City Poems and American Urban Crisis by Mickelson Nate;

Author:Mickelson, Nate;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Words lose meaning as they circulate through the urban environment, and this contributes to a growing madness in the city itself. Oppen describes an unidentified speaker who “wants to say / His life is real” but fails in his efforts to communicate the value of his experience. The best he can muster is a nihilistic joke: “There is nobody here but us chickens.” As Nicholls observes, the “urban landscape [of “Of Being Numerous”] registers a disturbing loss of historical and linguistic depth” (84). Indeed, as Oppen’s revision of section 4 of “A Language of New York” suggests, by the time he composed the expanded poem he was beginning to lose faith in the possibility that poetic language provides a means for intervening in the circumstances of urban crisis.

His pessimism is perhaps most evident in section 26 of “Of Being Numerous,” the longest section in the series and one that does not appear in any form in “A Language of New York.” Seeking a purpose for poetry in view of catastrophic world events, Oppen compares American cities in the 1960s to the European cities he encountered during the Second World War, a strategy he also uses in “Route.” He describes what it feels like to be a poet in an atmosphere of crisis and concludes that “We stand on // That denial of death that paved the cities, / Paved the cities // Generation / For generation” (NCP 178). Urban experience is thoroughly alienating, according to this view, because it is founded on a refusal to accept human mortality. The “denial of death” Oppen witnesses in these lines shows that cities cannot provide assurance, in and of themselves, that humanity will be protected from harm. In fact, as the poem suggests, cities are merely places where lives are “paved” over generation after generation in fruitless ideological attempts to forestall the inevitable. The remainder of “Of Being Numerous” tests the extent to which poetic engagement with the city is doomed to replicate this perverse and debilitating cycle.

For Marjorie Perloff, the meditation on poetics in sections 26 and 27 represent the climax of the poem. Noting that the first line of section 27, “It is difficult now to speak of poetry—,” signals a shift in Oppen’s perspective on the limitations of language, she suggests that Oppen’s pessimism about the distortions and madness of the city is balanced by his commitment to addressing the material effects of urban crisis through poetic inquiry. In Perloff’s reading, Oppen’s renews his inquiry in section 27 by outlining a process that connects personal experiences to broader social and political dynamics. It begins in his description of poetry as a form of autobiography, “One would have to tell what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is for us,” and continues in terms that echo Heidegger’s dwelling: “I would want to talk of rooms and of what they look out on and of basements, the rough walls bearing the marks of the forms, the old marks of wood in the concrete, such solitude as we know” (NCP 180).

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