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Short Takes
George Oppen
New Collected Poems
(2008, $24.95)
Luis Fernando Verissimo
The Club of Angels
(2008, $12.95)
C.P. Cavafy
The Collected Poems
(2007, $12.95)
Stumbling, a number of years ago, across George Oppen's "Boy's Room", I found myself moved by its simple evocation of the ordinary humanity that lies behind 'greatness'. But the poem does more than that: it also posits another kind of greatness, an ordinary maturity that is sexier than greatness. After the setup, which asks us to see Keats and Shelley simply as boys, Oppen moves in a startling direction:
Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body.
George Oppen:
New Collected Poems
He asks us to grow up, to relinquish our obsession with youth and to take on a possibly unbeautiful adulthood. Read in isolation, as I first read it, "Boy's Room" and its adoption of a banker as an emblem for sensual maturity might seem to employ a fairly conventional kind of poetic snobbery. What, it suggests, could be less Romantic/romantic, more directly opposite to a doomed young poet, than a banker? In the broader context of Oppen's work, however, the dig--which it must in some way be--gets complicated. For Oppen's poems more frequently speak sociologically or politically than emotionally, and Oppen's sympathies lie with the working classes of the world--the little people who get things done. The banker runs against his grain and, in that context, intensifies even more his embrace of what it must mean--specifically, in this case, to a woman--for a man to mature. I would argue that there may also be a rejection of the poet--or the artist or musician--as representative of a privilege more exalted than that enjoyed by the bankers of the world. Oppen is chopping at his own feet, one might say. And despite how contradictory this might seem at a glance, it plays to another current in Oppen's work--the embrace of what is natural, both out there among the plants and animals and in here, among us. The cult of youth is not natural; maturity and aging are.
Along with a focus on the hard objects of the world (he named his second book The Materials) and a manner of speaking about them that sometimes resembles the voice that the younger poet W.S. Merwin was discovering about this time, Oppen continually ponders society and politics, the way people work together or use each other. This larger study, which can seem too abstracted to a reader like myself, heightens the effect, by contrast, of the poems which examine more closely and with greater specificity the more individual aspects of life, such as love and friendship. "The Forms of Love," for example, recounts how a couple, parked "in the fields," watch the moon rise, revealing below them what appears to be a lake. They "grope" their way downhill
Beginning to wonder
Whether it could be lake
Of fog
We saw, our heads
Ringing under the stars we walked
To where it would have wet our feet
Had it been water
This eminently simple occurrence is rendered memorable not simply by its clean, lean language, which Oppen must have intended, but also by contrast with the 'thinkier' poems around it, which may or may not have been conscious on this part. An earlier poem, "Birthplace: New Rochelle," finds a similar resonance in the love of parent and child as the narrator revisits his childhood home, which has "lasted well," unlike himself:
An aging man,
The knuckles of my hand
So jointed! I am this?
He sees in the house and even in the sunlight shining upon it the "color of his (father's) times" and a "generation's mark" and thinks about his own child, no longer a child, "Not altogether lone in a lone universe that suffers time / Like stones in sun. For we do not." How is it, one wonders, that we do not suffer (or allow?) time? Is it because we wear out, as stones do not? Or is it that stones suffer alone, and we do not? The question is left hanging.
I leave it to you to decide if New Directions and editor Michael Davidson have done Oppen a favor by adding uncollected and previously unpublished poems to the texts of Oppen's books. Regardless, this is a handsome volume, issued in hardcover several years ago and now available in paperback (with an accompanying CD of Oppen reading).
