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Of Being Numerous
Book by Oppen, George
- GenresPoetryLiterature
64 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1968
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764 people want to read
About the author
George Oppen
24 books56 followersGeorge Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry—and to the United States—in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
January 4, 2021
If possible I would recommend listening to Oppen read this himself
There is something so fragile and weary in his reading that punches me in the heart especially hard when there is a sort of immediate self undermining in his poetry, the first instance of this (and me having my heart broken) is the forth stanza:
The sad marvels;
Of this was told
A tale of our wickedness.
It is not our wickedness.
And content wise too there's philosophy, social critique and just life, all the good (sad) stuff
(((Listen to him read here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/... )))
————-
Reread number 3: homie hit different after reading Hegel
There is something so fragile and weary in his reading that punches me in the heart especially hard when there is a sort of immediate self undermining in his poetry, the first instance of this (and me having my heart broken) is the forth stanza:
The sad marvels;
Of this was told
A tale of our wickedness.
It is not our wickedness.
And content wise too there's philosophy, social critique and just life, all the good (sad) stuff
(((Listen to him read here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/... )))
————-
Reread number 3: homie hit different after reading Hegel
December 12, 2022
“But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, though he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing.”
In tweaker fashion, read this as an aphoristic guide. I think it served. The idea, the fact, the glare, the planets and the stars, the sea anemone’s dream as it filters sea water with each tide. All impenetrable.
In tweaker fashion, read this as an aphoristic guide. I think it served. The idea, the fact, the glare, the planets and the stars, the sea anemone’s dream as it filters sea water with each tide. All impenetrable.
April 17, 2020
The way he reads the title poem is the most beautiful and painful thing. Although the collection didn't really grip me as much as his pervious ones did, it was delightful to read more of his work.
July 1, 2007
This is the George Oppen everyones been talking about! Not that other George Oppen I read years ago.
February 3, 2021
of being numerous slaps like anything else writing about loneliness & modernity & cities mwah. bonus points for quoting whitman
December 14, 2023
bellooooooooooooo
December 17, 2025
these poems are crazy fucking good. im speechless. I feel weird. can't articulate. amazing.
January 31, 2024
George Oppen was a key component of a “second-generation” group of Modernist poets in the 1930s termed the Objectivists, after moving to New York City and encountering Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and others. Objectivism rejected the bourgeois predilection toward neo-classical and mythological reference that we encounter with Imagist poetry while importing its use of highly concentrated units of language, a poetic structure that emphasizes the “whole” rather than, as Louis Zukofsky would later note, a sequence of imprecise images. (We see the rejection of the neo-classical flourishes we might expect from Ezra Pound quite explicitly in Oppen’s title poem in Of Being Numerous: “Phyllis—not neo-classic / The girl’s name is Phyllis.”)
It was also, surprisingly, a mode of high Modernism with a staunch politic that extended beyond literary form. Ruth Jennison, in her monograph The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde (2012), suggests two primary aims of Objectivist practice: “(1) to register in poetic form the contradictions of capitalism as structure and as lived experience, and (2) to yoke together these contradictions in such a way that reveals the geography of capitalism as a profoundly differentiated totality.”
Oppen was, undoubtedly, a figure in Modernist poetry who spent much of his career reckoning with the fraught relationship between the aesthetic in the political. I keep coming back to a tweet from Mosab posted a few days ago: “If poetry does not make People aware of an injustice and does not motivate them to eliminate it, then this is not poetry, or, at worst, People do not understand poetry, or maybe a new kind of poetry should be invented for this purpose.” After his publication of Discrete Series (1934), Oppen gave up poetry completely. Oppen articulates his twenty-five-year silence: “I made a choice. Stopped, for the crisis, writing.” After he gave up writing, Oppen distanced himself from the Objectivists and became increasingly involved with his work as an organizer with the Communist Party. He eventually was forced to abscond to Mexico with his family due to an active FBI investigation on him and his wife, fearing for the safety of their daughter. (The FBI documents files on the Oppens have been recently released to the public.)
