Among the storm clouds blowing through the 1960s, 1968 was by any standard an annus horribilis for the United States of America.Footnote ² That year saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, race riots in ghettos, Black Power salutes at the Mexico Olympic Games, bloody demonstrations at the Democrat Convention in Chicago, the Poor Peoples' March on Washington, and President Johnson's surprise withdrawal from the presidential race. Abroad, the Tet Offensive surprised American troops in Vietnam, the Czech “spring experiment” in Prague was crushed by the Soviet invasion, and student and worker riots in France in May nearly toppled the government, with resounding echoes across the globe. Prompted by these and other similar shocking events, the United States was undergoing a thorough self-examination as it sought to re-evaluate the structural transformations occurring in its democracy. Indeed, despite the unprecedented levels of material comfort and economic prosperity in American history, the 1960s saw an increasing crisis in the American public sphere, filled as it was with lamentations over the decline of public life: civility was vanishing, streets were becoming meaner, cynicism about government was rampant, and the spirit of community was increasingly giving way to narcissistic self-absorption.Footnote ³

1968 also saw the publication of George Oppen's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume Of Being Numerous. Oppen observed that along with his other major collections of the 1960s – The Materials (1962) and This in Which (1965) – these volumes “proposed the world as purpose” (SL 165). This was his direct response to an increasing realization that total knowledge as ontological fixity was impossible; and in the face of contingent and uncertain significance, Oppen's poetry can be seen as a process of making meaning in a modern capitalist world where meaning has ceased to be a given. In striving for such significance, Oppen sought to assemble a poetics of freedom and responsibility that emphasized a new ethical consciousness when constructing a world.Footnote ⁴ In his exceptionally valuable book George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, Peter Nicholls positions Oppen as a poet grappling with the intellectual and aesthetic fate of modernism, as he constantly refused the “formed tradition” of Poundian modernism and its political and aesthetic excesses by liberating the mind and imagination from preconceived knowledge and concept. Nicholls resists placing Oppen unequivocally in the camp of postmodernism, but he does suggest the incipient traces of postmodernism in Oppen's predilection for openness and uncertainty. Notwithstanding this intellectual nudge, my aim here is to demonstrate that it is less important to pigeonhole Oppen's poetics within modernism or postmodernism than it is to understand his poetic practice as a mode of critical public discourse participating in social debates concerning the state of democratic society in the 1960s. This framework will allow us to understand the political impact of Oppen's volumes of poetry in the 1960s much more clearly if we construe them as part of a distinct political engagement in a Habermasian transformation of the public sphere that reaches beyond his earlier modernist allegiances. The main argument here is that Oppen's poetry straddles a larger paradigmatic shift that occurs within the 1960s from a politics of subjectivity that is focussed upon the autonomy of the self to a politics of the self that stresses community and relational ethics. Taking my cue from the lines of his title poem in the volume Of Being Numerous, Oppen turned his back on the obsession with the “shipwreck of the singular” for the complexities “of being numerous” (NCP 171); which is to say that he eschewed the impractical isolation and the debilitating illusions of individual agency for the multifarious gains, albeit complicated, of the social collective. Indeed, throughout the volume Oppen grapples with a tension between reanimating the capabilities and potentialities of the creative imagination that exists in individuals and yet recognizing that these energies are not separate from the social collective that possesses a political power greater than the sum of its parts. Oppen repeatedly observes that his sense of individual identity is always locked into belonging to some social entity:

Within the changes to the public sphere, Oppen resists the manipulative abstraction of “the people” by recollecting that such abstractions hide the particularities that remain fresh and significant in consciousness and memory.Footnote ⁵ Within this context, it can be seen that Of Being Numerous addresses itself to the question of how to live as both a unique and yet a social being, and how to retain one's individuality whilst also participating within a community; and the urgency and pressure of that question characterizes all three volumes of his poetry published in the 1960s.

