What do you think?
Rate this book
The Materials
Coolection of Poetry
- GenresPoetry
233 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
About the author
George Oppen
23 books57 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 28, 2020
TO MEMORY
I
Who but the goddess? All that is
Is yours. The causes, beginnings,
Are lost if you have lost them;
But from your eyelid's quiver
Flowers that are trampled spring
In their bloom before us, and a landscape deepens
Hill behind hill, and the branches
Bend in that sunlight—
The lute has no meaning,
Nor canvas, nor marbles
Without you, nor the beaches
That shore the ocean,
The womb of our mother. Galaxies
Shine in that darkness—
O you who are darkness,
A core of our darkness, and illumination;
What your hands have let fall is lost to us
II
Words, there are words!
But with your eyes
We see. And so we possess the earth.
Like an army of ants,
A multiple dry carcass
Of past selves
Moving
Thru a land dead behind us
Of deeds, dates, documents
Into the present of leaves
What can our changes bring
To the flesh but the worm's old feast?
All that there is, is
Yours, and in the caves of your sleep
Lives our permanent dawn.
Another beautiful collection. Oppen is like and ocean: rich in metaphor, wide, awe-inspiring.
I
Who but the goddess? All that is
Is yours. The causes, beginnings,
Are lost if you have lost them;
But from your eyelid's quiver
Flowers that are trampled spring
In their bloom before us, and a landscape deepens
Hill behind hill, and the branches
Bend in that sunlight—
The lute has no meaning,
Nor canvas, nor marbles
Without you, nor the beaches
That shore the ocean,
The womb of our mother. Galaxies
Shine in that darkness—
O you who are darkness,
A core of our darkness, and illumination;
What your hands have let fall is lost to us
II
Words, there are words!
But with your eyes
We see. And so we possess the earth.
Like an army of ants,
A multiple dry carcass
Of past selves
Moving
Thru a land dead behind us
Of deeds, dates, documents
Into the present of leaves
What can our changes bring
To the flesh but the worm's old feast?
All that there is, is
Yours, and in the caves of your sleep
Lives our permanent dawn.
Another beautiful collection. Oppen is like and ocean: rich in metaphor, wide, awe-inspiring.
August 1, 2022
whoever else's
Also ours.
Also ours.
March 7, 2024
«El espacio que una mujer hace y ocupa
Tras estos años
Vuelvo a escribir
Naturalmente, acerca de tu rostro»
Tras estos años
Vuelvo a escribir
Naturalmente, acerca de tu rostro»
December 3, 2025
George Oppen's poetry intrigues me. Upon reading the poems, I often feel I'm on the cusp of understanding what he's talking about, but not quite. The meaning is just out of reach.
Some poems are more lucid than others - the ones that are mere snapshots of a visual image or an object he is describing, which is often the scene he is confronted with (hence in this manner he is a real Objectivist poet), are clearer than the more obscure and philosophical ones.
I often find his poems are like scintillating jigsaw puzzles. You turn the words around and around, hesitate at different points within a given line and reread it in a new light, and suddenly it reveals itself more, like an opal slowly turned in the sunlight.
I am tentatively giving this three stars, which does not by any means mean that I disliked this collection. However, too many of the poems were obscure for me. Over time, I have a feeling that my rating will slowly turn into four stars.
He's a very curious poet - discovering his poems is like picking up something in an antique store that maybe only a handful of people on the planet might have seen before but nobody has really understood until examined closely. You can tell, you can feel it's a great poem, but you stop and wonder - what on earth does it mean? And he compels me to keep going back and reread them all over again. That's a sign of a good poet, in my book.
Highly, highly recommended. He is quickly becoming one of my favorite poets of the 20th Century alongside Yeats, Kaufman, Micheline, Crane and one or two others.
Some poems are more lucid than others - the ones that are mere snapshots of a visual image or an object he is describing, which is often the scene he is confronted with (hence in this manner he is a real Objectivist poet), are clearer than the more obscure and philosophical ones.
I often find his poems are like scintillating jigsaw puzzles. You turn the words around and around, hesitate at different points within a given line and reread it in a new light, and suddenly it reveals itself more, like an opal slowly turned in the sunlight.
I am tentatively giving this three stars, which does not by any means mean that I disliked this collection. However, too many of the poems were obscure for me. Over time, I have a feeling that my rating will slowly turn into four stars.
He's a very curious poet - discovering his poems is like picking up something in an antique store that maybe only a handful of people on the planet might have seen before but nobody has really understood until examined closely. You can tell, you can feel it's a great poem, but you stop and wonder - what on earth does it mean? And he compels me to keep going back and reread them all over again. That's a sign of a good poet, in my book.