Even after his return to poetry twenty-five years later with The Materials, he questioned its efficacy. Referring to the Vietnam War, he suggests in a letter that “If we launch that ‘’general war in Asia,’ I think I will have to give this up again . . . I perhaps cannot write poetry in war time. I couldn’t before, and perhaps cannot now. I become ashamed, I become sick with shame.” Peter Nicholls, in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2007), suggests that Oppen’s return to poetry was far from triumphant, but rather rooted in a sense of failure. It was, in Nicholls’ words, both “the failure of the avant-garde which seemed to have been maneuvered into irrelevance by the war and by the development of the atom bomb, but also his own failure.”
Of Being Numerous is a sparse volume, both in its page count (the longer title poem and followed by six short meditations on the themes it generated) and its short, taciturn phrases punctuated by heavy line breaks. It is a text invested in various modes of silence, which both implicitly and explicitly throughout the title poem. “Clarity / In the sense of transparence,” he writes, “I don’t mean that much can be explained. / Clarity in the sense of silence.” Or, elsewhere: “It is true the great mineral silence / Vibrates, hums, a process / Completing itself / In which the windshield wipers / Of the cars are visible.”
Words exist as transparent vessels for the objects to which they refer, objects that populate Oppen’s poem with an abject, “mineral” weight. As a poem primarily invested in the relationship between the singular and the collective subject, the silence might also be the vibration and “hum” of the crowd, or cars on the street: when the sound of the street overlap and coalesce into a full, overbearing kind of silence in which discrete sounds become no longer discernible.
We might track other modes of silence in the text, too. The margins seem to overwhelm the terse stanzas, as does the constant enjambment of various lines. There is also, of course, the silence that breaks up Oppen’s career as a poet: a silence that resists the fascist deployment of Modernist aesthetics. (Nicholls cites a letter written by Oppen here: “For Oppen, Pound’s blindness to what was happening during the war—he ‘didn’t speak of the gas chambers’ (UCSD 16, 16, 10)—was bound up with a persistent modernist tendency to read the political through the lens of an avant-garde aesthetic.”)
The titular preoccupation with Of Being Numerous is, of course, the question of existing as a singular subject within a “numerous” society. That question is on a level replicated by the general structure of the poem: the poem is minutely divided into discrete parts that constitute a larger whole, each numbered up to forty, as well as the stanzas we encounter within each part that rarely extend beyond three lines. “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / is to know ourselves,’” the poem begins. “Occurrence, a part, / Of an infinite series.” I’m struck by this last phrase: Oppen grammatically skews what should be “as part / Of an infinite series” to be “a part,” which, then, contradicts the meaning of the sentence. Are we existing “as part” of that series, or, rather, resolutely “apart” from it as we view the world from a singular perspective? That tension carries throughout the entire text, as Oppen slides in and out of various pronouns. Oppen, referencing Robinson Crusoe (1719) in one of the poem’s more famous lines: “Obsessed, bewildered / By the shipwreck / Of the singular / We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous.”
Lines from Of Being Numerous have come to mind most days since I read it. “It is the air of atrocity, / An event as ordinary / As a President. / A plume of smoke, visible at a distance / In which people burn.” Or, later, “That denial / Of death that paved the cities, / Paved the cities / Generation / For generation and pavement / Is filthy as the corridors / Of the police.” The enjambment makes unclear what, exactly, has become the “ordinary” event: is it the president, or the plume of smoke “In which people burn”? (It is worth noting that Of Being Numerous was published the same year Richard Nixon would assume presidency, during the Vietnam War.)
The “denial” of “death that paved the cities” perhaps needs no further explication: today the New York Times, which has (of course) by this point established itself as a staunch Zionist news outlet, published an article arguing that deaths in Gaza are on the decline, with no acknowledgment of the lack of access to dead and injured and blackout of communication in Gaza. Mass death and displacement have become “ordinary” as they become numerous. Denial begins when we refuse to view subjects of an imperialist state as singular: the dead become abstractions, infographic numbers, anonymous. From Refaat Alareer’s last poem: “If I must die / let it bring hope, / let it be a story.” Oppen’s poetics demand an acknowledgment of the singular in the wake of the numerous: not as number but as narrative.
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It was also, surprisingly, a mode of high Modernism with a staunch politic that extended beyond literary form. Ruth Jennison, in her monograph The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde (2012), suggests two primary aims of Objectivist practice: “(1) to register in poetic form the contradictions of capitalism as structure and as lived experience, and (2) to yoke together these contradictions in such a way that reveals the geography of capitalism as a profoundly differentiated totality.”
