The annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture

My notes, prompted by years of reading Oppen and attending the lecture--

1) Oppen knew how to do things, how to sail and to repair a boat, how to make cabinets, fix an engine. His practicality set him apart from other poets, his contemporaries and otherwise.

2) When I first started reading Oppen--late 1970's--I wasn't ready for him. No, that's not quite true, I was ready for the man, I wasn't ready for his poetry. I remember saying to someone then, another poet, of Oppen, that "he doesn't feed me" or "I still feel hungry after reading his poems," or something like along these lines. How wrong I was; but perhaps my error then contained its own correction, and the admiration that I now have for Oppen's poetry was born of it.

3) Oppen lived a quietly eventful life; he wasn't only a literary man. He lived as if he'd much rather live his life than have his life put in a book.

4) Shyness, reticence, reserve all have their place in genius; genius has some essential but mysterious engagement with the unreachable limits of time, and genius keeps time to itself.

5) Reading his poems today, I can see Oppen seeing what no one else is seeing and finding the language to make a poem from that, so that what he's seeing changes as he's seeing it, hence the time it takes to make it. The language of an Oppen poems changes as the poem more or less arrives at becoming the poem it can only be. An actual typescript of a working draft of an Oppen poem appears to be as much regression as it is  rogression.

6) The affinity with Eliot is surprising, though I might be the only one surprised. What other poet so humanely fufills Eliot's notion of the artist as an individual seeking "a continual extinction of personality"? 

7) He was though, apparently, a completely admirable man, a political activist with nothing to hide, seeking with his partner Mary the many meanings of the good life. I'm never led to believe when reading Oppen that he's a writer who writes because he wants people to know him; instead he writes to know who he is. 

(The Annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, at the Unitarian Center, San Francisco, December 2, 2017, was delivered by David Hobbs.)