All these volumes form part of a theorization of the limits of democracy, at a point when “liberal democracy” in the United States was undergoing a thorough and radical interrogation in the 1960s. Questions about the nature of “liberal democracy” resound through many documents of the 1960s, perhaps most notably the Port Huron Statement, drawn up in June 1962 at the founding convention of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by their leader Tom Hayden. Widely distributed in the 1960s, the Port Huron Statement drove much of the American new-left thought during this period and is regarded by many as a key postwar American document in the debate about the constitution and operation of liberal democracy.Footnote ⁶ Among its wide-ranging analysis of contemporaneous American society, it stressed the necessity of developing a new and different sense of democracy, of transforming the public sphere:

Although there is no evidence of Oppen making a direct comment on the Port Huron Statement in his diaries, notebooks or letters, he does comment approvingly of the activities of the New Left in more general terms, and Peter Nicholls explicitly quotes one such statement: “It does seem to me that the New Left, the young left, has created the finest public conversation which has ever taken place in the nation, has created the only intelligent public conversation this country has known.”Footnote ⁸ It is my contention that we should consider Oppen's poetry as part of this “intelligent public conversation,” as it sought to reshape and transform this shifting, fluid public sphere. The Port Huron Statement directly invokes the widespread cynicism about political ideals “owing to the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well” (PHS 63). Like the Port Huron Statement, George Oppen sympathized with a democracy where “power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance” would be replaced by “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity” (PHS 67).Footnote ⁹

Marianne DeKoven's Utopia Limited, her engaging analysis of the change in the structure of feeling that occurred in the 1960s – a pivotal decade in the shift from modernity to postmodernity – regards the Port Huron Statement as one of the exemplary documents of the 1960s. Indeed, for many people, like Marianne DeKoven, the Port Huron Statement is significant for its development and promulgation of notions of participatory democracy:

The Port Huron Statement is paradigmatic in that it “is at once a text in the tradition of utopian socialist modernity and also a text moving away from this Enlightenment metanarrative towards a politics of the local and particular, as well as a politics of the self.”Footnote ¹¹ The development of the politics of the subject is a key characteristic of the emergence of the postmodern for DeKoven:

In an argument subtly contrary to those who argue that postmodernity began in the 1960s (that oppositional and radical aesthetics and politics were inherently postmodern), DeKoven argues that postmodernity is rather emergent in the 1960s (yet streaked with latent and residual modernity). Very usefully borrowing Raymond Williams's terminology of “dominant,” “residual” and “emergent,” DeKoven employs it to understand the fluid dynamism of the seismic social–cultural changes that occurred during and following the 1960s, as a simultaneity of modernist and postmodernist configurations rather than a fixed teleological sequence:

Written without romantic or cynical nostalgia, DeKoven demonstrates the ways in which 1960s writers kept oscillating between totalizing dreams of utopia and more private and diverse expressions of their desires and identities. The efflorescence of postmodernity from within the stamping ground of modernity depicts an age of contradiction, caught between the promise of equality held out by state organization and administration and the economic pressures that led individuals constantly to look out for themselves.

Indeed, as Howard Brick observes, in the affluent late capitalist society of the 1960s, this growing priority of social relations was caught in a web of incongruities:

Perversely, one mode of this new social relation developed in a form of imperious social organizations shaping the course of everyday life: institutional behemoths such as corporations, mass universities, service bureaucracies and the military establishment. The 1960s saw a shift to debates about “alienation,” which can be traced to two strands of thought – French-German existentialism and Marxist humanism (and, as Nicholls shows, both strands directly affected Oppen) – that achieved singular currency in American intellectual life in the 1960s. “Alienation” promoted a search for personal freedom from unfulfilling routine and a search for community to assuage a pressing sense of personal isolation. A basic existentialist proposition was the putative loss of meaning in the world. Heidegger's somewhat conservative cultural critique saw the crude instrumentalizing norms of modern civilization as irredeemably wrecking a prior world suffused with, and ordered by, spirit. However, the reception of these ideas in the mid-1960s stressed that any search for an absolute was a false pursuit, fashioning a doctrine of varied, contingent and open-ended uncertainties. On that basis, an ethos of freedom and responsibility that emphasized one's need to act, in the endeavour of constructing a world, and to face up squarely to those consequences, inevitably emerged.Footnote ¹⁵