Luis Fernando Verissimo:
The Club of Angels
New Directions has also recently issued in paperback Luis Fernando Verissimo's The Club of Angels, also previously available only in hardcover. Those who enjoyed Verissimo's Borges and the Eternal Orangutans are likely to enjoy this one as well, another mystery which is a subversion of the mystery, a post-modern, post-Borgesian frolic, this time among a group of old friends, lovers of find food, failures in the wider world. Narrator Daniel tells us immediately that there can only be one of two suspects in this case, either himself or Lucídio, who cooks the meals after which the members of the club begin dying one by one. Verissimo calls into question the conventions of mystery writing from the outset. If Daniel has invented Lucídio--that is, if the murders are fiction--then Daniel is himself clearly the guilty party. And his murders can only be coldly premeditated and not the product of passion because he has taken the time and energy to invent them. His necessity then is to convince the reader that Lucídio is real, for only then can Lucídio be the murderer. But can a murder mystery which begins with such a twisted premise be expected to remain faithful to that premise? Verissimo's novel becomes a meditation on mortality as well as a quietly rollicking entry into a world in which death may occur in so predictable a fashion, among such a small group, without the police becoming involved. Charming, humorous and sometimes even touching.
The intellectual worlds of Oppen and Verissimo would appear almost entirely different from that which motivated C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), and yet a thread ties them: love or, if one wants to wax a bit more poetic, the beatific vision.
C.P. Cavafy:
The Collected Poems
Oppen was moved mightily by the struggles of the masses of humanity; Verissimo's "club" by a love of each other and of fine food; Cavafy (or his narrators) by a profound attachment to the fading glories of the past and by the love which dare not speak its name, male homosexuality. It is perhaps Cavafy's frank (but never graphic) treatment of homosexuality in a profounding disapproving culture (though Greek, he lived most of his life in Egypt) that has most entranced modern readers, not simply because they see him as a precursor to gay rights--if only by refusing to deny what he was--but also because nostalgia and remorse are such powerful emotions in lyric poetry. I might argue that these poems are, as a whole, among the weakest in Cavafy's canon if only because they are so much of a cloth, creating as it were their own conventions: too many slight variations on a theme. More interesting, I think, are the poems clearly spoken by other characters, the poems which bring in both a generally broader outlook and the specific details of the historic past, reverberating with the spirit of their times and ours. If "Ithaca" and "Waiting for the Barbarians" are the most famous of these, they do not necessarily reign alone at the top of the heap. Cavafy wrote others of equal value: among them, "Julian and the Antiochians" and "In the Outskirts of Antioch," which use indignant mockery to exalt the people of ancient Antioch at the expense of the 'pagan' emperor Julian; "The City," which so clearly espouses the notion that one cannot flee from oneself; and especially "The God Forsakes Antony". Allied to the first two of these is "Julian at the Mysteries", an early poem not included here because Cavafy excluded it from his own assemblages of his work.
Cavafy has been frequently translated, and Oxford's new translation by Evangelos Sachperoglou offers as its main attraction the original Greek text facing the English translation--the Greek will do most of us no good at all, of course, but somehow it is nice to see it there. Sachperoglou also made the nowadays unconventional decision to translate only the 'canon,' the poems Cavafy himself collected and distributed to his friends. The other poems are easily obtainable in other editions, at least four of which (I believe) are currently in print. If one wants to sample the work of very different modern Greek poets, I recommend Yannis Ritsos's Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses (Princeton, 1991) and George Seferis's Collected Poems (Princeton, 1995). Ritsos was both a profoundly political poet and one deeply attached to Greek mythology, a subject Cavafy avoided almost entirely. Seferis, a Nobel laureate, was a High Modernist who may recall Eliot to some readers.
I'll close this rather scattershot column by noting that I am still in my 'year of reading Trollope'. While I don't find Trollope at all flawless--what writer is?--I must admit that I greatly enjoy him and even admire his deeply human and believable characters and the way he elucidates mid-nineteenth century England (especially the relations between the sexes and the heavy weight of the class system). Take a dip into Barchester Towers and see if you are not hooked.
Mail to Cooper Renner
About
Cooper
Cooper Renner edits the online magazine elimae. Mosefolket, his new and selected poems (published under the name Cooper Esteban), was released in 2007 by Alhambra/Ravenna Press. He is also the translator of Mario Bellatin's Chinese Checkers: Three Fictions (Ravenna, 2006).
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