Highly, highly recommended. He is quickly becoming one of my favorite poets of the 20th Century alongside Yeats, Kaufman, Micheline, Crane and one or two others.
February 13, 2024
Es un libro que para mí destaca en lo siguiente: es aterrizado, inteligente, logra emocionar y es interesante en cuanto a su sintáxis, corte de verso y uso de guiones.
Obviamente estas características son muy vagas y no dicen nada en sí mismas, principalmente las primeras 3, que son bien abstractas.
Me parece aterrizado en cuanto al uso de los materiales que toma para la construcción del poema. Por su puesto que todo poeta habla en un mundo, desde un mundo y sobre un mundo; el tema es desde donde parecen iniciar estos poemas (si es que el poema tiene un "inicio"). Si los poemas de Oppen tienen raíces, están allá afuera, en el mundo exterior, en la calle o habitación, en los lugares donde nos encontramos aislados o congregados, en una herramienta, una bahia, un bote, nuestros hogares, sean casas o departamentos, una chica jugando con la arena. Surgen ideas desde las cosas (no ideas but in things del Paterson de WCW), desde los materiales de los que está hecho el mundo del que estamos hechos. Luego los poemas despunta hacia la reflexión, que en un sentido general me parece una reflexión de quienes somos, de donde venimos y hacia donde vamos. Por ej, en "Antique", que inicia con versos que pudo haber escrito William Carlos Williams:
o en "Vulcano":
o en "Desde el desastre", sobre los departamentos:
Hay bastantes más ejemplos a lo largo del libro, pero soy muy perezoso. También hay un lado emotivo en Oppen, que muchas veces funciona a base de la ternura y una especie de grito hacia el futuro, por ejemplo, en "Sara en los brazos de su padre":
¿No es precioso acaso? Y eso que mutilé la primera mitad del poema.
Y nuevamente el tema del nostros, también con cierta emoción, hacia el final de "Sangre de la piedra", donde Oppen, como en otras ocasiones, parece partir desde un material primigenio del que estamos hechos, que parece muchas veces remitir a lo mineral o a la piedra:
o, siendo más pesimista (y lúcido, con esa mención al azar), en "Los poblados países de la bomba":
Otra material primogenio es la memoria, el pasado, la piedra, la imagen nítida de los nudillos de la mano, con dos poemas que me gustaría destacar:
Y por último, quizás algo más metafísico, pero no menos genial y muy emotivo, "A la memoria", como fuerza de resignificación, que parte así:
Obviamente estas características son muy vagas y no dicen nada en sí mismas, principalmente las primeras 3, que son bien abstractas.
Me parece aterrizado en cuanto al uso de los materiales que toma para la construcción del poema. Por su puesto que todo poeta habla en un mundo, desde un mundo y sobre un mundo; el tema es desde donde parecen iniciar estos poemas (si es que el poema tiene un "inicio"). Si los poemas de Oppen tienen raíces, están allá afuera, en el mundo exterior, en la calle o habitación, en los lugares donde nos encontramos aislados o congregados, en una herramienta, una bahia, un bote, nuestros hogares, sean casas o departamentos, una chica jugando con la arena. Surgen ideas desde las cosas (no ideas but in things del Paterson de WCW), desde los materiales de los que está hecho el mundo del que estamos hechos. Luego los poemas despunta hacia la reflexión, que en un sentido general me parece una reflexión de quienes somos, de donde venimos y hacia donde vamos. Por ej, en "Antique", que inicia con versos que pudo haber escrito William Carlos Williams:
Contra las torres
De vidrio, el elaborado
Mango de la sierra
Remite al pasado
(...)
o en "Vulcano":
(...) Ahora nativos
Son el soldador y el arco de soldar
En los circuitos de hierro del metro:
No hemos escapado el uno del otro
Ni en el bosque, ni aquí.
o en "Desde el desastre", sobre los departamentos:
(...)
Naufragio, familias completas se arrastraron
A los departamentos, desde allí
Sobrevivieron con qué moral
De la esperanza
Que para los hijos
Termina su metafísica
En los pequeños patios del hogar
Hay bastantes más ejemplos a lo largo del libro, pero soy muy perezoso. También hay un lado emotivo en Oppen, que muchas veces funciona a base de la ternura y una especie de grito hacia el futuro, por ejemplo, en "Sara en los brazos de su padre":
(...) - Sara, pequeña semilla,
Pequeña violenta, atenta semilla. Vamos déjanos ver el mundo
Relumbrando: esta semilla dirá
Max, palabras! No habra otras palabras en el mundo
Si no las que digan nuestra descendencia. Que crees, Max,
Que ella hará del mundo del que está hecha.
