures are borne out of people living in a city, living in a small coastal town, living in northern climates. There are pieces to being human, arranged according to these political structures. And how Oppen can recognize those arrangements is Oppen seeing that humanity. It’s an acknowledgment of population as objects and circumstances.
Which is a conceptual statement alone. The poems in this collection are often seeking individuals out, so the poem can adequately observe them. But using terms like “objects” and “circumstances” also speaks to the incredible efficiency of language. Efficient while maintaining its substantive factness. In “Rationality,” which may function primarily as an analogy on the logic of manufacturing objects, or the rationality of a laborer making sense of his life. But, in a literal sense, the poem takes its reader to the moment the mechanical emerges from a bed of oil. As I said with “Bahamas,” the process is to lead the reader through the poem’s reasoning. How has it arrived to see this one scene, whether it be the barefoot boy in a fishing boat or a young man in a factory line. A moment the poet will land on with his depth of appreciation for the world constantly laying itself out in front of him.
It’s like imagining the present tense as a struggle between order and humans existence. How does the past fit into existence? Is it reasonable to call that history if it’s related to this one particular person? Is order the present tense’s tyranny—a word I use for its exaggeration. But not because Oppen isn’t registering the onerous and absolute pressures a tyranny occupies for any given person. But because Oppen’s method is too subtle to be cast as an absolute position. As the book comes to its conclusion, it discovers the centrality of the poet. Or rather this soft, individualized lens the poet has trained on people is fashioned into a mirror. We get to see him see himself in the same light he uses to see others. It’s an “act of being, the act of being / More than oneself.” Who is anyone to believe they know the experiences encountered by everyone they see? And conversely, what poet is incapable of seeing the humanity within each person boxed in by what the world has overdetermined for people?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.