SOURCE: “The New Primitive,” in Chicago Review, Vol. 30, No. 3, Winter, 1979, pp. 148-51.

In the following review of Primitives, Taggart discusses the role of mind, light, vision, and action in Oppen's poetry.

… not primitive, but the new primitive: a late thought retrospective with or anticipating an earliest freshness.

—Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare

Not primitive as unskilled in the use of tools, but the new primitive: one who would put aside tools and the skills acquired over a lifetime to come upon the universe as if for the first time, who would come to language and the writing of poems as if for the first time. The thought is late in the sense of recent or current. In this case, it represents what has been done in the years since the publication of George Oppen's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1975). It is retrospective with and anticipates the freshness of his...