Oppen's dedication to the necessity of politics was clear when he joined the Communist Party as an activist, before choosing to go into political exile in Mexico when hounded by the FBI in the 1950s. His commitment to political–social–cultural transformation never changed when he returned to the USA in the late 1950s, although it was never quite as utopian in its ambition as the 1960s' New Left proved to be. He returned to a New York poetic scene that had developed a thriving avant-garde environment. The Lower East Side in the late 1950s and the 1960s was a well-established enclave of working-class radicalism and resistance and “this condition gave substance to the scene's reputation as an alternative to middle-class cultural consumption and expression. Particularly in terms of the growing poetry scene, the Lower East Side as a neighborhood proved helpful in lending ‘alternative’ status to artistic production.”Footnote ¹⁶ When the Oppens moved to San Francisco in 1967, they moved into the North Beach artistic bohemia already well established by the San Francisco Renaissance in the late 1950s and the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁷ Their house on Polk Street quickly become a meeting point for poets who both lived in and visited the city. Consequently, Oppen kept abreast of contemporary developments in aesthetics, poetics and cultural politics. Oppen's letters and diaries attest to the fact that he paid close attention to the major cultural and political issues of the decade. These private writings bear witness to his thoughts and observations on the key events, major radical movements and significant ideological struggles of his society, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the national day of remembrance, the struggle for women's rights, civil rights issues and the politics of racial segregation, the polemics of the New Left, the international stand-off produced by “the Bomb,” and the waste of the Vietnam conflict. Such political concerns loom significantly on almost every page of the Collected Poems as well, in such poems as “The Crowded Countries of the Bomb” and “Time of the Missile” (the A-bomb and nuclear politics), “The Source,” “Tourist Eye” and “A Language of New York” (urbanism), and “Population” and “From Disaster” (immigration and community). His intellectual struggles to integrate the needs of the individual with the occupations of the society dominate much of his writing in the 1960s. Within this context of radicalization and countercultural activity, Oppen's poetry can only be fully understood as part of the 1960s utopian modernity that seeks to combat the all-encompassing, enveloping bureaucracies and to resist the totally administered societies of late capitalism.

The oscillating balance between the individual and the collective that Marianne DeKoven so cogently identifies in the Port Huron Statement figures prominently in Oppen's poetry. As a poet who declared that “Everything I am is / us” (NCP 52), The Materials (1962), This in Which (1965) and Of Being Numerous (1968) can be seen as an unacknowledged contribution to this attempt to develop a more “participatory democracy.” This might be described as a participation in the transformation of a “public sphere,” famously defined by Jürgen Habermas in his influential book on the democratic theory entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas construes the “public sphere” as a discursive arena in which rational–critical debate about public issues is conducted by private persons willing to let arguments rather than social statuses determine decisions. The book documents the rise and fall of the bourgeois or liberal public sphere that sprang into existence as the result of the rapid expansion of commercial and literary activity in eighteenth-century Europe. Nancy Fraser defines Habermas's conception of the public sphere as a “theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, and hence an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction.”Footnote ¹⁸ Craig Calhoun stresses the rational linguistic basis for this social interaction:

Habermas's argument is that the critical public openness of the public sphere declines in proportion to the extension of its sphere: “Rational–critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption, and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated reception, however uniform in mode.”Footnote ²⁰ As Calhoun continues, “This goal cannot be realized by a denial of the implications of large-scale social organization, by imagining a public sphere occupied only by autonomous private individuals, with no large organizations and with no cleavages of interest inhibiting the identification of the general good, as liberal theory suggests.”Footnote ²¹ Critics (Nancy Fraser among them) have noted, and Habermas has to some extent acknowledged, that his account overlooked the manner in which access to the public sphere was founded not just on reason, but also on property rights, and the exclusions of gender, class and race.

Nevertheless, despite these limitations, for Habermas the public sphere retains the kernel of the ideal of rational discussion leading to consensus. Habermas distinguishes between the political public sphere and the literary public sphere, and sees the latter as an articulation of the values and world-understanding that intertwines with the political public sphere. The literary translates private experience into public discourse: personal experiences achieve public expression. The emphasis is always on the social mode of communication as a way of forging agency in a rational community. In her investigations of agency and autonomy in Critique, Norm and Utopia, the critical theorist Seyla Benhabib begins by identifying the philosophy of the subject in Hegel's thought and its increasing autonomy through critique. She argues that both Hegel and Marx envisage “a process of self-actualization in history to be attained by the creative and transformative moment of work.”Footnote ²² Epistemological primacy is afforded to the work model of activity. By contrast, Habermas's key contribution to this investigation of the models of human agency and autonomy in books like A Theory of Communicative Reason

