Take out all the adjectives

Jeremy Harding

• New Collected Poems by George Oppen, edited by Michael Davidson
  Carcanet, 433 pp, £14.95, July 2003, ISBN 1 85754 631 8

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.