Objectivists and On-Base Percentage

George Oppen was a contemporary of Carl Rakosi. They were part of a loose confederation of poets in the middle of the 20th century who called themselves Objectivists.

Gregory Luce, a.k.a Enchilada, had a post on his blog about Oppen. It’s funny; Oppen was published by, among other imprints, Black Sparrow Press. I have a shelf of Black Sparrow books**, including a volume of Rakosi’s poems, but until Luce mentioned Oppen, I had never read anything by him.

With Luce’s gentle prodding, I tracked down Oppen’s last published collection (Primitive, Black Sparrow Press, 1978). It’s on inter-library loan from the Minneapolis Central Library, so I have to read it quickly (no renewals!), which is a challenge. For me, his stuff isn’t readily approachable. One of the Objectivist principles is the primacy of structure. I have needed some extra time to decipher the structure in some of his work and to see how it affects the meaning and tone of the poem. (Oh god, this is sounding like a sophomore English assignment.)

So, it is serious business, reading George Oppen. But he was a serious guy. He even stopped writing poems for a decade or so because he wanted to effect radical political change and did not think poetry could advance that cause. (Apostate!)

At the same time as I’m trying to appreciate Oppen’s work, Major League Baseball started spring training. Now there’s an interesting juxtaposition. Spring training is not serious business. There’s as much horseplay, goofing around, and golf as there is working on the game. I like spring training for just that combination of work and play, of seriousness and silliness, and of course the optimism (usually unjustified) that infuses every camp. I tried to imagine what George Oppen would write if he left his dour world view behind for a day or two and hung out at spring training.

First, a short example of Oppen’s work. This from Primitive:

Waking Who Knows

the great open

doors of the tall

buildings and the grid

of the streets the seed

is a place the stone
is a place mind

will burn the world down alone
and transparent

will burn the world down tho the starlight is
part of ourselves

--------

Cool.

So, let’s go from images of the apocalypse to, say, Fort Myers, where the Twins are enjoying the rigors (rigors?) of spring training. This is my presumptuous attempt to turn George Oppen into Donald Hall.

Covering First

pitchers practice fielding
the bunt

trying to decide whether to cover
first or first to
toss that little toss to

the first baseman
has to make sure the
runner will

step on the bag not the foot

these men laugh and sweat
runs run
hard to first

but do not do anything
stupid

old coach pitches
batting practice
he’s smoking

a cigar

* Black Sparrow published, among many others, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Bukowski, Sherril Jaffe, and Ed Dorn.

Ed Dorn, too

The poet Ed Dorn died in 1999 at age 70. I came to his work via Black Sparrow Press, which published Charles Bukowski, Tom Clark, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others. I'll admit that part of the attraction of Black Sparrow Press books was their lovely binding and and typography. The books are a pleasure to handle. I still have a shelf of Black Sparrow books.


This weekend, I dusted off a couple of Ed Dorn volumes because I was trying to find a certain poem about poetry -- how poetry could be graded like beef. I found it, and as I re-read his work found also that some of Dorn's poems (and especially the unfinished fragments retrieved from Dorn's notebooks by Tom Clark) are Brautigan-like in their deceptive simplicity. Herewith a sampling:


From "Hello, La Jolla"


THROWIEGHT


I'm making a dogshit catapult
which I hope to market to people
who live on bluffs, or in flats
high above the city. I've taken out
a patent on a superb nickle-plated
guardrail mounting. I just haven't
worked out the throweight factors.

A slightly different version of this was first published in "Yellow Lola." In "Hello, La Jolla" it was part of a much longer work called Correct usages of some words widely misused or abused in modern conversation & poetry.


Another from the same collection, this one extremely Brautigan-like:


Lending a Hand to the Inanimate

Rocks like to be skipped
It's the only occasion
on which they get to take off
and land

And the one I was looking for in the first place, also from "Hello, La Jolla:"

Inspection

Poetry is now mostly government product
therefore we can dispense with the critical apparatus
the grades assigned to beef will do nicely:

Prime
Choice
Good
Commercial
Canners
Utility


For a long time, I couldn't help but grade poems (at least other people's) using this handy scale. Also, It got me wondering just what utility-grade beef would be used for.