It is this shift that underpins Habermas's conviction in the public sphere as a valuable site for rational debate, and applying Benhabib's analysis of Habermas's paradigmatic shift in social theory elicits a useful perspective for our understanding of Oppen's poetry. For it is clear that Oppen's poetry is construed as a mode of critical public discourse participating in social debates concerning the state of democratic society in the 1960s, touching as he constantly does on all the key crises of the era and the need for a new “structure of space” (SL 97). Dealing with the crisis of culture in the 1960s, Oppen regarded poetry as “a process of thought” rather than “revelation” (SL 99). In this distinction, his perpetual struggle to make poetry social “communication” without compromising its aesthetic integrity and power, and his anxious deliberations over the intractability of language, demonstrate Oppen's sense of the poet's vital role as communicator, where effective political agency lies in achieving clarity of communicative action. Yet unlike Benhabib's clear sense of understanding subjectivity as a paradigm shift from work models of activity to communicative models, we see in Oppen a poet caught in this shift. It is perhaps closer to the mark to think of DeKoven's articulation of a politics of the self that is “emergent” in the 1960s. At times, Oppen describes the self seeking an externalization or objectification of itself, believing in “the preponderance of objects” (NCP 89); while at other times the self seems clearer that it is the result of a subject–subject relation, “In which things explain each other, / Not themselves” (NCP 151); while elsewhere again, the poet striving for communication loses confidence in his medium and reverts to the apparent certainties that lie in objectification: “Words, there are words! / But with your eyes / We see. And so we possess the earth” (NCP 86).

It is clear from Oppen's letters and daybooks that throughout his life he wanted a critical, oppositional consciousness in culture. Yet when one considers the volumes of poetry published in the 1960s, for all his erstwhile Marxist ideological allegiances one is struck by a sense of a postmodern view of hegemony always in dynamic relation to resistance, rather than a modern view of inherent contradictions in relations of production inevitably generating revolution through the agency of self-consciousness of the exploited class. In his relentless push for critical thought in poetry (and public language more generally), Oppen recognized that bringing about any “politics of social transfiguration” (Benhabib's phrase for utopian sociopolitical aspirations of change) relied more on changing the consciousness and behaviour of humans' intellectual capacities and less on the predictability of the historical workings of a materialist dialectic: “I do not mean to prescribe an opinion of an idea, but to record the experience of thinking it” (SP 88).

Continually striving for “the rare poetic / Of veracity” (NCP 215), a language that catches that disclosure of consciousness as it engages with the world, is part of Oppen's engagement with the transformation of public space. Rather than espousing the romantic protest of the Beat writers, Oppen's work was a sense of poetry as forging a mode of critical public discourse that could participate in and influence social debates concerning the state of democratic society in the 1960s. Within this context, Oppen's distinction of poetry as “a process of thought” (SL 99) rather than as revelation becomes the basis for the formal shape of his poetry, as it is a process captured spatially in the very lineation of his thought:

The insertion of space into these sentences endows them with literal struggle, as they mime the emergence, process and definition of thought. Indeed, space pervades Of Being Numerous – new cities, city-spaces, urban spaces, syntactic spaces; also, the space of the individual in a crowd, the relationship of the individual to the mass; finding a space to speak – home, distance, space, city (all are spatial metaphors). Oppen wrestles with what sort of space America is becoming in the 1960s, evident in such poems as “From Disaster” (NCP 50), “Tourist Eye” (NCP 64–66), “A Language of New York” (NCP 114–19), and “A Narrative” (NCP 150–56); and such examples show that he was acutely conscious of poetry as a mode that needed to engage politically with social discourse.

While Habermas's theory has been very influential in discussions of the constitution of public discourse, it has not been without considerable controversy. One influential critic, Nancy Fraser, has argued that Habermas idealizes the liberal public sphere. Indeed, with the radical changes in the public sphere in the United States in the 1960s, what emerged was a clear example of Fraser's proposition, contra Habermas, that society is far more mixed and hybrid. Rather than society being composed of a single, comprehensive public sphere, it is better understood as a nexus of competing multiple publics, what Fraser terms “subaltern counterpublics.”Footnote ²⁴ These “counterpublics” include other non-liberal, non-bourgeois groups like workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and women, all having an effect on widening the sphere of public debate and promoting social justice in a civil society.

