Oppen's "Sara in her Father's Arms"

George Oppen’s prosody, as pointed out by Marjorie Perloff in “The Shape of the Lines: Oppen and the Metric of Difference,” is quite different from that of the Imagists, and particularly William Carlos Williams, despite some attempts to argue for their similarity. Apart from their prosody, what separates Imagist poetry (represented here by a certain Williams) from Objectivist (represented here by a certain Oppen)? Or, what is Oppen doing differently?

Let’s look at Oppen’s “Sara in her Father’s Arms.” The poem begins: “Cell by cell the baby made herself, the cells / Made cells. That is to say / The baby is made largely of milk.” At first the two sentences seem to bare no logical connection except that in the first “the baby made” and in the second “the baby is made.” But what do cells dividing have to do with milk, which a baby ingests for the first time only after birth? “Milk,” as a verb, means, according to the OED, “to draw out or extract.” Extracting from themselves, “the cells / Made cells.” In light of this, one might say the baby is made entirely of milking. By taking into account what “milk” means as a verb when it is being used as a noun is precisely the point. The poem in this moment is “thinking with things as they exist” as the reader must to follow the logic.

The poem then moves to talk of Sara’s “little seed eyes” and Sara herself as a “little seed.” This may seem strange at first, but again we can trace Oppen’s logic. Seeds, like the cells at the beginning of the poem, and therefore Sara, germinate. So too do her eyes since she sees and then speaks: “Come let us look at the world / Glittering: this seed will speak.” Upon looking at the world, Sara “will speak, / Max, words!” Sara then, makes cells and words—the materials of the world—herself, her world. This brings us to the last lines of the poem. “There will be no other words in the world / But those our children speak. What will she make of a world / Do you suppose, Max, of which she is made.” The making and the made, to return to nouns working as verbs and vice versa, coalesce in the speaker’s mind. Sara makes herself out of a world of which she is made. No doubt I have not exhausted the intricate interplay Oppen constructs between cells, seeds, sight, words, and worlds, but this is precisely my point.

Contra Williams, Oppen’s poems weave a tight web of connections through linguistic, grammatical, visual and paratactic play that open themselves up to possibility and then seem to close in on themselves again. In other words, Oppen’s poems are not sites of free association but rather a variety of associations condensed into little machines: “cell by cell […] the cells / Made cells,” “the little seed [saw] eyes,” “no other words in the wor(l)d,” and the last word of each of the last six lines: ‘seed world speak world world made,’ which seem to tell the history of the poem. To return to my original topic—the difference between Williams and Oppen—Williams’ poems tend to leave a reader with some sort of semblance, an overall image. Oppen’s poems often seem to come to some sort of close too, but in a more complex way and via different logics.