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The Oppens: Disability, Disease, and the Authorship of Late Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2022

JOHN DUNN
JOHN DUNN*
Affiliation:
London Contemporary Dance School. Email: johndunn1988@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Every artist has their last works, but not all are “late works,” as theorized by Edward Said. By revisiting George Oppen’s late poems, I challenge established preconceptions about late-life creativity that have typically emphasized social withdrawal, despair, and finality in his work. Emphasis placed on lateness, I argue, obscures material conditions of textual production, particularly coauthoring literary activities. The Oppens work together to shape a social poetics and model of authoring beyond the normative ideals of self-reliance, especially with Primitive, published when Alzheimer’s disease had all but prevented George from working. The poems and archival evidence of Mary Oppen's editorial work describe the couple's journey through illness and the work's posthumous reinvention as a stylistic artefact.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 1 - 30
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

1 Oppen, George, New Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 2003)Google Scholar (hereafter NCP), 176.

2 Ibid., 178.

3 See Middleton, Peter and Woods, Tim, Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Woods, Tim, The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999); and Charles Altieri, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Lowney, John, History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent work see Izenberg, Oren, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of the Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGuinn, Jacob, “Saying ‘We’: George Oppen's and Kant's Lyrical ‘Common Sense’,” Textual Practice, 34, 10 (Oct. 2020), 1751–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 “The argument of course goes on in ‘Of Being Numerous.’ In fact, that's what the poem consists of – is that argument. Again, without arriving at a conclusion.” George and Mary Oppen interviewed by Tom Sharp, 10 Nov. 1978, Speaking with George Oppen: Interview with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968–1987, ed. Richard Swigg (London: McFarland & Co., 2012), 198.

6 “I had known for a very long time that I meant to get to Of Being Numerous. I was not sure I could do it at all, I still carry some elation that I wrote it, that there was – again – time. tho it ends with retraction, question, fails, if that's failure, of a conclusion I am not so confident as to have sounded that I will write another book.” George Oppen to John Taggart, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 209.

7 Ibid., 276.

8 Michael Heller, Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012), 171–72.

9 Ibid., 170.

10 Scott Burnham, Rethinking Schuman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

11 Ibid., 24.

12 Peter Middleton, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 2.

13 Libbie Rifkin, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).

14 Christopher Grobe, The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

15 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 186; Michael Davidson, “Introduction,” in NCP; Lyn Hejinian, email to Michael Cross, 1 April 2006, Mandeville Special Collections, University of California at San Diego (hereafter UCSD), 74, 138, 25.

16 Julian C. Hughes, Thinking through Dementia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

17 Suzanne Cahill, Dementia and Human Rights (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018), 44. See also Ruth Bartlett and Deborah O'Connor, Broadening the Dementia Debate: Towards Social Citizenship (Bristol: Policy Press 2010).

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19 “Stigma often results in a special kind of downward mobility. Part of the power of stigmatization lies in the realization that people who are stigmatized or acquire a stigma lose their place in the social hierarchy. Consequently, most people want to ensure that they are counted in the nonstigmatized majority. This of course leads to more stigmatization.” Lerita M. Coleman, “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified,” in Lennard J. Davis, ed., Disability Studies Reader, 4th edn (New York and London: Routledge), 147–60, 149.

20 Rüdiger Kunow, “Forgetting Memory: Poetry and Alzheimer's disease,” in Kornelia Freitag, ed., Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 281–97, 281.

21 Ibid.

22 Shakespeare, Zeilig and Mittler, 1084.

23 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 43.

24 Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 57.

25 Ibid., 134.

26 Ibid., 7.

27 Gordon McMullan, “The Strangeness of George Oppen,” in Sam Smiles and Gordon McMullan, ed., Late Style and Its Discontents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 31–48, 37.

28 Whether running from their monied families, flunking university, sailing to Europe in the 1920s, or living in Mexico on the run from the FBI in the 1950s, he has always positioned, or positioned himself, at odds with the world around him.

29 Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 98–99.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 72.

32 NCP, 159.

33 Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Historicizing Late Style,” in Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, eds., Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 51–68, 54.

34 Ibid.

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37 NCP, 234.

38 For discussion see Kimmelman, Burt, “‘Tracking’ the Word: Judaism's Exile and the Writerly Poetics of George Oppen, Armand Schwerner, Michael Heller, and Norman Finkelstein,” Shofar, 27, 3 (Spring, 2009), 30–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 NCP, 251.

40 George Oppen, The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New York: New Directions Press, 1975).

41 NCP, 240.

42 Ibid., 141.

43 UCSD 16, 27, 23.

44 For analysis see Martina Zimmermann, “Alzheimer's Disease Metaphors as Mirror and Lens to the Stigma of Dementia,” Literature and Medicine, 35, 1 (Spring, 2017), 71–97; Zimmermann, The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind: Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the Long Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 3–4.

45 Lynn May Rivas, At the Heart of Work and Family (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 189.

46 Ibid., 184.

47 Ibid., 189.

48 Ibid., 275.

49 John Taggart, Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poets and Poetics (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1994), 9.

50 Rachel Blau DuPlessis to Mary Oppen, 2 June 1978, UCSD, 16, 2, 49.

51 George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

52 NCP, 282.

53 Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, the Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), 214.

54 NCP, 282.

55 NCP, 350.

56 Halpern, Rob, “Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen's Domesticity and the Relocation of Politics,” Chicago Review, 58, 1 (Summer, 2013), 50–74Google Scholar, 60.

57 NCP, 284–85.

58 Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

59 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 129.

60 NCP, 273.

61 NCP, 156.

62 NCP, 175.

63 NCP, 286.

64 NCP, 336.

65 Mary Oppen, Meaning: A Life (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), 200.

66 Ibid., 201.

67 Ibid., 200.

68 Ibid., 68.

69 Oppen, Mary and Young, Dennis, “conversation with Mary Oppen,” Iowa Review, 18, 3 (Fall 1988), 18–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 41.

70 Ibid., 44.

71 Ibid., 43.

72 For more analysis see Jeffrey Yang, “Mary Oppen, Meaning: a Life,” Poetry Magazine, 31 Jan. 2020, at www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/152087/mary-oppen-meaning-a-life (accessed 26 Nov. 2021).

73 Hutcheon and Hutcheon, “Historicizing Late Style,” 67.

74 Oppen and Young, 41.

75 Ibid.

76 Laura Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 269.

77 Oppen and Young, 41. Young is referring to the preface in The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New York: New Directions Press, 1975).

78 Andrea Brady concludes that his “‘objectification’ is not limited only to poetry, but also to his perceptions of women.” Brady, Andrea, “Object Lessons Review: George Oppen NCP,” Poetry Review, 94, 1 (Spring 2004), 64–70Google Scholar, available at http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordb526.html?id=13584 (accessed 3 May 2022).

79 Oppen, Mary, “Breath of Life,” Feminist Studies, 4, 2 (1978), 15–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Marcus, 268.