¿No es precioso acaso? Y eso que mutilé la primera mitad del poema.
Y nuevamente el tema del nostros, también con cierta emoción, hacia el final de "Sangre de la piedra", donde Oppen, como en otras ocasiones, parece partir desde un material primigenio del que estamos hechos, que parece muchas veces remitir a lo mineral o a la piedra:
El tiempo
Del planeta
Sangre de una piedra, vida
Desde una piedra inerte. Madre
Naturaleza! Porque encontramos a los demás
Desolados como nosotros había hermandad. (...)
o, siendo más pesimista (y lúcido, con esa mención al azar), en "Los poblados países de la bomba":
Lo que peude hacer el hombre,
Y lo que no
Y el azar que nos perdona
Algunas opciones, que nos ha protegido
Como un dios. Cual es el nombre de ese lugar
Al que entramos
Desesperación? Nosotros?
Otra material primogenio es la memoria, el pasado, la piedra, la imagen nítida de los nudillos de la mano, con dos poemas que me gustaría destacar:
Ciudad natal, new Rochelle
De regreso a casa
Y las gastadas piedras de la niñez - Han resistido bien
Un mundo de cosas
Un hombre que envejece,
Los nudillos de mi mano
Tan marcados! Esto soy?
Y por último, quizás algo más metafísico, pero no menos genial y muy emotivo, "A la memoria", como fuerza de resignificación, que parte así:
Qué sino la diosa? Todo lo que es
Es tuyo. Las causas, los orígenes
Están perdidos si tu los has perdido
(...)
May 25, 2022
"3
Lo que termina
Es eso.
Incluso la camaradería
Se acaba.
'Quiero saber si recuerdas
cuando fuimos felices! Aunque todos los viajes
Terminaron sin contar, todas las embarcaciones
Naufragaron."
Lo que termina
Es eso.
Incluso la camaradería
Se acaba.
'Quiero saber si recuerdas
cuando fuimos felices! Aunque todos los viajes
Terminaron sin contar, todas las embarcaciones
Naufragaron."
June 25, 2022
"Quiero saber si recuerdas cuando fuimos felices! Aunque todos los viajes terminaron sin contar, todas las embarcaciones naufragaron".
March 1, 2025
Un yo quebrado que se abre paso entre el metal y la memoria.
Read
March 28, 2026~~
A world around her like a shadow
She moves a chair
Something is being made -
Prepared
Clear in front of her as open air
~~
That this is I,
Not mine, which wakes
To where the present
Sun pours in the present, to the air perhaps
Of love and of
Conviction.
As to know
Who we shall be. I knew it then
~~
Glows. The gleam; the unimaginable
Thin feet taper down
The instep naked to the wooden floor"
Hidden and disguised
-- and shy?
The city's
Secret warmth
~~
Walking in the shelter,
The young and the old,
Of each other's backs and shoulders
Entering the country that is
Impenetrably ours
~~
And all the air before her --- what the wind brings past
In the bright simpleness and strangeness of the sands
~~
All that there is, is
Yours, and in the caves of your sleep
Lives in our permanent dawn
~~~~
What I've seen
Is all I've found: myself
~~
On that water
Grey with morning
The gull will fold its wings
And sit. And with its two eyes
There as much as anything
Can watch a ship and all its hallways
And all companions sink.
~~
Like a flat sea,
Here is where we are, the empty reaches
Empty of ourselves
Where dark, light, sound
Shatter the mind born
Alone to ocean
~~
But no screen would show
The light, the volume
Of the moment, or our decisions
In the dugouts, roaring
Downstream with the mud and rainfalls to emergencies
Of village skills and the aboriginal flash
Of handsome paddles among the bright rocks
And channels of the savage country
~~
Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuables. From disaster
Shipwreck, the whole families crawled
To the tenements, and there
Survived by what morality
Of hope
~~
Within the city's intracacies
Are these lives, Belief?
What do we believe
To live with? Answer.
Not Invent - just answer - all
that verse attempts.
That we can somehow add each to each other?
- Still our lives.
~~
Returning to that house
And the rounded rocks of childhood - They have lasted
well
A world of things,
An aging man,
The knuckles of my hand
So jointed! I am this?
