The personas we select for ourselves, for our personalities, encompass a long, semiconscious process that entails necessity, fear, and accommodation, if not a certain degree of subterfuge, while the ones we use in our work involve mostly ambition, astuteness, and a desire to both expose and camouflage our more private intentions, if not selves. In order to extend our imagination beyond that point where we may feel safe to go, our poetic personas often require the kind of self-knowledge, objectivity, and desire we can find only in the personas of those writers we select as models. In either case, an awareness of the nature of the negativity we’re being tested by is essential.
The first and perhaps most enduring poetic model I chose, without fully being aware of the fact, was the one George Oppen devised for both his person and his work. An objectivist poet, he became my mentor and guide in San Francisco in 1968, a heady and demanding time in which men in my position, unable to find full-time work because of our tenuous draft situation, wandered around campuses and other such places, looking for spontaneity and its distractions. I met George after a poetry reading he gave at San Francisco State University, which I’d graduated from the previous spring. Poetry readings were then ubiquitous in the Bay Area, but not poetry readings like his, in which every word and punctuation mark felt hard-earned and inevitable. I was mesmerized by his use of clarity and sophisticated philosophical and political observation and immediately knew that this was the way I also wanted to write, with conviction and great emotional directness. I was still leaning toward fiction but his persona, which appeared to care little for allusion, myth, and even metaphor and simile, seemed to be wrought out of the strict-hewn texture of his being. Like Hemingway’s, his persona was that of a stoic aesthete stripped of all guile and discernible ideology or literary affectation, indifferent to appearances and detectable fashions. He read his work simply, never performing it, as nearly everyone else in the Bay Area did, often with great fanfare. l could think of no one writer he sounded like, or appeared influenced by, his every word spoken in a rather flat, take-it-or-leave-it style, as if challenging anyone to doubt the veracity of a single syllable.
I managed to stick around long enough after the reading to meet him and we walked across campus together to the trolley back to the city, past all the political booths and merry-making Zen thespians and obsessed ideologists of every stripe. “Ah, the lovely absurdity of youth,” he laughed, managing somehow to include me in all this jubilance. Yes, I thought, I was part of all this, and, to some extent, writers like George were our chroniclers, translating all this energy and mayhem into coded anthems for everyone else to enjoy and decipher. But it was his honesty I liked, the fact that he didn’t mince words or thoughts. “I liked even what I didn’t understand in your poems,” I told him as we waited for the trolley back to the city, “it’s not like anything I’ve ever read or heard before.”
He asked if I was a student there and I explained that I had been and had also recently been a graduate student in poetry at the University of Iowa but had returned here after only three and a half months. When he asked why, I said I’d realized I wasn’t really suited to be a graduate student, and even though not being in school meant facing the terrible prospect of Vietnam, I or the writer in me seemed to need to be here, in what felt like the real world.
“So you’re in a kind of self-exile out here,” he smiled, “not knowing what to do next?”
“Yes, I have no idea what comes next.”
We both smiled at the thought, and then sighed audibly.
“Well, I’ve been there myself. I’m also from the East Coast. We have a few things in common.”
