SOURCE: “The Subway's Iron Circuit: George Oppen's Discrete Series,” in Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 121-41.

In the following essay, Conte discusses the relation of parts to whole in Oppen's Discrete Series.

When The Objectivist Press was inaugurated at the Brooklyn apartment of George Oppen in 1933, a few blocks from the site where Walt Whitman first printed with his own hands a book called Leaves of Grass, it was agreed that the authors would pay for the publication of their own work, alternative financing being unavailable. The advantage to George Oppen, acting as editor and publisher of his Discrete Series in 1934, was that this slender green book of thirty-seven pages was made as he wanted it: one poem, however short, to a page.

In an interview, George and Mary Oppen frequently answer for one another, finish sentences the other has begun, and...