Furthermore, not only do we see different groupings engaging in the public sphere, we also see different areas of debate being raised by different groups. Hence the central areas of debate shift over time due to the changing foci and ideologies of the groups of people engaged in the public sphere. In the absence of attention to the mechanics of the struggles by which both the public sphere and its participants are made and remade, one can usefully supplement our understanding of this struggle over language in the transformation of the public sphere by turning to V. N. Volosinov's model of language in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Volosinov's attention to the communicative struggles at the level of the signifier brings a level of detail to the larger abstract theories of Habermas (and to Fraser's caveats). In stressing the social nature of discourse, Volosinov argues that, within any given sign-community, different classes struggle over the use of the same signs. Hence, given the conflictual nature of social relations, signifiers are at the mercy of a tug-of-war between different ideological factions as each seeks to “pull” the sign in its direction. Volosinov consequently regards signs as “multi-accentual” and as the site of class battles, as the dominant and subordinate social groupings seek to impose their definitions on signs: “The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgements which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual.”Footnote ²⁵ Volosinov describes signs as possessing “two faces, like Janus,”Footnote ²⁶ one looking to conservative stability and the other looking towards a dynamic change: “the ideological sign in an established, dominant ideology is always somewhat reactionary and tries, as it were, to stabilize the preceding factor in the dialectical flux of the social generative process, so accentuating yesterday's truth as to make it appear today's.”Footnote ²⁷ Such an ongoing effort to “uniaccentualize” signs is to empty the social and historical sediments out of discourse in order to give the appearance of being “natural” and “given” to social processes.

In the 1960s, one of the signifiers most under pressure from conflicting social groups was the “I,” the self. As Marianne DeKoven noted, the 1960s are characterized by their “emphasis on the political content of subjectivity, and … focus on politics anchored in questions of subjectivity rather than what was traditionally viewed as the social … Throughout sixties political expression … the meaningfulness and authenticity of the subject's relation to self and world is primary.”Footnote ²⁸ Individuality and the rights of the individual have long been established as the founding principles of the Constitution of the United States, and further enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The protection and security of the individual is a sine qua non in American politics, ideology and nationhood. After the Second World War, the McCarthy era, the rise of the Civil Rights movement, pressure from women's rights' campaigns, and the significant increase in consumerism and big corporate power, all put the public political discourse about the rights and abilities of the individual firmly under scrutiny. The hegemonic discourse constantly sought to reassert the paramount rights of individuals, as part of an effort to bolster the ideology of liberal, representative democracy. One example of this occurs in Ronald Reagan's 1968 radio address as governor of California, where he takes a hard-line stance on the student militants, and concludes,

The subtle slippages here from “we” to “you” to “our” and then to “true individual,” in addition to the appropriation of notions of dedication, justice and order for the anti-student lobby, is indicative of the discursive strategy to propagate conservative values as being those of right-minded and sensible individuals.

Despite these hegemonic assertions, countercultural groups argued that such rights were illusory, eroded by ideological and material circumstances, and, indeed, that the rights of the individual hinged on the collective rights of the society. Alive to precisely the sensitivity of these interpersonal relationships, Oppen wrote,

An individual could not be seen in isolation from, or construed as a discrete entity separable from, the wider social structures of which it was a part. Some social critics such as Herbert Marcuse and others argued that the individual was alienated, dispossessed and estranged from these social structures by an increasingly rationalized and instrumentalized society. Consequently, Oppen's poetry shows a poet engaging directly in the discourse about the construction of the individual, seeking to inflect the key signifiers of the public debate. What is the “I”? How does it function in the society? What is the relationship of “I” to “we” or “us”? These social struggles seesawed backwards and forwards during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and were played out in nothing less than the seizure of these signifiers, the struggle being an attempt to define the “I” and “we.” Oppen's poems repeatedly return to this throughout the volumes published in the 1960s. “The Hills” shows a successive movement from “That this is I” through “As to know / Who we shall be” to “whoever else's / Also ours” (NCP 75). I, we, ours – this progression explicitly addresses the blurred boundaries between discrete individuals, and presents the knowledge of the self as deriving from a wider relation to a collective. In direct challenge to Walt Whitman's confident Romantic assertion of the heroic coherent individual self (itself a foundation stone of the American hegemonic ideology of selfhood), Oppen's poem “Myself I Sing” is about the lack of certainty and security of a discrete self:

