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| Oppen |
It is instructive to examine two poems addressed to
Objectivists themselves. Adopting the same marginal convention used (but abandoned
in late work) by Oppen, of capitalising after line-breaks while allowing for
hanging indented lines without this convention, Seed, in ‘From Manchester, ToGeorge and Mary Oppen in San Francisco,’ begins in fragile media res, and clearly establishes the urban and poverty as a
shared theme with Oppen:
this
city has its beggars too
Lonely and
threadbare in bronchial gloom
like
the sparrows
Imagining
bread or Spring (43)
The notorious damp of the region
is evoked well at the human level, the sparrows (not Bunting’s ‘spuggies’ here)
imaged and imagined as imagining shorter- or longer term respite. Of course,
this is the city of Peterloo
too (the site of the massacre now built over as St Peter’s Square, though
memorialized by a plaque). But after an ellipsis, Seed picks up (in homage and
identification) with a reference to Oppen’s ‘Of Being Numerous’, with its
realisation of the ‘shipwreck of the singular’ in the metropolis:
…
or the solitary
Traveller here and not here
In the
crowed night of streets
The enjambment ‘solitary/ Traveller’, though mild by later
standards, which we have already identified with the Barthesian punctum, makes the isolate figure more
so, as the capital on ‘Traveller’, rather than being a mere metrical convention,
lifts the noun towards becoming a proper noun. Travel is not now ‘dreamless’
but semi-present, transient, and the descent of ‘night’ (a resonant word in Seed’s
work, as we shall see) invades the streets and crowds it (empty but populated
with isolating vacancy). This ‘Traveller’ is finally
Dreaming
each footstep
Home
indecipherable
ache
beneath the ribs (43)
The footsteps are only imaginary or aspirational, the whole
process unreadable (words like ‘indecipherable’ and ‘impenetrable’ recur throughout
Seed’s work), leaving only the desire as pain, but also reminding us of the
bodily symptoms of bronchial disease, corporeal ‘gloom’ (a determinant of
poverty not just the environment). The ever right-wards adjustment of the
visual page, line by line, tilts the reading away from a discursive ending.
‘Indecipherable’, the untranslatable, the inaccessible, could relate equally to
the ‘dreaming’, ‘the footstep(s)’ or the ‘home’ by prior syntactic linkage, or
to the ‘ache’, by anterior connection. In all cases the Oppenesque theme of ‘solitariness’
(the word that is ranged farthest to the disappearing margin of our
conventional reading page) is a code that cannot be accessed. (A number of
Seed’s poems enact this by placing a solitary ‘I’ contentiously at the end of a
line.) What Burton Hatlen says of Oppen goes for Seed in these poems: ‘Oppen …
perfected a poetry in which syntactic interruptions and suspensions open up
abysses within which the unsayable resonates behind, around, and within what gets
said.’ (Hatlen 1999: 53) (This is not unlike the search for the elusive and
‘punctive’ something/something else that
Seed speaks of lurking in his (and Reznikoff’s) conceptualist practice.)
‘For Oppen,’ writes Altieri, ‘sincerity is above all an ethical
term.’ (9) Seed shares Oppen’s perspective: ‘The potential he saw in
“historical and contemporary particulars” was a sense of social purpose without
agitprop posturing.’ (9) The ‘gloom’ and negative ‘night’ re-appear in a later
Manchester poem, dated ‘11 vii 1992’ (81) as, firstly, the ‘Architecture of
solitude’ but also as the ‘Continuous Victorian night’, which reflects not just
the origins of the city (its growth on the site of Peterloo) but its continuity
with the ‘Victorian values’ of contemporary Thatcherite Britain (hence the
precise dating, as in the Falklands War poem, so that the poem is read as situated
social commentary but without agitprop intent).
 |
| LZ |
Zukofsky died in 1978, and ‘in memoriam Louis Zukofsky’ is Seed’s commemoration of this event
and was included in the book of tributes, Louis
Zukofsky, or Whoever Someone Else Thought He Was, published by North &
South Press, edited by Harry Gilonis, another Objectivist-inflected poet, in
1988. (The decade wait seems somehow appropriate to the hiatuses, career
breaks, renunciations and delays in the reception of Objectivist work!) It is
also a work of poetics, one of the instances where poetics appears in the
creative work itself. It opens:
outside
the dream no
Verb
Invented
this freezing rain is this
The
question riveted into brick
Under the
bridge (Seed 2005: 68)
‘outside the dream no’ operates as the title in the contents
page of New and Collected Poems, and
as such, beginning without capital letters, its assertion is muted, its negative
strangely isolated (well to the right of any other word). ‘Dream’ (as much as
the ‘dreamless’ state of the earlier poem) seems private and self-sustaining
(and is curiously close to a usage of Lee Harwood) while the world seems
determined by forces of decay. The enjambment announces the appearance of a
noun, which is (ironically) the word ‘Verb’, isolated on a lone line. One might
expect the word ‘noun’ to be there (and it would in a Oppenesque tribute I
suspect), but here it is the fact that ‘no’ (enjambment) ‘Verb’ (isolated as
though a Zukofskyean focussed particular) ‘invented this freezing rain’. Verbs
(those ‘doing words’ of schoolchild pedagogy’) do not ‘invent’; they animate.
Seed’s syntactic play is freer here and he asks ‘is this/ The question’
embedded in the flow of two other enjambed lines. ‘The’ of the ‘question’ is
neatly capitalised. It may or not be the question but it is ‘riveted into
brick’ in a quotidian location. The question that is questioned here seems to
be the proposition that ‘verbs’ ‘invent’. Invention (as in world-creation, say)
is not a ploy of Objectivist poetry (inventiveness is). Perhaps Seed is quietly
questioning some of the practices of late Zukofsky, the proto-Oulipean games
which seem so alien to the work of Oppen and Reznikoff, Seed’s acknowledged
mentors.
Rust edges
Already
flaking (68)
suggests not construction but decay (and promises more), the
space isolating the elements and liminal space of this slow process. The poem
ends, confirming retardation and reminding us of the rain as the instrument of
rusting.
Slowly in
October
Rain the
transient structures the (68)
Zukofsky has a long poem beginning ‘The’; Seed has a short
poem ending with ‘the’. The near- oxymoron
of the abstract phrase ‘transient structures’ alerts us to the ‘slowly’ moving
‘flaking’ of even a ‘rivet’; ‘transient structures’ are, in effect, historical
time, which is both nomadic and structured;
even in the world’s smallest units, the crucial ones (literally speaking), this
process is present. (Oppen spoke of the little words, the nouns, as his focus.)
No verb invents the corrosive rusting rain, but it effects its own processes of
decay, it carries out its own ‘verb’ function, as it were. This is perhaps
confirmed by a contemporary untitled poem that begins:
Trudging
the verb
Into
streets where else
SW19 SW20
Victorian property after
Dark surfaces all
Changed in five years (58)
This reminder of the Victorian,
the dark surfaces (‘after/ Dark’ subtly evokes that ideological ‘continuous
Victorian night’) and the slow historical change emphasise how Seed’s poems are
mutually confirming. (Something I say to students: it’s easier to understand 10
poems by a poet than one on its isolated baffling own. I’ve looked at two.)
Other recent Seed posts here and here.
Other recent Seed posts here and here.
