Take out all the adjectives 
Jeremy Harding
- New Collected Poems by George Oppen, edited by Michael Davidson
In ‘The Building of the Skyscraper’, a short poem which appeared in the Nation in 1964, George Oppen wrote:
The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.
It’s hard to tell from this poem, published when Oppen was in his mid-fifties, or from any of his poems, what words he was thinking of. He never fought shy of the grand ones: love, war, vanity, world, truth, loss, death, pity, horror, humanity. And while his work can have the blanched aspect of seawrack, it is charged with feeling, and the history of feeling, as it decays or evolves into thought. Yet Oppen was cautious with adjectives (check those seven lines above) and professed a passion for ‘small nouns’, rather than anything too towering or monumental. As a Communist who had lived through the Depression, he disliked extravagance, and perhaps he felt, too, that the seductive, clotted usages of power could pitch us off balance if we looked at them too hard.
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Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His versions of Rimbaud’s poetry are published by Penguin along with John Sturrock’s translation of the letters.
Other articles by this contributor:
Sarko, Ségo & Co. · The Banlieues Go to the Polls
What to Wear to School · Marianne gets rid of the veil
At the British Museum · The African Galleries
The Habit of War · Eritrea
At the Royal Academy · Botticelli
At the Barbican · Pilger pictures
Europe’s War · Kosovo
Jeremy Harding goes to Beirut to meet the novelist Elias Khoury · ‘Before everything else, a writer of stories’
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