Jacket2 Publishes George Oppen's Last Interview, with Paul Auster

For this interview, Paul Auster hopped on a flight to San Francisco, where he recorded this conversation with Mary and George Oppen while seated at their kitchen table, in their house on Polk St.

Paul Auster: I think the first thing that struck me, reading through the poems, all of them all over again, is the constant appearance of the sea as an image. It’s in nearly every poem, and it seems to me that you use it as untamed nature itself, a fundamental given. It’s also important in the reference to Crusoe in “Of Being Numerous,” the shipwreck, and it’s important in your personal life, too, I know, having being a sailor for so long. I just wonder if you can think about it again — the presence of the sea in the poetry.

George Oppen: It’s also in the poem I wrote for Mary — mother and daughter and the sea. Like you say, I think it is important to me. It’s a symbol of space at least, and our native space. It’s some kind of stoppage, something you can’t go beyond, and it flows in upon you. We talked earlier about Reznikoff in those wonderful lines at the very end of Testimony, which does that. I think it’s marvelous, the way it could be done. It’s just naming the parts of the things, the names of things, in the order of chunks of substance. Just names, as far as one can think, it seems to me — the unlimitedness.

Auster: The unlimitedness. But it’s also a place that has no reference to civilization, really. Man doesn’t do anything there.

George: It is large, and it’s a freedom, and fear.

Mary Oppen: It was a great adventure, too. Then recently you’ve written this about Cortés, which is almost the opposite. Its aim is finding the limit, and finding in some way an exultation.

George: As a symbol of poetry, he’s lost, he’s discovered a continent. He’s absolutely lost and he’s elated. And I use the words as the working of poetry, the experience of poetry, to the nail. And perhaps to the reader, certainly to the writer. He moves beyond himself somehow or other, and he’s lost, and it’s a kind of euphoria for a moment in this state.

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