The negativity that enters here, positioning the self in a far more fragile, insecure environment, is reiterated again and again, as for instance in “World, World–”:

The Romantic notion of the self-constituting subject as seer or prophet is rejected. Rather it is the incipient modernist sense of the self as belonging to larger social structures that is emphasized. The shift in these lines from thinking the limits of selfhood to realizing that the self has elided into “we,” and that being is having awareness of the relational, the communal, and the world that lies beyond the self, undermines any residual hegemonic American ideology of rugged, independent individualism. The Romantic self as mystery is challenged and undermined, subverted and refuted; the excitement and challenge of existence lies in the realization of the self's extensions, its associations and its dependencies, rather than in the isolated, separate, instinctual consciousness. This goes hand in hand with the repeated insistence in Oppen's poems on the United States as a multi-ethnic and polyvocal community, and of understanding the impact and pressure of this social pluralism on ideological notions of the sovereignty of the individual. In their apparent simplicity, with their carefully delineated and delicate syntax, Oppen's poems exude a style of innocence evident in much 1960s Romantic ideology (William Blake was a crucial paradigmatic figure in the 1960s).Footnote ³⁰ Yet instead of an abstracted, prophetic subject, being for Oppen is always an understanding and awareness of context and situation, both temporal (history) and spatial (geographical). It is rootedness. One example of this self occurs in the poem “Product” (NCP 61, quoted here in full):

This is a poem about identity. In particular, it depicts the intricate relationship between an object and its environment, such that the object's identity emerges from, is dependent on, its environment. For example, the bow of the boat is inseparable from the wave, indeed, gets its meaning from its confrontation with the seawater, carving through the waves. Oppen forges the word “boatness” to characterize the quality of being a New Englander; as if being at sea, working with boats and sailing and struggling with the waves is deeply embedded from childhood within the psyche of what it is to be a New Englander.Footnote ³¹ In an ironic echo of the lines in “Myself I Sing,” Oppen's final sentence is his own realization of selfhood through his confrontation with the action of sailing.

Boats, sailing and the related skills of carpentry figure prominently in Oppen's poems as models for the actualization of the self in the world, especially in overcoming alienated labour. Oppen's notion of craftsmanship is not the Poundian angry denunciation of a philistine phase where art becomes mechanical as society values money more than life, or profit more than beauty, evident in the satiric rage of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” or some of the Cantos; rather it is a fingerprint of care in the handmade object, the endowment of an object in the world with personal and intimate knowledge. These concerns are echoed in poems like “The Men of Sheepshead” (NCP 71), “Squall” (NCP 82) and number 7 of the sequence “Some Francisco Poems” (NCP 229–330); while in “Carpenters's Boat” the repeated invocation of “carpenter” appears almost like an incantation of a special skill that ties one to the materials and the activity of boating as “the monstrous welded seams / Plunge and drip in the seas” (NCP 128). The word “plunge” appears to denote a particular quality of elemental, primitive rawness, as it manifests itself again in “The Occurrences”:

The isolated force of the italicized “Now” and the following gap brings to mind the syntactic pressure of Gerald Manley Hopkins's “The Windhover,” where similar lexical efforts hinging upon a single word are made to indicate a sort of mystical leap into a void, or in this case a “plunge” (although, in Oppen's case, without the overt Catholic Christian metaphor). Elsewhere, “confront” and “present” are key words in this nexus of ideas, as objects stand in naked revelation and perception to the observer. The final open-ended injunction of the poem-sequence “Route” is “That we confront” (NCP 202), urging us into an active engagement with the world yet leaving the reader teetering on the brink of a fragile and unknown knowledge. “Route” is dogged by an apparently elusive and illusive materiality, as the effort to write poetry appears to be constantly upset by the realization that it may merely sink into banal “reportage” (NCP 199 and 200). Nevertheless, this complex of excitement and anxiety brought about by this confrontation with the world is also precisely the search for “the lyric valuables” (NCP 50).

