George Oppen died on July 7th, 1984, as per the New York Times clipping sent to Cid Corman by the critic Sherman Paul, and kept as part of Cid’s bulging and battered copy of Oppen’s Slected Poems from New Directions. Truly George Oppen and Cid Corman shared similar conceptions when it came to the practice of poetry. Both believed in the need for directness, for “sincerity” in writing; for objective truth in the work of poetry. Both relished the use of small words and plain language. Both believed in the moral value of poetry.

Cid clearly admired George as man and poet and vice versa. Among the material Cid archived in Oppen’s book is a late letter from George to Cid at 87 Dartmouth St., Boston, postmarked 26 Nov. 1979, which reads:

Dear Cid:

now over my desk are the lines:

‘wherever you are, you have come to.’

Cid, in his turn, annotated the first page of Oppen’s Discrete Series, as “a remarkable early 1st collection: it must’ve given LZ [Louis Zukovsky] pause–a sense of deep competition (this GO wd. not have felt so).

On the facing page, is unfortunately, a poem that I cannot decipher. Cid’s minute handwriting, especially when he is writing “for himself” is often hard to read. This is an undated poem, which indicates that Cid was not so sure about its finished state. Usually, Cid dates the poems that he feels are finished.

On the outside of yet another letter addressed to his Boston apartment on 16 March, 1981, is this poem, dated 17 Sept. 1984:

The sun haunts us
at night before
we enter sleep

It is the dream.
All we seem to
see within it

is it. It is
the spirit and
soul of death’s
breath.

I won’t attempt to give a complete description of the contents, or of the annotations, or, because of the difficulty of Cid’s handwriting, transcriptions of all of the marginal poems, but I would like to set out the most interesting.

A complete typescript of a poem that Cid wrote in memory of GO is also among the materials in the volume:

Cid wrote at the top, “Shortened To For Oppen,” which he scribbled out, and wrote Open next to it, all in caps. This is dated 30 August 86.

The man dying upon you
isnt [sic] your brother–he is
yourself. No dogtag Hebrew

reads you otherwise. The text–
George–derives from the breath you
and he lost in a foxhole.

10 Dec. 85

More soon.