I’m back in the new year and ready for more Sunday night poetry.
Sometimes a poem succeeds based on a single striking image expressed in exactly the right way. Such is the case with tonight's poem, “The Forms of Love,” by George Oppen:
Parked in the fields All night So many years ago, We saw A lake beside us When the moon rose. I remember Leaving that ancient car Together. I remember Standing in the white grass Beside it. We groped Our way together Down-hill in the bright Incredible light Beginning to wonder Whether it could be lake Or fog We saw, our heads Ringing under the stars. We walked To where it would have wet our feet Had it been water
Oppen is an interesting case: unlike some other poets I'm featuring, he believed that poetry and politics did not go together; in the words of L. S. Dembo, writing in The Nation, “[Oppen] never believed that politics could be made into poetry or, conversely, that poetry could have any effect on social conditions.” A Communist Party member (along with his wife), he stopped writing poetry in the 1930s to devote himself to labor organizing and activism, and only resumed writing it again relatively late in life. In between he fought as a US infantryman in World War II, was seriously wounded and awarded a Purple Heart, and then fled to Mexico after the war to escape McCarthyism, returning to the US in 1958, just in time for the Sixties.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by George Oppen.
- Internet Archive: New Collected Poems, by George Oppen, edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Davidson, with a preface by Eliot Weinberger. .
- Bookshop.org:
- New Collected Poems, by George Oppen. This edition includes a CD of Oppen reading several of his poems.
- George Oppen: Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley.