SOURCE: “George Oppen's Serial Poems,” in Contemporary Literature, The University of Wisconsin Press, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 220-40.

In the following essay, Golding argues that the disjunctive structure of Oppen's poems represents a formal expression of the central concerns of his poetry: disconnected relationship and the foregrounding of individual words.

George Oppen is often discussed as if he were a kind of miniaturist, preoccupied with the small, the particular, the concrete detail. Readers note how modest his ambitions seem, how he writes mostly short poems capturing what he calls “moments of conviction” (“George Oppen” 174), how he pays fiercely focused attention to, in his own words, “the small nouns.” Certainly this view is not wrong, and Oppen himself, both in his poetry and in interviews, does much to invite it. He summarizes his ambitions as follows in “Route”: “I have not and never did have any motive of poetry...