Oppen after SFO

Haven’t had time to write about the three Bay Area readings, which were great; mainly because I have been having such a great time with my old friend Robyn Schiff, who read with me for the readings in San Francisco and Sonoma, and also read with me last night here in Portland. She is a fantastic poet. Here she is at lunch right after I picked her up from the airport:



We have also been surprisingly busy just getting from place to place. San Francisco airport was kind of a nightmare, but I had an hour to read on the plane—Oppen’s Selected Prose (edited by Stephen Cope, whom I just met while up in Ithaca, now that I think of it). Some good quotes so far:

The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics. (32)

Such an art has always to be defended against a furious and bitter Bohemia whose passion it is to assist, in the highest of high spirits, at the razing of that art which is the last intrusion on an onanism which they believe to be artistic. In these circles is elaborated a mock-admiration of the artist as a sort of super-annuated infant, and it is the nightmare of the poet or the artist to find himself wandering between the grim gray lines of the Philistines and the ramshackle emplacements of Bohemia. If he ceases to believe in the validity of his insights—the truth of what he is saying—he becomes the casualty, the only possible casualty, of that engagement. Philistia and Bohemia, never endangered by the contest, remain precisely what they were. This is the Bohemia that churns and worries the idea of the poet-not-of-this-world, the dissociated poet, the ghostly bard. If the poet is an island, this is the sea which most lovingly and intimately grinds him to sand. (30)

...the poet, speaking as a poet, declares his political non-availability as clearly as the classic pronouncement: "If nominated I will run, if elected I will hide." (37)

I’ll be driving to Missoula today after an 11-noon Q&A at Portland State. Ten hour drive. One shot. Supposed to be beautiful, but it’s raining. Different kind of beauty. Ah, another Oppen:

The cocoon of “Beauty” as the word is often used, the beauty of the background music and of soft lights, though it might be an art, is also an art of the masseur and the perfumist. (30)