George Oppen

George Oppen is an American poet who lived a very adventurous life that directly impacted his poetry. He was raised in an affluent family in New York in the early 1900s. His family moved across country to San Francisco after his mother tragically committed suicide. George was a reckless young adult. He was expelled from school which provoked the start of his traveling. He traveled through England and Scotland to attend lectures on philosophy. He returned to the United States in 1926, which is when he started attending college. He met Mary Colby at Oregon State Agricultural College. Mary got expelled from the college and George was suspended. They decided to leave Oregon together and hitchhike and sail from the West Coast back to his home state of New York. Along the way they got married.

Once back in New York, Oppen became an important member of the Objectivist poets. Louis Zukofsky, another founding member of the Objectivists, said the group's goals for modern poetry were "to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world." They were highly influenced by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Oppen later published both legendary poets through his short-lived publishing company To Publishers.

George and his wife Mary became very involved as social activists during the Great Depression. His poems were published throughout his time as an activist. Soon after, though, he stopped writing entirely for two decades. Overwhelmed with political enthusiasm, Oppen eventually became affiliated with the Communist Party. After about ten years, he left his job as campaign manager and became involved with the military in an effort to fight fascism. He went on to fight in World War II. After he returned, he faced scrutiny from the House of Un-American Activities Committee. He fled to Mexico in 1950 and worked on a carpentry business.

He returned to the United States once again in 1958 with Mary. They found their way to New York once again where he reawakened his interest in poetics. From then on, he published numerous books of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize. He was able to complete his final work, even though he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, with the help of his wife. He died from complications with Alzheimer’s and pneumonia in 1984.

Robert Creeley wrote an introduction to a book of Oppen's poems (in 2003) that sums up Oppen's "Poetics" nicely:
"However different they were later to find their lives... all worked from the premise that poetry is a function of perception, 'of the act of perception'... Oppen's complex 'thinking with his poems' is a consistent and major factor in all his surviving work...much becomes clear, in fact, if one recognizes that George Oppen is trying all his life to think the world, not only to find or to enter it, or to gain a place in it but to realize it, to figure it, to have it literally in mind.”

Here are two examples of his poetry. They are both examples of ars poetica because he references the poem itself within the poem. Not all of his poetry is like this, but these are two examples that blend "America" with the individual with the poem with the world with the word, etc. He has perfected succinct and short lines. Some poems are entirely made up of couplets. His use of white space, caesura, and lacunae are well placed.

If It All Went Up in Smoke

that smoke

would remain

the forever

savage country poem's light borrowed

light of the landscape and one's footprints praise

from distance

in the close

crowd all

that is strange the sources

the wells the poem begins

neither in word

nor meaning but the small

selves haunting

us in the stones and is less

always than that help me I am

of that people the grass

blades touch

and touch in their small

distances the poem

begins

Who Shall Doubt

consciousness

        in itself

of itself carrying

    'the principle

        of the actual' being

actual

itself ((but maybe this is a love 

poem

Mary) ) nevertheless

        neither

the power

of the self nor the racing 

car nor the lilly

        is sweet but this