It is this immediate identification of selfhood with action that undermines alienation and estrangement (terms derived from the Marcusean and Sartrean influences in the 1960s) and this in turn leads to an authentic Heideggerian consciousness of being that is lived and understood.Footnote ³² The ideal is realized in action, and the poetic is a mode of that realization for Oppen. The self is not a coherent, essential consciousness that pre-exists being, but an identity born out of confrontation, action and performance. Denouncing the blandness and passivity of conformism, Oppen struggles with his medium to prevent its absorption into a predominant indifference. In this respect, the aesthetic consciousness has the potential for emancipating the individual through self-actualization, and these poems should all be understood as part of a discursive transformation of the public sphere, in which poetry translates personal experience into public discourse in a process of American political self-fashioning.

This analysis of the struggle over language and its combination with theories about the transformation of the public sphere aids our understanding of Oppen's processes of writing and his rigorous commitment to the “purity of the materials, not theology, but to present / the circumstances” (NCP 194). Oppen regarded the public sphere as dominated by ersatz gratifications of mass culture and he sought to resist this “new conformism” of the early 1960s by reasserting conscience and social responsibility against reification and surrender to the general necessity of things. Part of Oppen's effort to combat the impersonal flattening of history, the indifferentiation of past moments, and the evisceration of their meaningful, critical, dialectical historicity, lies in his opposition to a linguistic empiricism that eschews modes of thought that aim at critique and transcendence of the given. Oppen believed in the critical potential inherent in daily observations and off-the-cuff remarks that other discourses carefully eliminate. In this respect, Oppen's poetry is concerned with the historical alternatives that haunt established social structures, as subversive forces and tendencies. Yet most particularly the poetry proposes a feasible and egalitarian field of diverse, multiple, local and partial subversions and resistances, existing in dynamic, fluid relation to the contested hegemony. With sociopolitical change no longer measurable in leaps of revolutionary transformation, instead one sees shifts that are difficult to quantify; that lose, regain and shift again the ground they win; that alter the feel of life in subtle and intricate ways. Resisting an abstract, impersonal, preconceptual approach to the world is the basis of Oppen's poetics, where his technique is “to slow down, that is, to isolate the words.”Footnote ³³ His poetry and daybooks are studded with continual references to the difficult yet urgent struggle with resisting preconceptions and inert thought:

and:

and:

Indeed, if there is one word, concept or problem upon which so much of Oppen's work hinges, it is “definition.” Oppen's work is a continual striving for the definition of terms, signs, communities, knowledges and processes, but there is never a rested, achieved moment, since the exploration for definition is also always open and endless. In response to Oppen's description, L. S. Dembo astutely observed,

Indeed, Oppen's poetics is fascinated with a structure of relations between words and things that always retains the impression of the collective human contexts that produce them, and with the structure of relations that precede and exceed our ethical and epistemological foundations. Oppen's poems demonstrate a stylistic vacillation between declaration and dissimulation: propositional statements are simultaneously asserted and placed radically into question, and his practice results in poems where the already given becomes something at once deeply familiar and yet persistently strange. In this respect, Oppen conceives of the event of thought as a reciprocal interplay between structure and relation, where truth is never iterable as a fixed conclusion. Actuality exceeds representability.

At one point in The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard states that “What Habermas requires from the arts and the experience they provide, is, in short, to bridge the gap between cognitive, ethical and political discourse, thus opening a way to a unity of experience.”Footnote ³⁵ Striving for such a unity may be anathema to the deconstructive Lyotard, but his description of Habermas's synaesthetic goal nevertheless provides a parallel to Oppen's search for what is disclosed through poetry. Poetry for Oppen has the potential to unify society and experience, and its importance lies in its disruption of established modes of discourse as it seeks to produce new “processes of thought,” and ultimately new ways of addressing a tort (social injuries and civil wrongs that do not arise out of contractual obligations). Herein lies the ethical force of Oppen's search for “conviction's / Net of branches” (NCP 228): in allowing the multifarious, the plural, the local and the particular to stream through the discourse, poetic communicative action paves the way for authoritative and hegemonic forces in the public sphere to be relativized by discursive voices hitherto suppressed, marginalized or forgotten. As the public sphere was enlarged by the activities of the counterculture during the 1960s, so Oppen's volumes of poetry like Of Being Numerous were instrumental in shaping the horizon of possibilities that encouraged social transformation. Oppen developed a language of transfiguration in the aesthetic sphere that nourished the politics of transfiguration in the public sphere.