SOURCE: “The Experience of Poetry,” in Paideuma, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 99-103.

In the following essay, Corman demonstrates how Oppen's placement of words, spaces, and lines in a poem affects the reader's experience of its meaning.

Rather than “review” the mettle of George's poetry—let me present and draw upon the skill that this man has in using language as experience—as focal experience—in some of his most recent work (in Primitive). Three poems will do—though it would be a mistake to imagine they exhibit all that there is in this jewel of a book.

The first poem in the collection of 13 poems is

“a Political Poem”

for sometimes over the fields astride of love?          begin with 

nothing or 

everything          the nerve 

the thread reverberates 

in the unfinished 

voyage loneliness 

of becalmed ships and the violent men 

and women of the cities' doorsteps unexpected 

this sad...