He invited me to dinner at his house in North Beach that Friday night and over the course of the next few years I enjoyed many dinners with him and his wife, Mary, always, it seemed, on a Friday night. It was a coincidence no doubt, I thought, that two secular Jews should always pick a Sabbath night to meet. He was of German Jewish descent and I of Russian and Polish descent, and he knew firsthand what living in an uncertain state of exile was like. He’d been wounded while a foot soldier in WWII, winning a Purple Heart, though, as he said many times, his was a vastly different and necessary war. For seven years, he and Mary had survived the terrors of McCarthyism while hiding out in Mexico, and he seemed especially attuned to the fact that I was without family support and on the run amid what seemed the ever-growing chaos of the times. His childhood was privileged and he had enjoyed a small but sustainable inheritance, but his political affinities (he had been a Communist activist for much of his youth) had also led him to a life of manual labor, working as a carpenter, printer, furniture maker, and tool-and-die mechanic in Mexico and elsewhere, while I got by on part-time jobs driving a cab, working on the docks, and, for a very short time, driving a trolley elevator from the bowels of Twin Peaks to the street. And like him, I too appeared to live in a world at least somewhat constructed out of my imagination. During our walks along the San Francisco Bay, he’d explain the benefits of finding a woman like Mary and eventually settling down somewhere less frantic so I could concentrate on my work. He warned me against the attractions and convolutions of what he called the Eastern Literary Establishment, which he felt distrustful of because of its ardent social contract and politics, its emphasis on traditional dogmas and careerism. He knew and admired poets like Ezra Pound, whose fascist beliefs he abhorred even if he understood why Pound had embraced them, and who wrote an introduction to his first book, Discrete Series, in 1934, published by the Objectivist Press, which George put out with his fellow Communists and outliers, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky. He would boast about smuggling a banned copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses through customs into the States from Paris in a suitcase, reading Pound for the first time in London, and the importance of his sometimes contentious and mutually affectionate friendship with William Carlos Williams—Doc, he called him—who befriended him at a time when everything seemed new and overwhelming, as they now did for me. He talked at great length about Williams, Pound, and Eliot and I remember vividly his stuttering descriptions of the paradox of his being a Communist living off a trust fund provided by his capitalist father, the great upheavals and contradictions of life lived at full stride, and the apprehensions of life on the fringes of one’s knowledge and beliefs. His father, he explained, had shortened their name from Oppenheimer—J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist running the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which created the first atomic bomb, was, apparently, George’s second cousin on, oddly enough, his mother’s side—and perhaps that too factored into the profound and engaging sadness I felt in his presence, that and his mother’s suicide when he was four, a sadness that could be seen in the very crags of his long serious features and measured gaze. He was a great humanist poet who advised me on many essential subjects and though I wouldn’t understand much of what he told me, especially about poetry, for another twenty years, I appreciated the warmth and generosity of his attention.
What I did understand almost immediately after meeting him was that he was the perfect embodiment of what I imagined a writer to be: someone whose complete being is the personification of an artist, not someone playing the role in bearing, manner, and costume, but someone for whom such things are as inevitable as what he or she produces; someone who had no choice in the matter and had earned the right to call themselves one.
In particular I remember the Friday night after dinner when he took me into his narrow study to show me his desk (where every pencil and paperclip seemed to hold a place of honor) and pointed to typewritten pages of poems intensely inscribed with notes carefully written around words and phrases and in the margins. I had no way of knowing how many drafts these lines represented, though I imagined many more than I could ever bring myself to do. And when he explained that no matter how tired or distracted he was, he’d always reread a few lines of what he’d written that day before going to bed, feeling confident that whatever problem he’d experienced would be resolved by the morning, I tried to imagine my unconscious mind finishing a poem while I slept, advice that many years later helped me while I was struggling to finish my novel in verse, The Wherewithal. Before going to bed, I’d sit at the dining room table, interrogating myself about what I would write the next morning, knowing that if I didn’t my anxiety would be too great in the morning to write, praying that by immersing myself in the very darkness I was writing about (the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the welfare system in San Francisco in the Sixties) I would see and feel the history I was confronting. More than once I felt George’s presence during these nights, though I doubt he would’ve approved of the shots of vodka I drank as insulation and false encouragement.
According to George, a poem was done when every last comma and period was in its proper place—every single one. When I showed him one of my poems, he’d marvel at a single word or image, ignoring everything else I’d worked so hard on. One decent line or half-formed image was something to praise in someone my age, he said and though it would hurt to realize all thirty or forty of my other lines were less than memorable, I understood how lucky I was to have a teacher who would point out what no one else I knew could. He may not have thought of himself as a teacher (he was never one in any formal sense), but his generosity and forbearance were qualities that clearly came naturally to him and the pleasure he took in encouraging me made a lasting impression.
