Robinson Jeffers, George Oppen: Like-Minded Poets, The Power Of Influence Poem by Dennis Ryan

Monday, November 19,2018 at 4: 30 p.m.BB; Sunday afternoon,
November 25 at 12: 05 p.m.; Monday night, November 26 at 9: 24 p.m.

"Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly
At the mountains and sea.Are they not beautiful? "
- Robinson Jeffers, from "De Rerum Virtute"

"... I must not even pretend/To be one of the people."
- Robinson Jeffers, from "The Old Stonemason"

"At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore...
It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot-blooded...
can float at ease
In the ice-cold, midwinter water."
- Robinson Jeffers, from "Animals"

"I might at the top of my ability stand at a window
and say, look out...One man could not understand me/
because I was saying simple things...
I was saying: there is a mountain, there is a lake..."
- George Oppen, from "Route"

"The animal looked across
And saw my eyes... Vacation's interlude? "
- George Oppen, from "Philai Te Kou Philai"

Like everyone, poets relate to others, to one another
in terms of the sum of their experiences, their worldviews.
Jeffers and Oppen are no exception, Jeffers influencing
Oppen by his many pronouncements on the beauty
of the natural world, on the poet's solitariness
and vision, and the resulting sense of separateness
from his and her fellows. Both are California poets—
geography, sameness of place, locale, often affects/effects
to whom we pledge allegiance, as happened in the cases
of Hawthorne and Melville, Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman,
Frost, William Bronk and Wallace Stevens, et al. (Likemindedness—
include me therein, therewith—is inclusive of human genomes.)
Like in other mammals, like biochemistries: "the animal's bare eyes"
look into ours.This sense of commonality and shared purpose is real—
a sense of wholeness, all-inclusiveness, synergy as happened
with these two, like-minded poets: "The animal looked across..."