Stubborn Poetries by Quartermain Peter

Author:Quartermain, Peter.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

(1) What sort of news did Oppen have, for so many women writers? and

(2) Why did he notice them, why, in the 1960s and later, would he be drawn to pay close attention to their work?

These are not simple questions if only because Oppen's relations with women are divided and complex. Reading his work pretty extensively and intensively over a period of three or four weeks before setting pen to paper I found that I probably would have liked George Oppen (or rather, the unit George-and-Mary) if we'd ever met; indeed I'm pretty sure of that. He sounds like a smashing person, and he's an astonishingly wonderful poet. But it would be easy, paying attention and tribute to what Sharon Olds calls “that feminist side of George,”4 to sentimentalize or idealize him; it would be equally easy, too, to demonize him—and that, not simply because he seems to have enjoyed the company of younger long-leggy women. Among his papers at San Diego there's a fragmentary draft of what might be a letter—I have no idea whether it was ever sent, nor do I know when he wrote it, or who to: “Among the things I don't want to say—out of old friendship—is this: if we did NOT undertake the ‘Space Program’ we would cease to be anything we have meant by ‘human’ ((all the women I can remember speaking of the space program have been opposed to it—Secretly, at those moments, I regard the women as sub human———I do, I do.”5

Well. I'm not sure I'm going to even try to unpack that quite astonishing statement, though I do think it needs unpacking. I do want to get at some of the complexity of his relations with women and his attitudes toward gender, so I'm going to start by reading a couple of Oppen's poems. They trouble me—and it was that troubling quality, indeed, which led me to write to a couple of dozen women writers when I was casting around for my topic.

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