Mythology of Blue

• 2012-10-14

  The earth under our feet—We are not asked to begin nowhere.”

  -George Oppen

  [see also +]
  

  (anticipatedstranger)

  Source: anticipatedstranger

• 2012-05-01

  I think there is no light in the world
  but the world
  And I think there is light.

  -George Oppen, from “The Poem”

• 2012-04-05

  There are things
  we live among
  and to see them
  is to know ourselves.

  
  

  -George Oppen

• 2011-03-11

  The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted

  And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot bear it.

  -George Oppen, excerpt from Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22

• 2011-02-25

  “…Oppen found value in the not said, in the incomplete phrase, in the bare noun. His silence was political in that it represented the inability of art to provide an adequate image of human suffering.
  

  -Michael Davidson on George Oppen
  

• 2011-02-15

  9

  ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the
  people, does not also increase’
  I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

  Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his
  dialects and what has happened to me
  Have made poetry

  To dream of that beach
  For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

  The absolute singular

  The unearthly bonds
  Of the singular

  Which is the bright light of shipwreck

  -George Oppen, excerpt from Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22
  

• 2011-02-14

  The Shipwreck of the Singular

  7

  Obsessed, bewildered

  By the shipwreck
  Of the singular

  We have chosen the meaning
  Of being numerous.

  -George Oppen, excerpt from Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22
  

• →

  “When the hammer strikes a nail, the extreme force of the blow on the broad head is transmitted without loss to the point. The head of the nail is the whole of eternity and the point of that nail is pressed to the center of the human heart. ” [ quoting Simone Weil from memory ]”

  
  — George Oppen

• 2011-02-13

  Among days
  Having only the force
  Of days
  Most simple
  Most difficult.

  
  -George Oppen