A LANGUAGE OF THE CITY
Joseph Noble

     Even the titles of the two poems, "A Language of New York" (Collected Poems 94-101) and "Of Being Numerous" (147-179), show George Oppen's involvement with a topic of prime importance to him: language and community. The former poem appears in This in Which and is an earlier and shorter version of what became the latter, much longer poem. The earlier version has eight sections while the latter has forty. All of the earlier poem, except section four, reappears in the later poem in some form or other. As Oppen himself stated,

Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually does exist.

     I realize the possibility of attacking many of the things I'm saying and I say them as a sort of act of faith. The little words that I like so much, like "tree," "hill," and so on, are I suppose just as much a taxonomy as the more elaborate words; they're categories, classes, concepts, things we invent for ourselves. Nevertheless, there are certain ones without which we really are unable to exist, including the concept of humanity.

     I'm trying to describe how the test of images can be a test of whether one's thought is valid, whether one can establish in a series of images, of experiences...whether or not one will consider the concept of humanity to be valid, something that is, or else have to regard it as being simply a word (Interview with L.S. Dembo 175).

     In this oft-quoted passage about "Of Being Numerous," Oppen references many of his major concerns: his focus on the substantive, on nouns; his inquiry into what humanity is and how it is defined; how language and poetry are a test of one's thought; his belief that there are certain basic words without which we cannot exist; and whether or not these basic words are even valid. "Of Being Numerous" is a large and major work of Oppen's, too big for me to deal with justly here in a short essay. However, a look at the shorter, earlier version, "A Language of New York," will give the reader some idea of how Oppen dealt with the topic of language and community.

     Before I proceed to Oppen's poem, however,I would like to discuss briefly my use of the word community(1). My use of that word is very much informed by the way Oppen, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Heidegger employ it, though here I will mainly talk about the former two writers use of the term. Nancy states how

Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others. Community is what takes place always through others and for others. It is not the space of the egos - subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal - but of the I's, who are always others (or else are nothing)....It is not a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We. It is the community of others." (The Inoperative Community 15).

I would point out a few ideas in this quotation from Nancy important to my purposes in the essay. The idea of the realization of the "I" through others is found throughout Oppen's poetry, as in the line, "Things explain each other, / not themselves," from the poem "A Narrative" (Collected Poems 134). Also, through the death of others, one realizes one's own finitude and the being-in-common of that finitude. Rather than community being the site of a social communion, of a bonding, something that happens, or is desired to happen, in a fascist Gemeinshaft, community is the site of beings' recognition of their finitude and the being-in-common of that finitude. Ironically, that which separates us, our finitude, is also what binds us. In addition, Oppen thought of community as a conversation. Oppen stated in a letter to his sister, June Oppen Degnan, "I mean to be a part of a conversation among honest people" (Selected Letters 55), and in "An Adequate Vision," "'Mankind' is a conversation" (17). Writing, too, is part of community for Nancy: "what communication writes, what writing communicates, is in no way a truth possessed, appropriated or transmitted - even though it is, absolutely, the truth of being-in-common (The Inoperative Community 40). And for both, as well, community and writing are necessarily incomplete:

Moreover, there is no entity or hypostasis of community because this sharing, this passage cannot be completed. Incompletion is its "principle," taking the term "incompletion" in an active sense, however, as designating not insufficiency or lack, but the activity of sharing, the dynamic, if you will, of an uninterrupted passage through singular ruptures. That is to say, once again, a workless and inoperative activity (35).

"[W]hat is important is not the conclusion, but / what we are talking about" ("An Adequate Vision" 9)

     "A Language of New York" doesn't just deal with whether or not humanity is something which exists or is valid; it specifically deals with humanity in the context of the city. In the first section (94), we read,

A city of the corporations

Glassed
in dreams

And images -

And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter

Is impenetrable.

Here we are in the world of Frigidaire (4) and Lever Brothers (43), found respectively in Oppen's Discrete Series and "Tourist Eye" from The Materials, though in this first section Oppen is not so much criticizing this world as commenting upon and observing it. We see the incorporeal become the corporeal, or is it the corporeal becoming the incorporeal? The city is glassed in "dreams," "images," and "joy," but have the dreams and images made the city, or vice versa? The city revels in the "pure joy / Of the mineral fact," which, like the dreams and images, is both what built it and what it builds, what sustains it and what it sustains. It is interesting that this city, which is such an overwhelming fact in itself and delights in the "mineral fact," is glassed in dreams, images, and joy, all incorporeal things.

     The joy in the mineral fact seems to be what grounds the city, but also what might make it inaccessible to man. There is a similarity between these city buildings and Oppen's father's home in "Birthplace: New Rochelle" (34). Both poems give us a sense of the buildings as part of what Oppen calls the "stone universe"(2) (Selected Letters 33). The city here is "impenetrable // As the world, if it is matter // Is impenetrable." The city may have come from our dreams, images, and joy, may still be of Heidegger's zuhanden - those things made by man, as opposed to the vorhanden which are those things made by nature - yet it is still impenetrable to us, and, consequently, like the stone universe; indeed, the city is itself a "mineral fact." This section recognizes both the thingness of the city we ourselves have created and our feeling of separation from that very city.

     The sentence structure of section one also bears examination. The lack of finite, active verbs and the predominance of disjunct, dependent phrases and clauses contribute ironically to both the section's nominative feel, reinforcing the notion of the city as "mineral fact," and the sense of a city that is balanced precariously on glass, dreams, and images. Because of section one's indeterminate feel, the reader finds it hard to tell whether this section is celebrating the city's "pure joy / Of the mineral fact," or criticizing it. One of the things we see in the first poem of this series is Oppen's balancing of the nominative and substantive with a fruitful indeterminacy that causes the reader to question, think, and choose a reading for him/herself.

     The picture of New York City that we receive in section two (Collected Poems 95) is a much more critical one. It is a place where people are "Unable to begin /At the beginning." The "fortunate," though, "Find everything already here." This leaves the conclusion that there are some less fortunate who neither can begin at the beginning, nor can find everything already here for them, the poor and out of work that Oppen chronicled in such poems as "Return" (26-28), people like Petra Roja. The people who do find what they want already here are the "shoppers, / Choosers, judges," i.e., the famed 'discriminating consumers.' They are defined by consuming, indeed, are even consumed by it. So what type of life do they lead?

                                                       here the brutal
Is without issue, a dead end.

                                                       They develop
Argument in order to speak, they become
unreal, unreal, life loses
solidity, loses extent, baseball's their game
because baseball is not a game
but an argument and difference of opinion
makes the horse races.

These people are not engaged in what Oppen would feel is the "conversation among honest people" (Selected Letters 55) which takes place in community, but rather in an argument; in fact, their whole existence, even their games which are no longer games, are defined by the contentious, the argumentative, and the brutal. Can "humanity" be said to exist here where there is no real vital communication? These people are nothing more than "ghosts that endanger // One's soul." Though their brutal lifestyle may bring them "to the end / Of an era," a "dead end" by all accounts, as the "First of all peoples...one may honorably keep / His distance / If he can." The fact that these people come in first in this brutal rat race that they run is, of course, looked at ironically here. However, Oppen senses that "There is a change / In an air / That smells stale."

     Concerning the formal dimensions of section two, I would draw the reader's attention to Oppen's use of line endings, a subject which he addresses in his interview with L.S. Dembo. In the second stanza, the phrase "and difference of opinion" at first seems to apply to baseball: "baseball is not a game / but an argument and difference of opinion, " but then, as we read further, we don't know what the subject of "makes the horse races" is. We then realize that the phrase "difference of opinion" is the subject of "makes." So the phrase in question would seem applicable to both clauses. In other poems, Oppen uses this same technique. Why does he create this indeterminacy in the syntax through the use of line endings? Possibly as a way to reinforce the notion of relation in his work in general, and in this poem specifically. The notions of contextualization and interrelation are important for Oppen and his use of language in this indeterminate way seems to reinforce these concerns, but also seems to point to another view that Rachel Blau Du Plessis gets at in her essay on Oppen where she compares him with Pound, and shows how Pound takes essentially a didactic and propagandistic position in the Cantos a good deal of the time, therefore putting forward a program of what social relations should be and how to go about building them, as opposed to Oppen for whom relations among human beings and the world they live in are always contextual and always changing and not a system that should be imposed (Du Plessis 123-148).

