Mary Oppen - Meaning a Life

The wordsdo not illuminate the poem;

the poem illuminates the words.

St. John of the Cross
(translated by Mary Oppen)

Some books we can read over and over again through the years with renewed delight. Our initial encounter with such a book feels like our first experience with a place we love, or like the first sight of shore or seathat particular, that vast. Our emotions swirl with promise, hope, jubilation in a miraculous moment of recognition that enlarges our world. How lucky we are to have found this book! How impossible it is now to imagine our life without it! I think of this special-collection library that grows as we grow as our autobiographical canonresistant to trends, conditioned by intuition and whim, and open to any language or genre.

Mary Oppens Meaning a Life: An Autobiography merged into my autobiographical canon through her husband, George Oppen. I was working for New Directions on a posthumous selection of his poems, edited by Robert Creeley, who asked if I could write a chronology of the poets life to run in the book. I was a fledgling editorial assistant, the first stop on the whipping post of our office, and the request came as a bit of a surprise. High on the challenge, I dove into the chronology with zeal and, after wrestling with it for a few weeks, sent a draft off to Creeley for his approval. Without comment, the Black Mountain master gallantly nixed it. It would be better, he decided, to have someone else do it. Still, all was not lost, as my research had led me to Marys book, a copy of which was nearly impossible to track down at the time.

Meaning a Life was originally published in June 1978 by Black Sparrow Pressa California-based literary house built from the ground floor of Charles Bukowski and up through the contemporary American avant-gardetogether with George Oppens last book of poems, Primitive, which came out earlier that spring. George was already suffering the symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as Alzheimers disease and, as Mary told an interviewer a few years after his death in 1984, He couldnt get [Primitive] ready for the publishers. And he finally said, If you can do this, please do it. He said, I cant do it. So I had to put them together and get the typescripts presentable, and probably lots of things hed have done differently. Her autobiography opens with the dedication To George, whose life and mine are intertwinedan echo of Georges dedication in his CollectedPoems of 1975 For Mary / whose words in this book are entangled / inextricably among my ownwith the entirety of his Anniversary Poem as epigraph, one line of the poem questioning, How shall we say how this happened, these stories, our stories. What objectively appears to be a rare, celebratory occurrencethe simultaneous publication of a couples new books from the same press, both praised later that year in the same review by Michael Heller in The New York Timeswith the Oppens feels both ordinary (the common light) and fated (the shining rays of a binary star).

Mary Oppen was born in the kitchen of her parents frontier home in Kalispell, Montana, on November 28, 1908, and died on May 14, 1990, in Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California. Meaning a Life was her first book; she turned seventy the year it was published. As she tells the story, she found poetry at the same time she and George found each other. She was eighteen when she met him in a poetry class at Corvallis State Agricultural College (now Oregon State University). On their first date George picked her up in his roommates Model T Ford and they stayed out all night, in the bright / Incredible light of the moon, as George describes it in his poem The Forms of Love. They sat and talked, made love, and talked until morning... talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring, as Mary describes it in Meaning a Life. She returned to her dorm the next morning and was expelled (George was suspended) for breaking the curfew. She left school, George followed her, and they decided to flee family to make a life of their own, complete, a mated pair, with the strength of our intelligences, our passions and our sensibilities multiplied by living our lives together, and with a shared vision of conversation, ideas, poetry, peers. They were eighteen! Armed with Conrad Aikens anthology ModernAmericanPoets and writing, both soon getting poems published in the same Texas newspaper, for which they each received a check for $25. Then, almost as soon as she had begun, Mary stopped writing. While hitchhiking to New York, they made it as far as Dallas before she got sick, had an abortion, didnt recover, and returned to Georges fathers home in San Francisco. She talks about writing and not writing in her autobiography:

The time and the urge to write did not come again to me until I was working on translations of St. John of the Cross in 1971 or 1972. I have quite often translated poems I wanted to read from the original French or Spanish. The St. John translation was so poor in every version I could find that I began to make what I called transpositions. From that I began to write again; my readings in the prophets brought me back to a search for my father, who had read Sirach, Ezekiel, the Psalms, the Song of Songs and other parts of the Bible to me. It was as though pent-up emotions were waiting to be releasedI wasnt aware of all I remembered until I tapped at the door and memories came flooding in. Apparently nothing is forgotten, but all is waiting to be called forth; I think I have reached a safe age from which to release these memories which have troubled me over the years. Perhaps they would not have been released for the asking when I was younger.