31 years ago today, the poet George Oppen died in the Idylwood Convalescent Home (now the Idylwood Care Center) in Sunnyvale, California. He was 76 years old, and had been suffering from dementia (Alzheimer’s disease) for several years before his death. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about George or his wife Mary, either their lives or some words that they have written. This past week, while researching the life of Oppen’s friend and contemporary Carl Rakosi, I reread Rakosi’s wrenching account of Oppen’s last days, published in the Carl Rakosi: Man and Poet collection that Michael Heller edited. To be undone in such a way, or to survive the deterioration of the one you’ve entwined your life with!

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One of the last letters included in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ The Selected Letters of George Oppen was this one, dictated to Mary and addressed to his sister June, just a few years before his death. It reads:

June:

I have the little figurine in exactly the right place [spot] and I remember my mother in the garden by the sun-dial and the Rothfeld grandmother who asked me not to play [the piano] so loud and I said, ‘It’s supposed to be loud.’ And the man across the street who said, ‘Hello Bud,’ and the manuscript who came at intervals, and the Saxon automobile with me sitting on my father’s lap and steering, and the slope down-hill toward our house at Circuit Road and the bicycle I got for Christmas and I insisted it must belong to the delivery boy — I couldn’t believe it was mine, and a great many other things — all in the little figurine.

And me climbing on my mother’s bed, and the people said to come down and someone said, let him be – – – –

George and June’s mother, Elsie [Rothfeld] Oppenheimer, took her own life in 1913 when George was just five years old (Elsie herself was just 30). As a child, George’s nickname was Bud or Buddy, since he and his father shared the same name.

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A few years ago, Stephen Cope published Oppen’s Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers with the University of California Press, a project which had initially been Cope’s dissertation (undertaken with Michael Davidson at UCSD, which owns an enormous amount of the Oppen’s archival materials). As the final section of that book, Cope published something he called “Twenty-Six Fragments,” which were “a series of notes scrawled by Oppen on envelopes and other small pieces of paper found, after his death, on or near his desk or posted to the wall of his study”. They are devastating when read all together. Buy or borrow Cope’s book and read them for yourself, I urge you! Here are a few which seem especially connected to Oppen’s last days:

2. I find I am forgetting
all the spoken            of
and the numbers      (i.e.
how to form them
———————
also the numbers

3. We don’t really know what
Reality is made of

5. Being with Mary: it has
been almost too wonderful
it is hard to believe

7. I think I have written what I
set out to say — I need
not now turn to narrative

I have told not narrative, but
ourselves — no narrative but ourselves

10. People visit, and I am
shaken

11. Our little bird: I
feel all my
boyhood in
him

15. We are entering a new era
and nothing will be the same in the storm

(written while that storm was
blowing

(post post modern)

17a. Cortez arrives.
he is absolutely lost
at an unknown shore.
and he is enraptured

(this is the nature of poetry

17b. The poem:

Cortez arrives at an unknown shore
he is absolutely lost
and he is enraptured

17c. Cortez arrives at an unknown shore
he is utterly lost
but he is enraptured

18. Rezi’s last poems:
just names, and the words
themselves
carry meaning            .           somehow

19a. These ordinary words
come to mean
everything

In a way I live on words, forget words

19b. The middle class boy to die
in a foxhole like a
dog

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Finally, let me also share this: I’m working on a public-facing website dedicated to the Objectivist poets, and in the course of my research have been collecting anything related to these writers I can get my hands on. A few months ago Richard Swigg generously sent me some video recorded during the 1973 National Poetry Festival in Allendale, Michigan, where George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Charles Reznikoff gathered (along with Robert Duncan, Ted Enslin, Allen Ginsberg, and many others) to discuss their writing. Here’s a short excerpt from that discussion in which George Oppen tells a gnomic, witty story which he describes as “a very lovely Objectivist story”:

Whatever you do, dear ones, don’t think of a white horse!

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Also, be safe, everyone. Love each other well. It has been almost too wonderful.

Featured image: Mary’s handwritten account of the memory from George’s childhood included in the letter to June cited in this post.