SOURCE: “Palmitexts: George Oppen, Susan Howe, and the Material Text,” in Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 64-93.

In the following excerpt, Davidson examines how Oppen's method of composition “built” his poems into objects.

Piling up pieces of paper to find the words

—George Oppen

In the previous chapter, I described how Gertrude Stein's most recalcitrant work reveals a social narrative in textual practices that would seem to serve entirely aesthetic ends. Those practices include her use of repetition, her deployment of social idiolects, her puns and pronominal play, her satirical use of canonical genres (play, sonnet, Bildungsroman), her flattened diction. What I have called “textual practices” Stein called “composition” to invoke both the evolving character of writing in time and the overall shape of the text. But perhaps we can see this social narrative in the physical page itself—not...