To quote, says the OED, is “to copy out or repeat (a passage, statement, etc.) from a book, document, speech, etc., with some indication that one is giving the words of another (unless this would otherwise be known).” It is this process of copying and repeating which in recent poetry has acquired a new complexity. Michael Palmer, speaking of his own compositional practice, puts it like this:

(“Interview” 286)

We have moved far from what Bob Perelman has called Pound’s “ideology of accuracy” (Marginalization 88), for this act of “citation” bows to etymology and “summons” its material only to transform it, “slightly or radically.” For the reader, the result of this is something akin to déjà vu, but as an experience now attributable not to some subject as recollection or dream, but rather to a particular mnemic register in the text. “[T]he art of citing without quotation marks,” to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase (Arcades Project 458), is an art of montage in which the punctuality of attribution gives way to an effect of textual “uncanniness,” in which sedimented material seems at once disconcertingly familiar and unfamiliar. While quotation marks conventionally situate the matter they enclose, alerting us to its origin in another time and implying a larger context to which it relates, “citation” in Palmer’s sense “covers over” and obscures the original location, leaving the matter in a state of tantalising indeterminacy and blurring the difference between (as Derrida puts it) “the said and the saying” (“At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am” 415). This “covering over” amounts to a rewriting which encrypts the original material but does so in such a way as to make it lead a kind of ghostly existence in the body of the new (as Derrida puts it, “another language comes to disturb the first one. It doesn’t inhabit it, but haunts it” [414]).

To take just one recent example, Lyn Hejinian in her long poem A Border Comedy (2001) helpfully provides a list of “Sources” at the end of the book, though it is only with difficulty that we actually locate their progeny in the text itself. And partly this is because Hejinian’s aim is often to produce effects which are quite different from the “sources” in which they apparently originate. As if to alert us to this, she lists as one of these “sources” Osip Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante,” where we read of the poet’s work as “a continuous transformation of the substratum of poetic material” which demonstrates “a peculiarity of poetic material which [he] propose[s] to call its convertibility” (Mandelstam 414). Such “convertibility” may remind us of the dreamwork, and Book 1 of A Border Comedy is indeed much concerned with the interrelatedness of dreams, narrative and hidden secrets. Hejinian also cites her friend Kit Robinson’s essay on dreams as another “source” and there we are told that “the possibility of a grammar of dreams leads away from the consideration of the dream as a code for the analysis of the individual psyche toward a more general view of dreams as problems in perception and description, that is, as problems for writing” (Robinson 32-33). This “grammar of dreams” suggests not just a repetition or citation of dream content in writing but a process by which that writing is itself infected by the modes of dreaming, by those movements of condensation and displacement which Freud had famously described. To which we may add that to consider citation is also to consider reading and writing as practices which are inextricably linked; indeed, as Antoine Compagnon puts it, “la citation […] est lecture et écriture; elle conjoint l’acte de lecture et celui d’écriture. Lire ou écrire, c’est faire acte de citation” (34). Writing in this sense entails a re-writing which articulates the force of desire that governs reading (as Compagnon notes [35]), this is how Barthes in S/Z defines the “scriptible,” as “ce qui peut être aujourd’hui écrit [ré-écrit]”). To quote without quotation marks is, then, to register an extreme of inwardness with another text, the new inhabiting the old in the same movement as it draws it into itself—hence the complex implications of “learning by heart,” as Derrida observes in his “Che cos’è la poesia?.” Yet as Derrida also notes there, this echoing of an other’s words registers not just a “pure interiority” (231), but an otherness and division which characterise reflection itself.

While the co-implication of reading and writing thus conceived illuminates many of the concerns of recent Language poetry, we may discern a complex foreshadowing of its possibilities in the work of George Oppen, a poet who has had an important influence on younger American writers. Quotations are everywhere in Oppen’s poetry, especially in his later work, where he began to distinguish them by using italics rather than quotation marks, thus marking them not as speech but as another layer of text. Increasingly, the incorporation of “foreign” materials does not point outside the poem, but functions rather to disrupt any sense of unified poetic “voice” even though sources are often obscured. Referring to a late collection, Oppen thus says “I don’t want to be tied to the characteristics of voice, conferred upon me, not chosen. So I have carefully broken with that. These poems are written in violation of my own speech” (Amirkhanian & Gitin 24). There is a related assumption here, that the language we think of as our own is constantly borrowed or stolen from others—Oppen declared that his quotations “are not allusions; they are thefts” (UCSD 16, 19, 12) [3] —and that our words are caught up within the seemingly endless conversation that defines our social being. In this regard, as Michael Davidson has noted (NCP xliii), a particular significance attaches to Oppen’s modification of the last line of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” to the following lines in one of his last poems: “till other voices wake / us or we drown” (NCP 286; my emphasis), a simple change which speaks for a telling difference in viewpoint. Similarly, Oppen dedicated his Collected Poems (1975) to his wife Mary “whose words in this book are entangled inextricably among my own,” and on the acknowledgements page he noted that “phrases, comments, cadences of speech occur, in some instances without quotation marks, which are derived from friends”—a list of names follows. Such materials are, to use Mandelstam’s word, eminently “convertible,” and in line with this Oppen’s quotations are frequently inexact and half-remembered, thus emphasising again that the poet is engaged in a process of re-writing rather than in one of mere transcription. At the same time Oppen’s mode of composition is not actually collagiste, not a stitching together of found materials in the manner of, say, Apollinaire’s poèmes conversations; rather, Oppen finds what he calls “seed phrases” (SL 102), phrases which shed sudden illumination and give access to another world of thought. A particularly resonant word or passage may become what Michael Heller aptly terms “a transformative nexus,” a sort of switching mechanism in the poet’s thinking (Heller 53).

Oppen’s reading of Heidegger provides an especially intriguing instance of the kind of re-writing at work here, illuminating the way in which a certain kind of poetic thinking may be governed by chance and contingency, by coincidence and tenuous connection, rather than by the ideological insistence that came to characterise Pound’s Cantos. So, for example, in a letter of 1967, Oppen remarks on what he calls “a superstition concerning my relation to H[eidegger]”:

(SL 156)

Recalling this poem, “The knowledge not of sorrow” (NCP 5), Oppen is struck by the coincidence of his and Heidegger’s conception of boredom, and his reading of Heidegger’s speech, “What is Metaphysics?,” many years after writing the poem allows him subsequently to see its final lines, “the world, weather-swept, with which / one shares the century,” as a moment when “Being”—“what-is”—is somehow disclosed. Oppen’s early thinking thus seems to him to resonate mysteriously with Heidegger’s, and this is complicated by another experience which he recounts in the same letter:

(UCSD 16, 16, 11) [4]

The phrase, from Kurt Leidecker’s translation of Identity and Difference, delivers itself as a kind of dreamlike (and deceptive) dictation from “outside,” as it were. [5] In the letter, Oppen quotes the “missing” passage as follows: “Substance itself which has been the subject of all our planning / And by this we are carried into the incalculable” (SL 156). These two phrases have a quite disproportionate effect on Oppen: he was, he says, “convinced that a part of the statement was of crucial importance to [him], of such importance as to alter the subjective conditions of [his] life, the conditions of [his] thinking, from that point in time” (SL 135). Yet the phrase belongs to Heidegger and while Oppen feels he has been “given it,” he guiltily tries to “remove” it, to over-write it with words of his own so as to avoid, he says, the charge of “plagiarism.”

Here, to be sure, we are moving in the realm of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, with the later re-writing of the passage having an effect quite in excess of the original and triggering a complex of contradictory feelings. [6] Having made his changes, though, Oppen is still unsatisfied and decides to “look up the original phrase and use it in quotation marks” (SL 136). This he does, but even after reading the short essay, as he says, “ten or more times in dizzy incredulity” he still can’t locate it. A common enough experience, we may think, but for Oppen it seems to signal some deep connection between the loss of an original text and the writing that is generated from that loss. That connection is marked by an ambivalence that is central to his work and which may be taken to characterise his particular poetics of quotation. On the one hand, the withdrawal of text and meaning produces an anxious loss of orientation. Oppen describes this sensation in relation to another dream:

(“Disasters” 150-151)

As in the Heidegger dream, there is an experience of going back to something only to discover that it is different from what it had been, that it is constituted anew from every attempt to stabilise re-reading as mere repetition. At the same time, while such an experience may certainly produce anxiety, as it does in this dream, it is also the source of something new and in that sense we might see it as a sort of model for Oppen’s notion of poetic thinking. As he puts it in one of his notes, “the thinking occurs at the moment of the poem, within the poem […] As the image forms in the mind, forms in the present and surrounds me tho it may speak of the past” (“The Anthropologist of Myself” 160). The poet may recall a past experience, then, but that experience is fundamentally recast, perhaps so as to be almost unrecognisable, when caught up in the force-field of present perception. We are dealing not with a situation in which a given subject appropriates something other as an object of knowledge, but rather one in which (as for Heidegger) thinking and being are somehow elided. In this sense, the poetic imagination intuits rather than knows, and where Pound in The Cantos wants what he says about, for example, Byzantine interest rates to be true to historical “fact,” for Oppen that kind of referentiality is constantly undermined by the slipping away, the evanescence, of a prior term which would make “accurate” reference possible.

This at any rate seems to be the lesson of Oppen’s Heidegger dream. Here again are those troublesome phrases as he later incorporates them in the long poem called “Route”: “Substance itself which has been the subject of all our planning’ // And by this we are carried into the incalculable” (NCP 201). For Oppen, these words are at once familiar and unfamiliar, and their tenuous existence, absorbed into a poem as a modified quotation with apparently no findable source, renders them genuinely uncanny. Yet if we go to Heidegger’s essay, “The Principle of Identity” in the short book called Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference, the lost sentence is actually located with surprisingly little difficulty. It reads as follows:

(Essays in Metaphysics 26)

As Oppen recalls the passage, he finds himself deliberately changing the word “incalculable” to “infinite” and then to “unthinkable.” The final version of the poem restores “incalculable,” though in fact Heidegger’s word isn’t “incalculable” in the first place, but, as we see here, “immeasurable.” Oppen’s account of his dream carefully situates it as a remembered event, but his citation of its key terms triggers a series of erasures and reinscriptions which bar access to Heidegger’s original text. Yet while the dream thus dissolves into a tissue of misrememberings, these are still not so extreme as to have prevented Oppen from finding the passage after his dogged re-readings of the text. At the same time one does discern here a genuine failure of recognition and one which testifies, I think, to the extent to which “recollection” made it possible for Oppen to find in Heidegger’s essay a content which wasn’t actually there. It is something Adorno has described in his own re-reading of a text by Ernst Bloch:

(Notes to Literature 2: 219; my emphases)

“The substance of the text unfolded only in memory”: once again we are close to Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit and, indeed, to Derrida’s talk of “a past that has never been present” (Memoires 58). Something, too, of the logic of the supplement is involved here, for Oppen’s reading of Heidegger’s words is such that the text returns but with a different meaning from the one it “originally” had.

In the essay in question, Heidegger is considering the way in which, as he puts it, “Our whole existence is challenged everywhere; now as if set upon, now as if pushed—to plan and calculate everything” (Essays in Metaphysics 25). Man, he says in the passage singled out by Oppen, is “framed” (gestellt), enclosed by the total world of technology so that his existence, and even what is “immeasurable,” threatens to be completely dominated by the imperatives of “planning and calculating.” As this text echoes in Oppen’s memory, however, there is a curious displacement of emphasis, so that it is the notion of “substance” that now becomes central. Oppen’s misremembered version of the passage turns it into a statement that “substance,” the “things” which humanity has sought to order and plan, might somehow assert its autonomy, thus presenting some absolute limit to human “calculation” (in an unpublished note Oppen observes that “the existence of matter cannot be explained. We do not explain it, but find it. ‘and by this we are carried into the incalculable’” [UCSD 16, 16, 13]). Thus re-conceived, Heidegger’s argument, says Oppen, entails “simply the acceptance of the inevitable final death of mankind” (SL 136), and it seems, he thinks, to echo the argument of his own earlier poem “Time of the Missile” (NCP 70), with its vision of a non-human world “Which can destroy us, / Re-arrange itself, assert / Its own stone chain reaction.”

I have spent some time with this one example of the way in which (in Adorno’s phrase) a text might “unfold only in memory” because this quality of belatedness seems in a curious way to characterise Oppen’s way with quotation. In fact this unconscious reworking of Heidegger’s sentence represents a type of poetic thinking which subordinates propositional logic to the promptings of language—a thinking, of course, which Heidegger himself developed in his fragmentary and etymological readings of poetic texts. It is as if what Oppen calls the “objectification” of the poem entails some kind of partial forgetting (or repression) of its original materials so as to reconstitute them in the present tense of the poem, a process which once again recalls Freud’s idea of deferred action.

Oppen’s use of quotation tends in this way to generate a particular emotional tonality, one characteristically suspended between feelings of loss, on the one hand, and the assertion of creative energy, on the other. As an embedded fragment from the past, the quotation is there to remind us that the temporality we inhabit is a complex one. Words re-written enact a movement of present becoming past and past becoming present, making the very act of writing one which might ceaselessly engage the question of human finitude. It is this question that lies at the heart of Oppen’s great serial poem “Of Being Numerous,” a work rich in quotations of the kind already considered. I shall have space to look in detail only at the poem’s opening, but it is here that Oppen announces his major theme and he does so with a long quotation that has powerful resonances for the work as a whole. The first section opens as follows:

(NCP 163)

We begin with a quotation (from Robert Brumbaugh’s Plato for the Modern Age) which echoes the epigraph Oppen had derived from Jacques Maritain for The Materials, “We awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things. [8]” (NCP 38) Any sense we may have of our own existence as a special or singular “occurrence” must be tempered by the fact that we are also “a part / Of an infinite series.” But with the idea of a “series” comes, inevitably, a fascination with origin and inaugural event. Oppen now alludes to and dismisses the Bible’s “tale” of man’s fall into mortality and “the expulsion from Eden,” as he put it in his notes (Davidson 21). [9] Yet while the narrative of Original Sin is rejected here, Oppen’s opening lines still seem to allude to some loss of presence and immediacy—the individual as merely one term in an “infinite series,” perhaps, or the very condition of “being numerous” as somehow random or indeterminate, lacking a convincing “tale” to give it historical substance. The syntax here is characteristically difficult: “The sad marvels” seem to be in apposition to the “infinite series,” but the next line then leaves us groping for a referent for “this.” Readers are forced to make the sense for themselves here (a situation which is highly characteristic of the poem as a whole). My own suggestion is that we understand the “sad marvels” (of human history) as belonging to an “infinite series” of births and deaths, the “sadness” of which cannot be blamed on some original “wickedness” but has to be grasped instead as the very condition of human finitude. The prose section that follows then carries special weight since it seems to propose some insight into that condition:

In a letter to his young friend Steven Schneider, Oppen disclosed that “The long quotes in the first section are Mary, verbatim, telling me about Bonnefoy; the next words, beyond what I’ve quoted, were ‘that’s what Douve is about’” (SL 129). Schneider, then living in Paris, had sent Oppen his translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve in late March 1965 (SL 388 n.5). The long serial poem seems to have fascinated the Oppens: “It’s been a joy to have the Bonnefoy,” Oppen wrote (UCSD 16, 10, 16), and another letter suggests that he had begun to read the poem in French before Schneider’s translation arrived. [10]

At first sight, the sombre tone of Bonnefoy’s work with its often lofty, classical vocabulary might seem far removed indeed from the concerns of Oppen, whose own poem is, ostensibly, intent on capturing the demotic energies of the contemporary city. Yet Bonnefoy’s preoccupation with time and change in Douve generates a poetic vision which is in some ways surprisingly close to Oppen’s. For both men, poetry must recognise what is called in Douve “the vast unutterable [indicible] matter” of the world (stone is its privileged embodiment there) and in “Of Being Numerous” “the pure joy / Of the mineral fact.” While Bonnefoy speaks of “the thickness [l’épaisseur] of the world” (On the Motion 64), Oppen describes it as “impenetrable.” This sense of the “metaphysical thereness” of things with “their stubborn atomicity, and their opaque silence” (The Act and Place 19) [11] underlies the central concern with “presence” in Bonnefoy’s work. For, as Maurice Blanchot observes, where Hegel had famously dismissed out of hand any notion of immediacy, Bonnefoy grounds his poetic in a desire to “recapture the act of presence, the true place, that site where there gathers in an undivided unity what ‘is’.” (The Infinite Conversation 34). Yet this irreducible sense of “being” depends too upon its opposite—as one critic observes, “[Bonnefoy] has often stressed that it is in absence, and because of death, that ‘presence’ comes to full realization.” “Presence” thus entails not a romantic transcendence of time, but, on the contrary, “an epiphany of finitude” (Naughton 19). To put it another way, the emphasis, shared by both poets, on what Bonnefoy terms “the here and now” is not at all some pure present or the “freedom from time limits and space limits” that Pound, for example, had associated with the image (“A Retrospect” 4), but rather “our limitation,” the finite limits which define existence (The Act and Place 106-107). Hence the paradox of Douve’s existence in Bonnefoy’s long poem, as the dead woman is still somehow alive, both in “movement” and “immobile”: “each instant I see you being born, Douve, // Each instant dying” (On the Motion 49) and “even dead / She will again be light, being nothing” (On the Motion 67). Douve’s death and her assimilation into the “earth” become a force capable of “Illuminating / Vast unutterable matter”: “Let the cold by my death arise and take on meaning,” she says (On the Motion 101).

The quotation from Mary Oppen at the beginning of “Of Being Numerous” brings together certain key elements from Bonnefoy’s poem, though its central contention—that “It is dead and it is not dead”—remains designedly enigmatic. In some notes to this section Oppen glosses the phrase “That which ‘is dead and it is not dead’—the permanent” (Davidson 21), though the designation of the latter word also remains unclear. [12] Does the floating “it” refer, perhaps, to the past, the “infinite series” of births and deaths already mentioned? My question is framed, of course, by the fact that we are dealing with a quoted passage here which, like all quotations, is also “dead and […] not dead,” belatedly evoking a past which the act of recollection cannot reanimate or fully repossess but which, like the quotation itself, is somehow rendered “obscure” by the advent of the new (in this as in other cases, had we not been able to derive Oppen’s source from his letter, the origin of the passage and its object of reference would have remained quite “obscure”). The past, with its connotations of closure and finitude, is “obscured” by the arrival of Spring, with its traditional associations with renewal. Yet like Douve and like quotation, the past is “dead and it is not dead” and while we cannot return to it, it continues to live within us. At the same time, though, this contradiction also infects our future: for Oppen and for Bonnefoy, any sense of the future as open possibility is also bound up with a knowledge of inevitable closure.

Yet just as Bonnefoy urges the recognition that “You will have to go through death to live, / The purest presence is blood which is shed” (On the Motion 79), so Oppen’s use of his wife’s comments on Douve seems to hint at an alternative to the “sad marvels” recalled in the “tale of our wickedness” by glimpsing our position as being at the beginning of an “infinite series” as well as at its end; history might thus perhaps carry again the “sense of continuation” (UCSD 16, 22, 2) that Oppen finds wanting in contemporary American culture, opening a future which exceeds the horizon of the individual life. Yet it is a future, of course, which extends from one’s own death, a perception which starkly illuminates the limits of the individual life. As Oppen puts it in a letter of 1973:

(SL 263)

The tragic “brilliance” of this recognition shines in Mary’s recollection of the “old town” and of Bonnefoy’s Douve, with its speaking salamander, the only creature which can pass unscathed through fire. In the poem in Douve called “Place of the Salamander,” the creature “freezes and feigns death,” attaching itself to the wall with a stony gaze, but at the same time the poet sees “its heart beat eternal.” In an essay which refers to this passage, Bonnefoy remarks that the salamander “here present as the softly beating heart of the world, becomes the origin of what is” (The Act and Place 120). This sense of being depends upon the sudden perception of the salamander not as one thing among many (as just one term in an “infinite series,” perhaps) but as a presence which somehow brings everything to, in Bonnefoy’s phrase, “the transparence of unity” (The Act and Place 121; emphasis in original).

Again, the accidental “rhyme” with section 22 of “Of Being Numerous” is striking:

(NCP 175)

Oppen’s “clarity” sets itself off from any kind of conceptual thought—it is “silent” rather than explanatory—and what is seen in its light is allowed to “be” for itself rather than exemplifying merely membership of a larger class. This sudden emergence into authentic being has a decidedly Heideggerian inflection, perhaps echoing a passage in Being and Time in which it is said that “When one has an understanding Being-towards-death—towards death as one’s ownmost possibility—one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent” (Being and Time 354; emphasis in original). In Douve, that sudden “transparence” is enacted in a grammar of perception for which “a salamander” becomes, for poet and reader, “the salamander,” the creature having “freed itself from the world of objects created by an analytic reason that runs the risk of remaining on the periphery of things” (The Act and Place 121). There is nothing to suggest that Oppen knew Bonnefoy’s essay (it was first published in Revue d’esthétique in 1965), but his own Heideggerian sense of “disclosure” could produce very similar effects. In section 21 of “Of Being Numerous,” for example:

(NCP 175)

Oppen’s poem is markedly less exotic than Bonnefoy’s, but as in Douve the shift from “a brick” to “the brick” also signals some kind of “presence.” In the simplicity of this grammatical shift and in their directness of address, these lines register some movement beyond the temporal limits that are the defining feature of our singularity. Such moments, Oppen suggests, may release us temporarily from that sense of pastness and mortality that sounds so insistently in his poetics of quotation. At these times we are, however briefly, “an inch from the thing; at that moment, no quotes, no references—at that moment, something near transparence after all” (SL 144). Yet it is only momentarily that Oppen’s poem seeks silence and absolute immediacy. Indeed, after sections 21 and 22, the poem plunges back into quotation, ending with a long passage from one of Whitman’s letters, as if to remind us that the already spoken words of others and their survival in the present tense of the poem might augur a sociality for which a recognition of human finitude is the prime condition. In his deliberate misquotation of Eliot’s line, as “till other voices wake / us or we drown” (NCP 286, my emphasis), Oppen would encapsulate his turn against the ironic, solipsistic mode, and in doing so open possibilities our major poets continue to explore.