before he was anything

My father, before he was anything else, was a poet. He regarded this vocation, as he records in the notebooks, as some “mission from G-d.” (The hyphen indicated his reverence to the deity; his reluctance to write out the divine the name, even in English, is an old Jewish custom and is further evidence of the fidelity that he mixed with his freedom.) “Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money…nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.” This statement of purpose was also a statement of regret: he offered his literary consecration as an explanation for what he felt was poor fatherhood, failed relationships, and inattention to his finances and health. I am reminded of one of his lesser-known songs (and one of my favorites): “I came so far for beauty, I left so much behind.” But not far enough, apparently: in his view he hadn’t left enough. And this book, he knew, was to be his last offering.

Foreword by Andrew Cohen to The Flame: poems, notebooks, lyrics, drawings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) by Leonard Cohen.

find the grain

In his long life (seventy-six years) Oppen wrote little prose and fewer than 300 pages of verse. If we have more of him than we have of Catullus, it’s not by much. He prized what took time, found the grain of materials, exacted accuracy. He’d been a tool-and-die maker and a cabinet worker. He once interrupted some blather about Biblical translation by remarking that what they needed for the job was a carpenter: no, better: “a Jewish carpenter.”

     WORKMAN

     Leaving the house each dawn I see the hawk
     Flagrant over the driveway. In his claws
     That dot, that comma
     Is the broken animal: The dangling small beast knows
     The burden that he is: he has touched
     The hawk’s drab feathers. But the carpenter’s is a culture
     Of fitting, of firm dimensions,
     Of post and lintel. Quietly the roof lies
     That the carpenter has finished. The sea birds circle
     The beaches and cry in their own way,
     The innumerable sea birds, their beaks and their wings,
     Over the beaches and the sea’s glitter.

[poem by George Oppen]

—Hugh Kenner, “George Oppen: In Memoriam,” Poetry Project Newsletter, Oct. 1984 , Mazes: essays by Hugh Kenner (North Point Press, 1989).