There’s a good reason why George used this Martin Heidegger quote “the arduous path of appearance” as an epigraph for his third book of poetry, This in Which. Appearances to George were the kind of superficialities and indulgences he deemed dangerous to poetry; any reliance on fluency in language struck him, as it did Wright Morris, as contrived and willed emotion. If even a hint of it appeared in a poem I showed him he’d shake his head and sigh, and then find a different word or two to compliment. Language itself should be held suspect, he believed, since it too often called attention to its devices, and self-consciously held itself up as a paradigm. Language was a means of communication, a servant to the meaning it strove to convey, nothing more. Once it conveyed its meaning and music, its job was complete. Poetry derived from the rigors of hard-earned-and-wrought thought and emotion stripped of anything designed to impress. Fashion impressed, not ideas; ideas convinced and described, and if they managed to occasionally move readers with their seriousness and susceptibility to interpretation all the better. It was us we should strive to impress and no one else, and we should therefore be the hardest and most withholding of all our readers. When he liked even a phrase or line of anything I wrote I saw it as a great achievement.
George was the product of his thinking, and his thinking was the result of what he’d suffered and survived. In 1969 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Of Being Numerous, the title poem an indictment of the Vietnam War, which he was writing during the time I knew him. I returned to Iowa in 1970 and though we lost touch in the following years his friendship remained a continuing source of encouragement. When I heard of George’s death in 1983, I was reminded of Robert Musil’s description of his own aesthetic as being “toward the severe.” When Musil was asked if he, like so many other serious writers, didn’t want a larger audience—his novel, The Man without Qualities, was one everyone familiar with European literature knew about but few actually read—his reply seemed also a good description of George’s aesthetic: “I am not the kind of author who tells his readers what they want to hear because they know it anyway. . . . My readers have gradually come to me, not I to them.” As with George, everything was subordinated to his sense of “passionate seriousness,” a seriousness that knew how to survive not only war and exile but also the passion of despair and conscience.
This arduous seriousness and strict disregard for appearances, or fashion of any sort, were aspects of his persona I so ardently adapted to my own, as a person, as a poet, and later as a teacher. I certainly used his example when structuring the poems in my first book out of what at times felt like the whole cloth of my imagination. If I were to err as a writer it would be on the side of truth and stupidity, not ambition and whimsy. When deciding on how to proceed in a particularly challenging subject, I would remember his lessons on my developing as a writer slowly and accurately, without assuming too much or placing too much emphasis on personal identification. Writers develop at their own pace, with their reading being the sole source of inspiration and ambition. This certainly helped with my own work.
Whenever I find myself taken with the fluency of any aspect of a poem I’ve written I’ll stop myself and then put it aside until that time when I can bear to look at it more objectively, with the confidence of a greater reserve. Much and most of what I write is filler, partially considered ideas and exhortations devised to appeal to those instincts I’ve learned to distrust, even disdain. When I reach that point in a poem beyond which I can neither add nor subtract context or inclination, I know I’ve reached the place where George lived most of his poetic life, a place that asked for nothing more of the reader than what he’d earned in respect and credibility, a place neither particularly kind nor remunerating, though where true satisfaction lived. His manner, though generous and even cautiously modest at times, was always manifestly critical in the most positive and constructive sense. It’s through the discerning filter of his eyes that my persona observes the various drafts of my poems and, to some extent, my life.
This is section 8 from George’s poem “Route,” from Of Being Numerous.
Cars on the highway filled with speech,
People talk, they talk to each other;
Imagine a man in the ditch,
The wheels of the overturned wreck
I don’t mean he despairs, I mean if he does not
He sees in the manner of poetry
Thinking in the manner of poetry changes not only the writer but also the world he or she perceives. There are no appearances in reality, and once embraced, the imagination changes everything else.