George Oppen: From A Foxhole Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday afternoon, January 18,2019 at 3: 10 p.m.; Thursday, May 12,2022

'The stiff lines of the twigs
Blurred by the April buds... '
- Charles Reznikoff, #19, from Poems (1920)

Wounded,
lying in a foxhole,
George Oppen recited
Charles Reznikoff's poems
over and over again;
'These gentle iron lines',
he later recalled, 'sustained me, rescued me.'
He never wavered in this conviction.
The nouns. The small nouns,
that they referenced something:
'To talk of the house and the neighborhood
and the docks. And it is not ‘art'.'
Speak about real things.
There was a certain way of speaking
about one's encounters with the world.
Things remain what they are.
The discourse is real, but not final.
He could believe in it.