Feels Like An Old Friend

Joel Oppenheimer, Lessons (Selected Poems)

That's Francine du Plessix Grey ("beauty") with Joel Oppenheimer {"the beast") at Black Mountain College in 1951. Oppenheimer was a free spirit, and his poems reflect a dedication not only to craft, but to the joy he felt in the pleasures of ordinary life:

The Lover

every time
the same way
wondering when
this when that.
if you were
a plum tree. if you
were a peach
tree.

Oppenheimer drank from the same lower-case font as cummings and Creeley--he wrote modest poems whose rejection of the complexities of the better-known poets of that era--Bishop and Lowell, Auden and Robert Duncan--fit the rebellious spirit of the age. Oppenheimer turned his back on romantic sentiment, on the bloated diction of the moderns, on allusiveness and ambiguity, but at the same time he eschewed the reveling in the morbid self-analysis--see Lowell, Sexton, Plath or Snodgrass--that was a staple of post-War verse. Oppenheimer's self-reflections are wry and self-deprecating; he took many things seriously, but treated his own ego with delicate irony.

Oppenheimer was an outlier: I've checked the two touchstone anthologies of 1969--Mark Strand's The Contemporary Poets, and Berg and Mezey's Naked Poetry and Oppenheimer isn't included in either collection (Oppenheimer's first book appeared, to the best of my knowledge, in 1951). It's hardly fair to generalize about this rich era of American verse--it's mind-boggling to read through these anthologies and to consider the remarkable poetic genius of the period 1945-1970--but sad to see nothing of Oppenheimer's included. This fact makes Dennis Maloney's Lessons all the more welcome. 

Oppenheimer's best poets are transparent, under-stated, and quietly moving. He reminds me of Kenneth Rexroth and early Robert Bly (of Silence in the Snowy Fields), producing the same loose-jointed, Japanese-inflected pinpoints of introspection and wry observation that still feel fresh and immediate. I love this one, reproduced in part, written on the death of his colleague, William Carlos Williams:

now you are dead
no more to see
flowers or women,
no more great
mullen in jersey
salt flats, now
you are bones that
three-legged
dog can worry, now
you have eternity to
consider those mysteries
your life was
built on, now, if
like marc antony you
too are listening in
heaven, you are even
permitted to laugh
at all of us working
in your woodpile, where
you knew enough to
settle anyone
              ----and yet, you
                    were always a loudmouth, did
                    it have to be so silent, and
                    you who all of us knew
                    the waste of news, how does it
                    happen i hear of your death in
                    the middle of music, and ......

I was fortunate to hear Oppenheimer read a couple of times in New York back in the 60's. He was funny and sly and erudite. All of the great ones from that period had imbibed Shakespeare and Milton, Dante and Chaucer, Donne and Eliot and Yeats....the canon as we used to say, all those dead white males who have fallen on hard times, not so much because they are DWM's but because who reads Paradise Lost or The Canterbury Tales anymore?  So much of contemporary poetry feels unmoored from tradition; as a result, a great deal of what I read in Poetry and The American Poetry Review feels pretentious and inscrutable. But the generation that came of age right after World War II was full of men and women who wanted to make a place for themselves in F.R. Leavis's great tradition, in Frye's universe of language.  Oppenheimer wore his learning lightly; he knew what he was doing and went about his business simply, but if you read his criticism, his pieces in the Village Voice, you saw first-hand his intelligence and passion for literature, music, politics.  In this way too he reminds me of Bob Creeley and Rexroth, polymaths who happened to write poems but whose interests in literature and languages ran deep.

The Black Mountaineers must have had a grand old time drinking and sleeping around, writing poems that were loose-limbed and irreverent--thumbing their noses at the buttoned-down Fifties. Always I imagine the age in the black and white tones of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, the finest novel of the era, and then think of how good these poets were at prose--Oppenheimer wrote brilliantly on every subject under the sun.  It would have been grand to live in those days when literature was something more than a commodity, when being a writer was brave and eccentric and important. Not that there weren't philistines galore, but philistinism wasn't our culture's default setting. Never mind that. There never was a golden age, and if I project false happiness on the now distant past it's because the present feels so unbearably awful. Progress, we must recall, is a myth.

***

Oppenheimer died at 58, far too young.

...in the quiet 
light of early spring one
comes on strange things in 
bars...

(A line from "The Fourth Ark Royal")

or,

on the left branch, a
blossom, on the
top branch, a blossom,
which child is this.
which flowering
of me, which
gold white bloom,
which the force of my life.

("The Gardener")

Lessons: Selected Poems, edited by Dennis Maloney, is published by White Pine Press

 George Ovitt, Easter Sunday, 2017