The house
My father's once and the ground. There is a color of his
times
In the sun's light
A generation's mark.
It intervenes. My child,
Not now a child, our child
Not altogether lone in a lone universe that suffers time
Like stones in sun. For we do not
~~
Or more
Incapable of contact
Save in incidents
And yet at night
Their weight is part of mine
For we are all housed now, all in our apartments,
The world untended to , unwatched.
And there is nothing left out there
As night falls, but the rocks
~~
It is the child who is the branch
We fall from, where would be bramble,
Brush, bramble in the young Winter
With its blowing snow she must have thought
Was ours to give to her.
~~
....there can be no breath
Of wind in the trees, the houses
Of earth and Of palm from the jungle. The sea that made us
islands has events
Of gulf and Gulf Stream and the gales
That move across it -- We have come from some powerful
Surf to the West where that sea breaks
In salt on the continent.
~~
A world around her like a shadow
She moves a chair
Something is being made -
Prepared
Clear in front of her as open air
~~
That this is I,
Not mine, which wakes
To where the present
Sun pours in the present, to the air perhaps
Of love and of
Conviction.
As to know
Who we shall be. I knew it then
~~
Glows. The gleam; the unimaginable
Thin feet taper down
The instep naked to the wooden floor"
Hidden and disguised
-- and shy?
The city's
Secret warmth
~~
Walking in the shelter,
The young and the old,
Of each other's backs and shoulders
Entering the country that is
Impenetrably ours
~~
And all the air before her --- what the wind brings past
In the bright simpleness and strangeness of the sands
~~
All that there is, is
Yours, and in the caves of your sleep
Lives in our permanent dawn
~~~~
What I've seen
Is all I've found: myself
~~
On that water
Grey with morning
The gull will fold its wings
And sit. And with its two eyes
There as much as anything
Can watch a ship and all its hallways
And all companions sink.
~~
Like a flat sea,
Here is where we are, the empty reaches
Empty of ourselves
Where dark, light, sound
Shatter the mind born
Alone to ocean
~~
But no screen would show
The light, the volume
Of the moment, or our decisions
In the dugouts, roaring
Downstream with the mud and rainfalls to emergencies
Of village skills and the aboriginal flash
Of handsome paddles among the bright rocks
And channels of the savage country
~~
Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuables. From disaster
Shipwreck, the whole families crawled
To the tenements, and there
Survived by what morality
Of hope
~~
Within the city's intracacies
Are these lives, Belief?
What do we believe
To live with? Answer.
Not Invent - just answer - all
that verse attempts.
That we can somehow add each to each other?
- Still our lives.
~~
Returning to that house
And the rounded rocks of childhood - They have lasted
well
A world of things,
An aging man,
The knuckles of my hand
So jointed! I am this?
The house
My father's once and the ground. There is a color of his
times
In the sun's light
A generation's mark.
It intervenes. My child,
Not now a child, our child
Not altogether lone in a lone universe that suffers time
Like stones in sun. For we do not
~~
Or more
Incapable of contact
Save in incidents
And yet at night
Their weight is part of mine
For we are all housed now, all in our apartments,
The world untended to , unwatched.
And there is nothing left out there
As night falls, but the rocks
~~
It is the child who is the branch
We fall from, where would be bramble,
Brush, bramble in the young Winter
With its blowing snow she must have thought
Was ours to give to her.
~~
....there can be no breath
Of wind in the trees, the houses
Of earth and Of palm from the jungle. The sea that made us
islands has events
Of gulf and Gulf Stream and the gales
That move across it -- We have come from some powerful
Surf to the West where that sea breaks
In salt on the continent.
~~
May 21, 2022
EL HIJO DEL EXTRAÑO
Gorrión en la calle de adoquines,
Pequeño gorrión redondo y delicado
El pájaro de Chaucer —
o si una hoja
Brilla entre las hojas, entre las hojas de
Las estaciones —
Las patas del gorrión,
Las patas de la cría del gorrión tocan
La roca desnuda.
Gorrión en la calle de adoquines,
Pequeño gorrión redondo y delicado
El pájaro de Chaucer —
o si una hoja
Brilla entre las hojas, entre las hojas de
Las estaciones —
Las patas del gorrión,
Las patas de la cría del gorrión tocan
La roca desnuda.
December 20, 2020
'image of the engine', 'population', 'product', 'the crowded countries of the bomb', 'squall', 'to memory', 'still life', 'leviathan' are the best poems here.
June 23, 2022
"Si la ciudad tiene raíces, están en la mugre" 🌿
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews