I understand that the California around San Francisco is almost an entirely different than the California of Santa Monica. But it’s hard not to see correlate Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings with the threaded reality George Oppen presents in his Seascape poems, especially with “Some San Francisco Poems,” which occupy the majority of the book. There is something truthful in the rhythms of ocean, spoken to in both artists’ works. And it’s how the ocean’s truth influences what someone would understand about California. In the Diebenkorn that view involves a color palette, a domestic lens (each of the Ocean Park paintings offers an abstracted view of the beach while looking out a window). The paintings are both settled and variable.
Ocean Park #79, by Richard Diebenkorn
Oppen’s work, on the other hand, notes the trace of ocean rhythm and propensity as it travels up the beach and further inland. As though the poet had seen something about the ocean through a needle’s eye, something that spoke explicitly to that glimmer of truth he might experience when he wasn’t expecting it. A view of ocean, for instance, that appears between a gas station and the shack. The sensation while looking at the ocean, and he feels a wave’s movement as though it could extend beyond the ocean itself, along the wind, along the mind’s eye tracing through what’s happening.
Combed thru the piers the wind Moves in the clever city Not in the doors but the hinges Finds the secret of motion As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices, murmurs Flaws In the wind Fear fear At the lumber mastheads And fetched a message out of the sea again
Say angel say powers
Obscurely ‘things And the self
Prosody
Sings
In the stones
(from “The Translucent Mechanics”)
The opening quote from “The Translucent Mechanics” (#5 from the longer series of “Some San Francisco Poems”) focuses first on whatever presence is carried onto shore by winds moving along the piers. And it follows that wind through the city, into the door hinges, remembering when it was moving with the up and down rhythm against “hollow ships” that speak back to the ocean. While some of the poems follow the wind’s passage a little more closely, “The Translucent Mechanics” provides Oppen’s view of truth (or “self // Prosody”), which could be viewed through a needle’s eye.
It reminds me of the triangulation effected by Rae Armantrout’s work. Especially the poems where two or three sections share a pinpointed notion or idea. A reader can sense she’s arriving to a point, and the point is beyond precision, like the sensation of looking at the Pleiades in the night sky. The stars are present but vague. Available, but only if you had the ability to see beyond what your eye perceived. But where Armantrout’s poetics revolves around a vague perception—giving a reader enough confidence that they might be sure, but they’re not so sure how sure they are. Oppen figures that sensation of approximated certainty within nature. A traveling wind that’s present in extremely specific situations (the wind that might travel in a door hinge, for instance). And if you can follow that wind through the poem you’ll see just how relevant the wind really is.
In this sense, Seascape reads more like a book commemorating what Oppen had accomplished in his previous books, especially Of Being Numerous (‣). This real truth that felt architectural to the city in that book feels here like nostalgia. The poems remember what it was like to feel all that. It appears in the wind. It appears in light. It’s aperture is the eye of a needle.
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.