The music of thought in the poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk

253 Pages·2009·2.169 MB·English

by  Bronk, William, Oppen, George, Weinfield, Henry, Bronk, William, Oppen, George

The Music
of Thought
in the Poetry of
George Oppen and
William Bronk

The Music
of Thought
in the Poetry of
George Oppen and
William Bronk
Henry Weinfield
University of Iowa Press | Iowa City
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 2009 by the University of Iowa Press
www.uiowapress.org
Printed in the United States of America
Design by April Leidig-Higgins
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form
or by any means without permission in writing from the
publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact
copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher
would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any
whom it has not been possible to reach.
The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press
Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources.
Printed on acid-free paper
lccn: 2008933514
isbn-13: 978-1-58729-781-6
isbn-10: 1-58729-781-7
09 10 11 12 13 C 5 4 3 2 1
contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
one
Oppen, Bronk, and the Story behind “A Narrative”
11
two
Because the Known and the Unknown Touch:
A Reading of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous”
35
three
In the Drift of the World:
A Reading of Bronk’s Life Supports:
New and Collected Poems
107
four
Oppen’s Reoccupation of Traditional Lyric
in “Eclogue,” “Psalm,” and “Ballad”
181
Afterword 199
Notes 207
Bibliography 223
Index 231

acknowledgments
The publication of this book has been made possible in part by support
from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA) in the College
of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. I am also grateful for
the grant from ISLA that I received that gave me the opportunity to travel
to the University of California at San Diego to examine the Oppen papers
there. I would like to thank the librarians of the UC–San Diego Special
Collections for their help.
Quotations from George Oppen’s New Collected Poems are used by
kind permission of the New Directions Publishing Corporation. Quota-
tion from the work of William Bronk is by permission of the Trustees of
Columbia University in the City of New York. I am grateful to the Rare
Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.
I would like to thank David Clippinger, who is now in the process of
editing William Bronk’s letters, most of which are now housed at Co-
lumbia University, for his kindness in making some of the typescripts
of the Bronk letters available to me. I could not have written the chapter
on Oppen without the magnificent edition of the poet’s letters edited by
Rachel Blau DuPlessis and I am glad of this opportunity to thank her.
My thinking on Bronk and Oppen has been enriched by the many
friends and colleagues with whom I have had the benefit of conversations
over the years. Let me mention some of them by name: Paul Auster and
Michael Perkins, with whom I conducted the taped conversation with
Bronk that appeared in a special issue of Sagetrieb devoted to the poet;
Burt Kimmelman, who coedited that issue; Michael Heller, the author
of the first book on the Objectivists, Conviction’s Net of Branches, and
of many articles on Oppen and Bronk; Louise Chawla and John Ernest,
whose work on Bronk has been important to me; and Michael Davidson,
whose edition of Oppen’s New and Collected Poems has enriched our un-
derstanding of the poet. I am grateful to the late Burton Hatlen (whose
death was announced just as I was completing my labors) and to Marjorie
Perloff, both of whom read and commented on the long Oppen chapter
and from whose criticism I have greatly benefitted over the years. My
friends and colleagues Stephen Fallon, Kevin Hart, David O’Connor, and
Catherine Schlegel have enriched my intellectual life at Notre Dame, and
I am grateful to Allen Mandelbaum, Paul Bray, and Robert Murphy for
their friendship and intellectual companionship.
I would like to express sincere thanks to my editor at the University
of Iowa Press, Joseph Parsons, and to the managing editor, Charlotte
Wright, who with kindness and efficiency shepherded this book through
its various steps. Also, a special note of thanks goes to Blythe Woolston,
indexer extraordinaire.
When I was completing my revisions to this book, Peter Nicholls’s
splendid study, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, appeared. I
wish I could have taken a fuller account of it in these pages, but I am
grateful, in any event, for a recent opportunity to discuss Oppen with
Peter at the University of Sussex. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ste-
phen Fredman and Norman Finkelstein for the considerable time and
effort they put into reading and commenting on the manuscript of this
book at every stage of the process. As always, I am grateful to my friends
Stuart Liebman and Lois Greenfield, and to my wife, Joyce, and our chil-
dren Paul, Saralena, and Vera for their encouragement and love. Finally,
I think of three poets who are now dead—Allen Kimbrell and two friends
from my undergraduate days at CCNY, who introduced me to the work of
Oppen and Bronk and shared the excitement of discovering their poetry
with me: Ross Feld and Bradford Stark. It is to their memory, as well as
to that of the poets George Oppen and William Bronk themselves, that I
dedicate this book.
acknowledgments
viii
The Music
of Thought
in the Poetry of
George Oppen and
William Bronk