Found in the attic, from March 2004.
Preliminary PreparationsTake your anxious hands off the thick text of any national newspaper and begin disregarding those distant purveyors of mental anguish – war, politics, and class struggle – (and especially their complexities and theoretical contexts). This is not an order to become apathetic but a command to localize your focus. Raze such fabricated notions as national pride, Truth, and socially induced moral expectancies to the weary, bloody soil and begin again in a plot green with the possibilities of individual imagination. Refuse to let anyone else define your world for you and begin becoming a creator to reclaim control over your own life and decrease the mentally dimming consequences of repetition-without-remark; as William Carlos Williams has written in Spring & All, “When we name it, life exists” (203). Hold an internal inquisition to assess all past assumptions, then send them flailing to the dungeons. This will clear your cluttered, modern head to create space for new names, definitions, and impressions. Then refocus your eyes on the immediate, that which is within the stretch of your arm. Thus will you gain self-control, new perceptions, and access to a heightened imagination. (But forget that objectivism is also a theory, forget it has a name. Remember that it is not a movement so much as it is the desire for refreshment.)
FieldworkLeave your house. Take a walk around the block, take a drive into the city, or sit on your front porch and spy like a detective, newly cleared eyes wide open. Note those simple things that strike you the most – the neighbor pushing an empty baby stroller, an African-American yelling for passersby to contribute to the United Negro Pizza Fund, the drip of next-door’s rusted gutter. Refrain from placing these sights in a universally examined context such as the constraints inflicted by poverty, and do not turn them into a plea for social action. Instead make your imagination take hold of these sights, transfix yourself around them, and form appropriate words that are not replicas or mirrors to these situations but peers, equals, or even that which will outshine the original (Similar to Williams 209). Remain in reality without consulting the crutch of realism. This will turn your poem into a new reality, another object in the world. This is objectivism, in which the poem is a machine of carefully constructed parts.
The Writing ProcessRemember Louis Zukofsky’s explanation of objectivism: “preoccupation with the accuracy of detail in writing” (“Objectivism, Objectivists” handout) – this is no slapdash slopping of words onto the page; this is practice in precision. Do not seek for symbols to fit the subject – the subject will demand its own form, for this is formalist writing (although it is removed from formalism’s traditional definition). Do not stuff the content of your reconstructed object into a sonnet, a sestina, or a haiku unless the imagination demands that form, like Zukofsky’s subway mantis demanded a sestina because of the complex “twisting/ Of many and diverse thoughts” (68). Keep intuition as well as natural, individual knowledge intact while composing your “Re-collection” (Zukofsky 69). Remain sincere in choosing your words – sincerity retains honesty and prevents the haphazard confusion of mixed metaphor. If you are writing about a beach, use appropriate language for your topic – don’t fall into similes of trains or farmhands – this would be ridiculous and insincere. Instead consider words of water, sand, sky, tidal motion. This is sincerity.
StyleAs always in imaginative, honest texts, style is dependent solely upon the writer, not by any preconceived, packaged form. Granddaddy Williams incorporated elements of his theory that “so much depends/ upon” the quotidian into his actual poems: “Impossible/ to say, impossible/ to underestimate” speaks of the sublime importance of any given moment, object, or experience (197). Similarly, he has retained a printed consciousness of the aforementioned sociological concerns such as poverty, but has twisted them into a criticism of the strained imagination and bleak faces one will encounter in modern America: “and we degraded prisoners/ destined/ to hunger until we eat filth/ while the imagination strains” (218). This is not placing his poems in the context of an academic discussion of class struggle but an imaginative rendering of the sight of “young slatterns, bathed/ in filth,” for example (217).
Charles Reznikoff was a clean reporter, translating daily events into simple, clear language often unencumbered with the declarative “I.” His writing resembled snapshots; his subjects tended toward singular instances of violence, trauma, or despair, as in the poem about the child laborer Amelia who caught her hair into a wire-stitching machine. Other times, he uses a playful combination of logopoeia (mind & emotions), melopoeia (ear) and phanopoeia (eye) to create a complex resonance for a beautiful poetic line, as in Aphrodite Vrania: “The ceaseless weaving of uneven water” (36). Mostly, though, he presents his captured moments free of any overt commentary, giving the reader only the facts (which in itself is a commentary on focus).
Louis Zukofsky, writer of the objectivist dissertations “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931” and “Sincerity and Objectification” that appeared in the February 1931 issue of
Poetry, brought an academic, rhetorical thickness to his manifestos and poetry that remains unmatched by any of the other objectivists. Through odd phrasings like “shapes appear concomitants of word combinations” and “in further suggestion which does not attain rested totality,” Zukofsky explained objectivism’s simple mantra: think “with the things as they exist” and direct them into controlled focus (qtd. in Objectivism, Objectivists handout). “Mantis” and “’Mantis,’ An Interpretation” are metapoetic musings on the writing process of objectification.
Lorine Niedecker, the great condenser, was of the later generation of objectivists, being introduced to the movement through that 1931 issue of
Poetry at her rural home by the lake in Wisconsin. She further condensed the objectivist moment of focus into a quiet, controlled form often characterized by a five line stanza in which the third and fourth lines resonated a slant rhyme. Following Oppen’s suggestion in a March 1913 essay from
Poetry (whether or not she read this essay I do not know), Niedecker wasted no words in her poetry – her minimalism demanded that every word be applicable to her presentation.
George Oppen, like Niedecker, was a minimalist of sorts who linked a series of 31 fragmentary moments into a larger work –
Discrete Series. His poetry also wasted no words, and made use of the echoes heard upon reading the work to add a metacommentary on the written scene, related to the act of writing: “Nothing can equal in polish and obscured/ origin that dark instrument” refers both to the car described as well as the poem, the finished object (8). Oppen is another careful craftsman translating the world precisely as if he were using an exacto knife, which often makes his poems a layer-upon-layer curiosity.
The Finished ProductSimilar to gas pumps, railroad ties, hairbrushes, and balloons, each ink-on-paper printed poem becomes yet another man-made object housed in our world. The poem is not a reflection of the object or moment which inspired its birth, but an object like that which summoned its inception. These poems are not mirrors. They are separate creations, objects in themselves.
