Michael Kindellan on George Oppen: The Labor of Revision and sincerity

Michael Kindellan's essay in issue 23 of The Wolf asks what sincerity meant to the American Objectivist poet George Oppen, and answers by setting him against Ezra Pound. It begins with Oppen's 1963 essay 'The Mind's Own Place' and his 1975 'Statement on Poetics', the only sustained prose he wrote on versification. Kindellan reads the first as a reply to Pound's credo that technique is the test of a man's sincerity, noting that Oppen quietly swaps 'technique' for 'image'.

The argument turns on where sincerity sits. Pound, Kindellan says, treats it as a quality of a person, a lack of pretence that shows in an authentic rhythm, and he traces the idea back through Whitman, Confucius and Trilling's account of Shakespeare. Oppen applies the word to things: a poem can be sincere without its author needing to be, which matches his sense of Objectivism as poems being objects. Pound's image is a kind of speech and a superposition of ideas, whereas Oppen wants a verse that avoids fluency and speed, an 'anti-speech' close to aphasia. Oppen is also more worried about ontology, about whether there is anything to stand on.

From there the essay moves to revision. Kindellan draws on Oppen's papers at the University of California, San Diego: typed lines pasted in layers over earlier ones, hundreds of rewritings, and a note insisting that writing is finding out what he means. A sequence of successive versions of a single line about 'little distances of grasses' shows the process, which Kindellan likens to rehearsal. He also looks at Oppen's late unpunctuated poems, where enjambment opens gaps in syntax, and at a Halloween poem that dissociates itself from authorship.

The closing pages complicate the claim. Kindellan suggests that a poetry which refuses rhetoric risks becoming a rhetoric of not posing, citing Frank O'Hara's remark on pared-down diction, and that Oppen's drama of not being able to speak may be one of his most persuasive devices. The essay ends with Oppen's lines about the play beginning with the world, and a works cited list. It will interest readers of modernist poetics, Objectivism and the relation between drafts and finished poems.

Work

The Labor of Revision: George Oppen's Sincerity

Author

Michael Kindellan

Oppen was unabashed in his pursuit of authenticities and truths.

Michael Kindellan, The Wolf, issue 23

Unlike Pound, Oppen does not speak of sincerity as an attribute or characteristic of a person.

Michael Kindellan, The Wolf, issue 23