Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950, Volume 1 by von Hallberg Robert;Faggen Robert;

Author:von Hallberg, Robert;Faggen, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

The first line of Oppen’s untitled first poem in his first book Discrete Series anticipates his later work, announcing at once his epistemological and ethical concerns in his characteristic syntax.

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were

saying, but of boredom

Is—aside from reading speaking

smoking—

Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,

wished to know when, having risen,

“approached the window as if to see

what really was going on”;

And saw rain falling, in the distance

more slowly,

The road clear from her past the window-

glass—

Of the world, weather-swept, with which

one shares the century. (NCP 5)

Oppen’s poem of fourteen lines (a sonnet?) begins midconversation; here as elsewhere what seem to be his greatest insights are attributed to another, often an unnamed “you.” The ostensible quotation is, moreover, an interpretation of yet another quotation, to be given later in the poem. The poem thus takes place in a specific moment between its speaker and addressee, albeit one that is intercut with a fictional moment from Henry James’s short story “The Story in It.” It is filled with the mundane—the small activities (reading, speaking, smoking), emotions (boredom, sorrow), surroundings (window, glass, road, rain)—yet its repeated qualifiers and subclauses (a nod to Jamesian syntax perhaps?), its slightly too general words (knowledge, world, century), urge us to read it “as if to see / what really [is] going on.”

An attempt at reconstructing the syntax of what seems to be the poem’s main “x is y” statement, using the lines’ “Of’s” as syntactic markers and discounting the many asides and elisions, yields the following: The knowledge of boredom is the knowledge of what Maude Blessingbourne wished to know, and that is the knowledge “of the world” as specified in the poem’s last two lines. The four lines following the quotation describe what Maude “saw”; whether that is the knowledge she sought or not—that is, whether those lines are “what really was going on” or simply what she saw out the window—is, despite the rhetoric of clarity, not clear.

Even if we grant that this is the (syntactic) outline of the poem, questions immediately arise. Is the “of” that anchors the poem subjective or objective? Is this poem about the knowledge that pertains to boredom, that a personified boredom has and perhaps gives us, or about that which we have of it? Second: If the poem means to make a groundbreaking but simple philosophical statement, if it means to say that boredom discloses “what-is,” as Heidegger might put it, that knowing boredom means knowing the world more authentically, why does the poem take so long to get there? Why does it go through Henry James? Do the poem’s detours inflect the relationships it is building between knowledge, world, nature, time or being, seeing, saying—or define the knowledge it pursues? How do we move from the knowledge of boredom, whatever that is, to that of the world?

Through the poem itself. How to get from a personal vision or experience to a global or universal one is not just the poem’s overall question, but what its discrete parts enact.

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