Oppen was, undoubtedly, a figure in Modernist poetry who spent much of his career reckoning with the fraught relationship between the aesthetic in the political. I keep coming back to a tweet from Mosab posted a few days ago: “If poetry does not make People aware of an injustice and does not motivate them to eliminate it, then this is not poetry, or, at worst, People do not understand poetry, or maybe a new kind of poetry should be invented for this purpose.” After his publication of Discrete Series (1934), Oppen gave up poetry completely. Oppen articulates his twenty-five-year silence: “I made a choice. Stopped, for the crisis, writing.” After he gave up writing, Oppen distanced himself from the Objectivists and became increasingly involved with his work as an organizer with the Communist Party. He eventually was forced to abscond to Mexico with his family due to an active FBI investigation on him and his wife, fearing for the safety of their daughter. (The FBI documents files on the Oppens have been recently released to the public.)
Even after his return to poetry twenty-five years later with The Materials, he questioned its efficacy. Referring to the Vietnam War, he suggests in a letter that “If we launch that ‘’general war in Asia,’ I think I will have to give this up again . . . I perhaps cannot write poetry in war time. I couldn’t before, and perhaps cannot now. I become ashamed, I become sick with shame.” Peter Nicholls, in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2007), suggests that Oppen’s return to poetry was far from triumphant, but rather rooted in a sense of failure. It was, in Nicholls’ words, both “the failure of the avant-garde which seemed to have been maneuvered into irrelevance by the war and by the development of the atom bomb, but also his own failure.”
Of Being Numerous is a sparse volume, both in its page count (the longer title poem and followed by six short meditations on the themes it generated) and its short, taciturn phrases punctuated by heavy line breaks. It is a text invested in various modes of silence, which both implicitly and explicitly throughout the title poem. “Clarity / In the sense of transparence,” he writes, “I don’t mean that much can be explained. / Clarity in the sense of silence.” Or, elsewhere: “It is true the great mineral silence / Vibrates, hums, a process / Completing itself / In which the windshield wipers / Of the cars are visible.”
Words exist as transparent vessels for the objects to which they refer, objects that populate Oppen’s poem with an abject, “mineral” weight. As a poem primarily invested in the relationship between the singular and the collective subject, the silence might also be the vibration and “hum” of the crowd, or cars on the street: when the sound of the street overlap and coalesce into a full, overbearing kind of silence in which discrete sounds become no longer discernible.
We might track other modes of silence in the text, too. The margins seem to overwhelm the terse stanzas, as does the constant enjambment of various lines. There is also, of course, the silence that breaks up Oppen’s career as a poet: a silence that resists the fascist deployment of Modernist aesthetics. (Nicholls cites a letter written by Oppen here: “For Oppen, Pound’s blindness to what was happening during the war—he ‘didn’t speak of the gas chambers’ (UCSD 16, 16, 10)—was bound up with a persistent modernist tendency to read the political through the lens of an avant-garde aesthetic.”)
The titular preoccupation with Of Being Numerous is, of course, the question of existing as a singular subject within a “numerous” society. That question is on a level replicated by the general structure of the poem: the poem is minutely divided into discrete parts that constitute a larger whole, each numbered up to forty, as well as the stanzas we encounter within each part that rarely extend beyond three lines. “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / is to know ourselves,’” the poem begins. “Occurrence, a part, / Of an infinite series.” I’m struck by this last phrase: Oppen grammatically skews what should be “as part / Of an infinite series” to be “a part,” which, then, contradicts the meaning of the sentence. Are we existing “as part” of that series, or, rather, resolutely “apart” from it as we view the world from a singular perspective? That tension carries throughout the entire text, as Oppen slides in and out of various pronouns. Oppen, referencing Robinson Crusoe (1719) in one of the poem’s more famous lines: “Obsessed, bewildered / By the shipwreck / Of the singular / We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous.”
Lines from Of Being Numerous have come to mind most days since I read it. “It is the air of atrocity, / An event as ordinary / As a President. / A plume of smoke, visible at a distance / In which people burn.” Or, later, “That denial / Of death that paved the cities, / Paved the cities / Generation / For generation and pavement / Is filthy as the corridors / Of the police.” The enjambment makes unclear what, exactly, has become the “ordinary” event: is it the president, or the plume of smoke “In which people burn”? (It is worth noting that Of Being Numerous was published the same year Richard Nixon would assume presidency, during the Vietnam War.)
The “denial” of “death that paved the cities” perhaps needs no further explication: today the New York Times, which has (of course) by this point established itself as a staunch Zionist news outlet, published an article arguing that deaths in Gaza are on the decline, with no acknowledgment of the lack of access to dead and injured and blackout of communication in Gaza. Mass death and displacement have become “ordinary” as they become numerous. Denial begins when we refuse to view subjects of an imperialist state as singular: the dead become abstractions, infographic numbers, anonymous. From Refaat Alareer’s last poem: “If I must die / let it bring hope, / let it be a story.” Oppen’s poetics demand an acknowledgment of the singular in the wake of the numerous: not as number but as narrative.
Subscribe to my Substack here for more poetry reviews/recommendations!
October 16, 2010
I'm a fan of Oppen's style. He brings a minimalist approach to poetry with heavy subject matter.
March 12, 2022
Το "Περί πληθείναι" είναι υπόδειγμα του Objectivist Poetry.
Ο Oppen ξεκινά με την ύλη, τα αντικείμενα και την αίσθηση του ανήκειν σε μια εποχή
Το αστικό τοπίο είναι "μια πόλη επιχειρήσεων κλεισμένη/ πίσω απ' το κρύσταλλο/των ονείρων" 13
Το πλήθος ρέει ως γλώσσα, σε όλες τις ηλικίες. Για τον Oppen είναι ανθρωπάκια
"Και στις φωλιές τους/ με την πίσσα στις στέγες/ και τις βεραντούλες στις εισόδους και τις πόρτες/ -ένας κόσμος από βεραντούλες-" 17
Όπου υπάρχει κυρίαρχος ο εγωτισμός, που δεν περιμένει τίποτα.
"Το γεγονός ξεσπάζει με όλη του την πραγματικότητα/ μέσα σ' έναν παροξυσμό συναισθημάτων/ όπως πάντα" 21
Για τον Oppen υπάρχει "το ναυάγιο/ της μοναδικότητας" και η επιλογή του πληθείναι.
Τα κτίρια είναι "κούφια, διαθέσιμα, μπορείς να μπεις παντού,/ να κοιτάξεις απ' τα παράθυρα"
Ως μαρξιστής (το κίνημα του Αντικειμενισμού, ως μέρος του ευρύτερου Μοντερνισμού, είχε μεγαλύτερη σχέση με το εργατικό και κομμουνιστικό κίνημα) γράφει για την κίνηση, την διαρκής και αιώνια κίνηση, καθώς και την ενικότητα σε σχέση με την πληθυντικότητα του κόσμου.
Είναι ένα ευρύ, δύσκολο και απαιτητικό έργο, όπου μέσα του υπάρχουν διάχυτες σπουδαίες ιδέες για την αλήθεια, την πραγματικότητα, την ποίηση και τη ζωή.
Ο Oppen ξεκινά με την ύλη, τα αντικείμενα και την αίσθηση του ανήκειν σε μια εποχή
Το αστικό τοπίο είναι "μια πόλη επιχειρήσεων κλεισμένη/ πίσω απ' το κρύσταλλο/των ονείρων" 13
Το πλήθος ρέει ως γλώσσα, σε όλες τις ηλικίες. Για τον Oppen είναι ανθρωπάκια
"Και στις φωλιές τους/ με την πίσσα στις στέγες/ και τις βεραντούλες στις εισόδους και τις πόρτες/ -ένας κόσμος από βεραντούλες-" 17
Όπου υπάρχει κυρίαρχος ο εγωτισμός, που δεν περιμένει τίποτα.
"Το γεγονός ξεσπάζει με όλη του την πραγματικότητα/ μέσα σ' έναν παροξυσμό συναισθημάτων/ όπως πάντα" 21
Για τον Oppen υπάρχει "το ναυάγιο/ της μοναδικότητας" και η επιλογή του πληθείναι.
Τα κτίρια είναι "κούφια, διαθέσιμα, μπορείς να μπεις παντού,/ να κοιτάξεις απ' τα παράθυρα"
Ως μαρξιστής (το κίνημα του Αντικειμενισμού, ως μέρος του ευρύτερου Μοντερνισμού, είχε μεγαλύτερη σχέση με το εργατικό και κομμουνιστικό κίνημα) γράφει για την κίνηση, την διαρκής και αιώνια κίνηση, καθώς και την ενικότητα σε σχέση με την πληθυντικότητα του κόσμου.
