SOURCE: “Against Transparency: From the Radiant Cluster to the Word as Such,” in Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 79-87.

In the following excerpt, Perloff considers Oppen's poetic diction within the context of the popular use of words and images in advertising.

Oppen's famous twenty-five-year silence (he published no book between Discrete Series [1934] and The Materials [1962] has often confounded readers: what can it mean, it is asked, to abandon one's chosen art for a quarter of a century? And did the poet's political activism (he worked for Communist party causes on and off for some twenty years) and his years of exile in Mexico reinforce or interfere with his poetics?¹ For my purposes here, the psychology of Oppen's silence is less important than what I take to be its paradoxically positive effect on the poetry. When Oppen resurfaced, Rip...