     Another aspect of this section's formal dimension is its paratactic structure, especially in the first stanza. Here we find the three main topical elements placed side by side: the fortunate find everything already here; they are shoppers, choosers, judges; here the brutal is without issue. The structure of the sentence is not: "Because these people are this, therefore, such and such is the case." The elements of the stanza are simply placed next to each other in the mode of Oppen's figures of perception (Selected Letters 81) as opposed to what he describes as the figures of elocution.(3) This technique gives the reader the feeling he has more direct access to the elements discussed and allows him to participate more by connecting these elements together himself in whatever way he feels is called for by the poem. This dimension of reader participation can be found in many of Oppen's poems, and it speaks to the dialogic process so important in general in Oppen's work.

     Right after talking about keeping distance from the people of New York at the end of section two, the very first lines in section three (Collected Poems 96) say, "I cannot even now / Altogether disengage myself / From those men." The men about whom he is talking are those he met while in the service during World War II. Why can he not disengage himself from these men, yet wants to disengage himself from the shoppers and people of New York? What concerns Oppen is particular people. He asks how can he forget those particular men he knew during the war, whom he calls by name, and all they went through, and "talk / Distantly of 'the People,'" whose names he doesn't even know? He asks,

Who are the people? that they are

That force within the walls
Of cities

Wherein the cars
Of mechanics
And executives

Echo Like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak.

This passage, and indeed the whole section, echoes some of Oppen's earlier poems. The topic of how one dwells in the war environment is dealt with in section three of "Blood from the Stone" (31-33), only in that poem we receive a picture of Oppen as soldier cut off from the place he was in because of the war, whereas in this section of "A Language of New York" we encounter Oppen feeling more in contact with his war companions than the people he lives among in New York City. The discussion of cities and how people live in them echoes so many other Oppen poems, such as the end of "Return" (26-28) with its talk about Petra Roja, the Depression, and The Relief, as well as "From Disaster" (29), and "Blood from the Stone" again. The "walls" and the people "within" them in "A Language of New York" strike a similar chord with the "halls and stairways" and the "deep bulk" of the buildings in sections two and three of "Tourist Eye" (43-45). And the mention of "cars" in the poem at hand connects with the other discussions of cars in numerous other Oppen poems, especially from Discrete Series.

     Though section one may have been more indeterminate, sections two and three seem to take a dim view of the city. It seems ironic that the people whom Oppen values so much, whom he knows so well and as individual people, he met and came to know under the duress of war, while the people in the city in which he lives and dwells are just that, "'the People.'" Does this show that people are constructed by the context they inhabit, that when they need to depend on one another as soldiers do during war, they get to know each other better than in a city during peacetime where they, ironically enough, "develop / Argument in order to speak"? And it is also ironic that in the picture presented here the city does not provide opportunities for establishing relations between people, while war does. Is one reason for this because in war there is an enemy to fight against and, therefore, the duress of dealing with the enemy makes individuals band together, while there is no enemy in the city except for the way of life or each individual around you? And if the latter are your enemies, how can you connect with your neighbors or culture or environment when they are what you are fighting? And again to make a connection with section three of "Blood from the Stone" (32), compare that poem's wartime picture of "Standing / Shut by the silent walls" with the poem at hand's civilian picture of "walled avenues / In which one cannot speak."

     In this particular section, Oppen seems to be saying that after the kind of experience that he's had during the war with others, he can no longer talk "Distantly of 'the People.'" The intimacy of relations that he achieved with fellow soldiers during the war makes the lack of connection with those he lives among in peacetime seem unreal. What we see happening in "A Language of New York" is Oppen continuing the momentum of his previous discourses in earlier poems on people's relationships with the city in which they dwell and writing longer and more extensive ruminations on those relationships, this more extended work itself eventually expanding into the forty section poem, "Of Being Numerous" (147-179).

     The unreality of "'the People'" and Oppen's relationship with them, of these people who "are ghosts that endanger // One's soul," the unreality of a city "Glassed / In dreams // And images -," of the cars that "Echo like history / Down walled avenues / In which one cannot speak," this unreality is continued in section four (97) which reads:

Possible
To use
Words provided one treat them
As enemies.
Not enemies-Ghosts

Which have run mad
In the subways
And of course the institutions
And the banks. If one captures them
One by one proceeding

Carefully they will restore
I hope to meaning
And to sense.

The "institutions" and "banks" are the same agencies of power as section one's "corporations // Glassed / In dreams //And images," the same agencies of power as Frigidaire (4) and Lever Brothers (43). It is in these places, and in the public spaces like the "subway," that words "Have run mad." Notice that in section two we encountered the "argument and difference of opinion," in section three the echoing of the cars and the "walled avenues" where "one cannot speak," and here in section four we find words that are "Ghosts / Which have run mad." So far in the poem, this is how the language of New York is characterized: argument, echo, inability to speak, madness.

     How to define humanity by using this language is the question. Like Heidegger, Oppen starts from the ground base, questioning and examining the foundations and essentials of things. Encountered as is, words have become unusable, but it is possible to use words "provided one treat them / As enemies. / Not enemies - Ghosts." The adversarial nature of the city, its brutal and argumentative nature, calls for an adversarial attitude towards words, but then Oppen changes his mind and decides it would be better to treat words as ghosts. The vacillation in the train of thought here emphasizes the nature of many Oppen poems as process.

     Treating them like ghosts, like traces of words, the poet must pursue and come to know each word one by one, "proceeding // Carefully." He must come to know each word by its name, so to speak, as he did the men with whom he fought in the war, and not like one knows "'the People.'" When one rediscovers and redefines words in such a way, then, Oppen says, "they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense." Notice the important phrase "I hope," because it points to all the work that has yet to be done and again shows Oppen's commitment to the on-going process of conversation that is community.

     Another thing to notice is that Oppen seems to be promoting a kind of domestication, a civilizing. Though the people who are "ghosts that endanger // One's soul" might be said to be civilized in an urbane way in that they are discriminating shoppers and have developed a communication of argument, these are the very reasons they have "run mad" like the words they use. Indeed, the madness of the people and the words seems to be symbiotic, each feeding off the other. The people themselves have not been restored "to meaning / And to sense." The idea of civilizing that Oppen values takes the form in his poems of the incomplete process of communitarian conversation and a respect for each being's existence and finitude. Besides intersecting here with Heidegger and Nancy, Oppen also shows himself to have much in common with Ezra Pound who himself refers to the place of the dialogic in civilization when he writes, "A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values" (Guide to Kulchur 137).

     Also, notice the use of line endings again: between stanza one and two. The word "Carefully" can be read in two ways: one captures words by proceeding carefully, and the words themselves will carefully restore to meaning and sense. In the first reading, power is in the hands of the one who captures the words; in the second, it is in the hands of the words themselves. We can extend this scenario. Since the people are referred to as ghosts in section two, there is a sense that the ghosts that have run mad in the subways and institutions and banks here in section four are also these people, or are even both the people and their words, that they are identified by their words, and that the people themselves in a way need to be captured and carefully nurtured in order to be restored to meaning and sense. But then again, as with the double reading of "Carefully" in the context of the "words," the people, by transcending themselves in the Heideggerian sense, and capturing themselves through this transcendence, have the power in their own hands to "Carefully" restore themselves to meaning and to sense.(4)

     Section five (Collected Poems 98) begins with the dependent clause, "Which act is / violence." Is this a question or is it a clause referring to something? Is it referring to the previous section? Is the act of capturing words and restoring them to meaning and sense an act of violence? Or is Oppen asking which act in the previous sections is violent: fighting in war or living in New York City? The rest of the poem gives a context to these first two lines, but it does not really define them any better and instead leaves them in that indeterminate space much of Oppen's poetry can occupy.

     Stanza two seems to be saying that the trappings of technological progress are not enough: "No one makes do with a future / Of rapid travel with diminishing noise / Less jolting / And fewer drafts." Rather, what everyone waits for is war. There is a deterministic attitude towards war; it comes "As always." The hope seems to be that war lets their "juices...flow"; yet "the juices lie," which means both that the juices don't flow, and that they falsify. One may feel invulnerable and alive when the juices flow; there may be the "passions / Of that death" of the "Great things [that] have happened / On the earth and given it history," the history of "armies" and "ragged hordes," but, still, "who escapes / Death?" War and the great events of history, the passion of fighting for a great idea or cause, haven't been able to answer the whole question of our finitude. War is not looked at here as it is in section three where Oppen contrasts the intimacy he had among his fellow soldiers with the isolation he feels from those among whom he lives in the city. In section five, war is seen as part of the "argument and difference of opinion" of the city dwellers, of the life "run mad" in the subways, of, as this sections says, the "future / Of rapid travel." This section demonstrates Oppen's ability to hold contrary and opposing points of view in the same poem towards a single thing. This indeterminacy shows us Oppen thinking aloud, so to speak, and engaging in the process of conversation with himself and the world in which he lives, specifically here, New York City. The series again reveals its dialogic nature.

Whether or not there is war, whether he has
Or has not opinions, and not only warriors,
Not only heroes

And not only victims, and they may have come to the end
Of all that, and if they have
They may have come to the end of it.

     The poem ends with the same indeterminate tone with which it started. The other half of the "whether" clause, what is usually a definitive statement or declaration, is not supplied; instead, more indeterminacy and conjecture are added: "and they may have...and if they have / They may have." Oppen doesn't know whether or not humanity has come to the end of war, warriors, and heroes, but "if they have / They may have come to the end of it." What is "it"? Life, violence, war? We don't know. Again, Oppen is willing to reveal his doubt, uncertainty, and the limits of his knowledge on this matter at the time of the poem's writing. We witness him in the midst of his deliberations on "'the People'" and whether or not they "may have come to the end of" their "passions" for violence, war, and technology and have faced the finitude of their death. So far in the poem, Oppen seems to be enumerating a number of distractions - shopping, sports, work, war - that humanity has constructed which enable each person to avoid facing his or her own finitude.

     After the confusion, uncertainty, and madness of sections two, three, and four, section six (99) is a point of calm.

There can be a brick
In a brick wall
The eye picks

So quiet of a Sunday.
Here is the brick, it was waiting
Here when you were born,

Mary-Anne

The image of the wall here echoes the city walls and the walled avenues of section three, only here it is an image of endurance, patience, and fidelity, rather than one of containment and claustrophobia. It is also an image of witness and companionship: it was there when a woman named Mary-Anne was born. It is a marker of her birth, yet how can it be a marker if it is only one of hundreds of bricks in a wall? The bricks of the wall are like "'the People,'" numerous and anonymous. The only way one of either the bricks or the people stands out is when the "eye picks" one out, when there is a selection and a zooming-in, as happens in this poem. Here we come across one particular brick and one particular person, Mary-Anne. She has a particular name and time and place of birth, and, therefore, though she still is of "'the People,'" she becomes more than just "'the People'"; she becomes restored "to meaning / And to sense" by the eyes' act of "Carefully" picking her. Oppen's sense of vision here is the kind that he says goes beyond the physical, though also including that, to the metaphysical: "The most tremendous and compelling emotion we possess is the one that forces us to look, to know, if we can, to see (Interview with L.S. Dembo 186). I also think of the woman in poem twenty-one (Collected Poems 11) of Discrete Series who is awaiting "locally-a date." Unlike that woman, who dwells in the indeterminate place of the potential of being, Mary-Anne has entered history and her being. This poem also shows how "'the People'" become viable to Oppen: "One by one."

     Mary-Anne is again found in section seven (100):

Strange that the youngest people I know
Like Mary-Anne live in the most ancient buildings

Scattered about the city
In the dark rooms
Of the past-and the immigrants,

The black
Rectangular buildings
Of the immigrants

These are the same buildings described in section three of "Tourist Eye": "Rectangular, rearing / Black windows into daylight" where the child played piano in the "deep bulk" (44). In both passages, we encounter the young living within these dark, ancestral, and even somewhat forbidding domains of the city. This convergence of the "youngest people" and the "most ancient buildings" documents the meeting of the past and the present in the city. These "children of the middle class" are "'The pure products of America-.'" This latter line is a quote from William Carlos Williams' poem "To Elsie" (Selected Poems 53), the next line of which is "go crazy-," echoing the madness of the people in sections two and three and the words run mad in section four of "A Language of New York."

     Oppen sees these children, these "'pure products of America,'" as "Investing / The ancient buildings." The language used to describe the children, "products" and "Investing," points to the American emphasis on making money, and the American tendency to treat even people as capital. We saw the American, omnivorous, consumer lifestyle earlier in section two where we witnessed the "dead end" of the shoppers. Yet, the "change / In the air" that Oppen writes of there is present here towards the end of the poem, in sections six and seven, in the children, a group that holds a special place in Oppen's metaphysics, as can be seen in his poem "Sara in Her Father's Arms" (Collected Poems 30), and even in "Tourist Eye" (43-45) with its ambivalent image of the child playing piano.

     But Williams' "pure products" are more akin to Oppen's "'the People.'" Here in section seven, Oppen seems to be turning the words "products" and "Investing" to a different use, seems to be using them in the sense of "issue" from section two, something that the "shoppers, / Choosers, judges" are without. The children invest the ancient buildings in that they renew them and make them come alive, in that they infuse life into them. In a way, Oppen restores William's "pure products" "to meaning / And to sense."

     The young inhabit these buildings that are of the past and "Of the immigrants," the latter mentioned twice in this section. The young and the immigrants, those outside of the mainstream, are ironically the ones living among history. By living in these buildings, the young both follow in the immigrants footsteps and remind us of the immigrants' history. The young "Jostle each other // In the half-forgotten, that ponderous business, / This Chinese wall." The young stir up things, such as the city's "half-forgotten" history, of which the immigrants are a part, a history which stands like a "ponderous business," monolithic, like the Great Wall of China. What was the purpose of that wall? To protect Chinese civilization by keeping out the barbarians. But do these walls we build, these buildings we construct, help civilize us, help create a safe place for us, or do they cut us off from each other, as can be seen in "Tourist Eye" where "The solitary are obsessed" (44). Heidegger's words on dwelling, freedom, the safe are pertinent:

Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its being, when we "free" it in the real sense of the word into a preserve of peace. To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. (Poetry, Language, Thought 149).

The "change / In the air" that Oppen senses may come from the children; they may be the ones who will be able to capture carefully the ghosts and their ghost words and restore them to meaning and sense. And only by returning people and words "specifically to [their] being," as Oppen does in section three with his comrades from the war, and not treat them anonymously as when we "talk / Distantly of 'the People,'" will our lives restore to meaning and sense. Since the next and last section of "A Language of New York" makes direct political reference, and since the issue of the safety of our cities has arisen, as well as the issue of American economics, I think it worthwhile to quote a passage from Oppen's daybook:

Suppose there were a headline screaming ATROCITY every time a bomb dropped in Vietnam or THE STREETS ARE NOT SAFE every time we built a bombing plane.
                                                                                      The name of the
game is imperialism, and we throw away our lives for it. We can hardly be said to possess our own lives ("An Adequate Vision" 25).

With that type of economics sustaining our way of life, our streets and cities will never be safe.

     Section eight (Collected Poems 101) of "A Language of New York" is comprised entirely, except for Oppen's identification of the author, of a quote from Walt Whitman that is dated April 19, 1864, approximately 100 years before Oppen's poem was written. Whitman obviously wrote this passage while he was in Washington D. C. during the Civil War. The two settings to which Oppen has referred previously in "A Language of New York," war and the American civil setting, are here combined in the setting of the American Civil War. Yet, we do not receive a graphic portrait of battle scenes; instead, we come upon Whitman's description of the American capital, another building, functioning here as both the seat of government and a symbol. This symbolic building is given fairly positive and enthusiastic treatment by Whitman. He tells how the "capital grows upon one in time," especially since there is this figure that he supposes is the "Genius of Liberty" on top of it, a figure that is twice described as "great," a word that refers to both its size and quality. This figure is also described as "wonderful" and "dazzles and glistens like a big star." The passage has telescoped from the capital as a whole to this symbolic figure of the Genius of Liberty. The main editorial and creative change that Oppen has made in this section is to separate the last word, "curious," from the rest of the passage, an action that both accentuates the word's meaning and gives it a sense of irony. After all we have seen in "A Language of New York" about civil life in an American city, the word "Liberty" indeed seems a curious one. After he himself fought in a war to end fascism and preserve liberty, one of the questions Oppen seems to be asking is what kind of liberty do we have in a city like New York? Yet, to be curious is to ask questions, to want to discover, to be open to things. The word "curious" implies process since curiosity is a state in which one continues to ask questions. Curiosity also conveys a sense of wonder. Oppen and Heidegger both share that sense of wonder that the things which are are. Oppen himself said:

And I set myself again and again, not in the spirit of any medical pragmatism, any philosophy offering to cure everything, nor in any effort to improve anybody, but just to record the fact, to saying that I enjoy life very much and defining my feeling by the word "curious" or, as at the end of "A Narrative," "joy," joy in the fact that one confronts a thing so large, that one is part of it. The sense of awe, I suppose, is all I manage to talk about. I had written that "virtue of the mind is that emotion which causes to see," and I think that perhaps that is the best statement of it. (Interview with L.S. Dembo 185-186)

This sense of presenting what is seen while not offering definitive answers is what happens throughout Oppen's poetry and is what happens in "A Language of New York." We are presented with the people, things, events, and situations Oppen sees, both physically and metaphysically, with all their complexities and perplexities. The poems he writes are themselves "curious," questions that he is asking himself and is asking the reader about human being. And indeed, by being presented with situations without definitive answers, the reader is allowed to puzzle through and answer these questions in large part for him or herself.

     But there is also a notion of history in this last section of "A Language of New York." Whitman and the Civil War are part of the history that is "half-forgotten" in section seven. Oppen's work many times gives us this sense of history slipping away, and of him gently nudging it back into our consciousness, or more exactly, nudging the notion of history back into our consciousness. We also find ourselves in a relationship with history, with its legacy of ideas and attitudes that we have inherited and assimilated, ideas about how we are to dwell together in these buildings and cities we have built. For Oppen, history and being are domains about which we must always be "curious," about which we must always be asking questions.

      Another thing to notice about this section is that the Whitman quotation both filters Oppen's thought through a persona and gives voice to another person. This technique shows the person in relation to others and can be traced back to the first poem of Discrete Series where Oppen quoted Henry James. Oppen again places his ideas in relation to those of another, continuing the "honest conversation" that was such an important part of his being and, indeed, helped define that being.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "Objectivist Poetics and Political Vision: A Study of Oppen and Pound." Hatlen. 123-148.
Dembo, L.S. and Cyrena N. Pondrom, eds. The Contemporary Writer; Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972.
Hatlen, Burton, ed. George Oppen: Man and Poet. Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 1981.
Heidegger, Martin. Existence and Being. Washington, D.C.: Gateway Editions, 1949.
---. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Oppen, George. "An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook." Ed. Michael Davidson. Ironwood 26 (1985): 5-31.
---. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975.
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---. The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1990.
Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970.
Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1985.