Είναι ένα ευρύ, δύσκολο και απαιτητικό έργο, όπου μέσα του υπάρχουν διάχυτες σπουδαίες ιδέες για την αλήθεια, την πραγματικότητα, την ποίηση και τη ζωή.
September 28, 2017
A remarkable collection, tho Oppen tells us "it is not easy to speak," & therefore difficult to be able to remark; but thereby we have the magnificent truth of this work, hard-fought & earthbound: Sappho's sparing & airy perspective on life-processes taken to a 1960s New York. These are poems not concerned with the little things but the broader truths derived in saturnine contemplation of molarities. Oppen feels rendered speechless by what he observes. It is hard for us to not follow suit along his variegated routes as well.
How talk
Distantly of 'The People'
Who are that force
Within the walls
Of cities
Wherein their cars
Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak
How talk
Distantly of 'The People'
Who are that force
Within the walls
Of cities
Wherein their cars
Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak
May 19, 2021
Solo diré que empecé el libro unas cuatro veces. Me detenía y esperaba el tiempo suficiente como para volver a comenzar. Cuando lo cerré por fin, me di cuenta que era por la sencilla razón de no querer que acabara. En cada relectura encontraba una nueva verdad. Me lo prestó una amiga y, después de varios meses, asumí que debía devolvérselo. Lo compraré. Falta un soporte para el envés de mi almohada.
March 2, 2024
“They were patient/
With the world./
This will never return, never,/
Unless having reached their limits//
They will begin over, that is,/
Over and over”
Fragile n soft… yet with such despairing subject matter, when you hear Oppen read the long titular poem, you hear him about to break. This poem is about to break. Its quite lovely
With the world./
This will never return, never,/
Unless having reached their limits//
They will begin over, that is,/
Over and over”
Fragile n soft… yet with such despairing subject matter, when you hear Oppen read the long titular poem, you hear him about to break. This poem is about to break. Its quite lovely
January 11, 2021
"The rocks outlived the classicists"
"It is the air of atrocity,/ An event as ordinary/ As a President."
"It is the air of atrocity,/ An event as ordinary/ As a President."
May 29, 2021
Hermoso, maldita sea, hermoso
Lo que haremos diciendo, lo que haremos unidos
Lo que haremos diciendo, lo que haremos unidos
March 16, 2022
Claridad en el sentido de silencio.
July 2, 2023
probably the best poetry post og american modernists and pre new york school. Objectivists > confessionals (ew)
September 25, 2023
ok I like this one a lot actually
February 5, 2025
Absolutely beautiful.
December 27, 2025
se posiciona entre los poemarios mas importantes para mi
February 3, 2024
La fuerza tras los muros de las ciudades, un jirón de humo en el que la gente arde en la patria del naufragio.
Oppen vincula la poesía y la política, por un lado mostrándonos las esquirlas y las zanjas que ha dejado la pobreza, por otro, las raíces de un mundo donde cae la lluvia agazapada entre la multitud: “más que una poesía de ideas, se trata de la música de la percepción del mundo”.
Oppen vincula la poesía y la política, por un lado mostrándonos las esquirlas y las zanjas que ha dejado la pobreza, por otro, las raíces de un mundo donde cae la lluvia agazapada entre la multitud: “más que una poesía de ideas, se trata de la música de la percepción del mundo”.
February 22, 2009
Oppen sees something that other poets do not. Even other objectivists poets of his time do not seem to accomplish what Oppen does with his writing. Honesty, perhaps? Of Being Numerous, to me, is a perfect example of what an objectivist poem should look like, and the fact that Oppen performed all of his ideas on what poetry should be, never veering from his objectivist ideals, is highly impressive.
September 16, 2011
The opening section is one of my favorite pieces of poetry of all time. The book is consistently strong, a close second-place to Oppen's wonderful 'This in Which.' Objectivist poetry rewards, rewards, rewards.
August 13, 2007
Of Being Numerous is the best poem I have ever read. Period.
Read
August 22, 2008wonderful
August 18, 2009
Between 3 and, in some stellar parts, 5.
Read
May 25, 2018811.52 O62d 2017
January 15, 2008
stirring, vivid. One of my all time faves.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews