oppen on the irreducible here and now
for Thomas, re recent conversations concerning science, religion, and the phenomenological here and now. I wish I had the time & energy to write something original. In lieu of something I could come up with, I offer something of decidedly higher artistic merit.
From the poem A Narrative, from the collection This In Which, 1965.
11
River of our substance
Flowing
With the rest. River of the substance
Of the earth's curve, river of the substance
Of the sunrise, river of silt, of erosion, flowing
To no imaginable sea. But the mind rises
Into happiness, rising
Into what is there. I know of no other happiness
Nor have I ever witnessed it. . . . Islands
To the north
In polar mist
In the rather shallow sea --
Nothing more
But the sense
of where we are
Who are most northerly. The marvel of the wave
Even here is its noise seething
In the world; I thought that even if there were nothing
The possibility of being would exist;
I thought I had encountered
Permanence; thought leaped on us in that sea
For in that sea we breathe the open
Miracle
Of place, and speak
If we would rescue
Love to the ice-lit
Upper World a substantial language
Of clarity, and of respect.
6 Comments:
Don't you just love Oppen?
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Thanks for this, Jay. It reminds me somehow of Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2.
Laura - good to hear from you, as always. Truth be told, I've had a hard time appreciating Oppen -- but this poem just blew me away. Maybe it will provide the/a way into his work that I've been hoping to find.
Thomas - I never would have thought about it in connection with Cremaster 2! I suppose the references to ice . . . and the long, panning (sometimes 90-degree rotated) landscapes, the salt flats. Interesting. Both are very much "about" northerly landscapes. But the emotions are so different (at least the emotions I take from them) -- I found Cremaster 2 unrelentingly dark and frightening, whereas the response to the Oppen poem is much more subtle and, for lack of a better word, "positive".
Would love to have a discussion about the Cremaster films, though. Almost everyone I know hates them -- primarily, I think, because of the way they were funded (which angers me as well -- those of us without hundreds of thousands of dollars may never get another chance to see them). They made a tremendous impact on me, though . . .
I think the similarity lies mainly in the way the two works bring artifice right up to nature and vice versa. I remember leaving the theatre and being able to see all the silenced construction equipment at night and the subway as part of the natural system. The way there is a continuum that runs from rocks to vaseline to bees to man ... that's not precise enough ... but something like that.
I don't know about the funding/availability issue. And knew nothign at all about Barney or the series when I saw it. I was just plainly and simply impressed and still am.
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