The Translucent Mechanics by George Oppen
"The Translucent Mechanics" by George Oppen is a free-verse poem that explores themes of perception, existence, and the interconnectedness of language and reality. Comprising twenty-nine lines, the poem invites readers to delve into the fluidity and transparency of the world, portraying it as an organic mechanism in constant flux. Oppen employs a third-person perspective, initially embodying the wind as it sweeps through the city of San Francisco, uncovering its secrets and flaws while also engaging with vital forces. The poem is characterized by its spareness and rhythmic cadence, reflecting Oppen's Objectivist roots, which emphasize clarity and authenticity in language.
As the poem unfolds, it emphasizes the importance of precise articulation and the synthesis of individual imagination with the external world. Repeated words such as "fear" and "say" highlight the poem's central motifs of communication and the search for meaning. Oppen's work seeks to reveal the dynamic relationship between language and the material world, ultimately culminating in a spiritual invocation that suggests a deeper, divine understanding of existence. "The Translucent Mechanics" serves as both a meditative exploration of reality and a testament to the power of poetic expression.
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The Translucent Mechanics by George Oppen
First published: 1972, in Seascape:Needle’s Eye
Type of poem: Meditation
The Poem
A spare, free-verse poem, George Oppen’s “The Translucent Mechanics” comprises twenty-nine lines, four of which contain only a single word. The title invites readers to experience the poet’s vision into the tentativeness and transparency of things, revealing them as organic mechanisms, ever in flux.
The poem is written in the third person, as the poet takes on a persona that views things from shifting perspectives. First, he assumes the point of view of the wind, moving through “the clever city”—specifically, the port of San Francisco—penetrating its “hinges,” or workings, to discover its “secrets of motion”—that is, its life.
“Flaws” are discovered, as well as “fear,” but so is commerce with vital forces. A “message” is “fetched…out of the sea again,” the sea indicating the primordal matrix of life. “Angel” and “powers,” or spiritual voices, now declare the dialectic of “‘things and the self.’” “Prosody” that “sings/ In the stones” entrusts to “a poetry of statement” a “living mind.” Objects in poetry inhabit both human language, including the poem itself, and the physical, material world—both of which are themselves objects.
The “living mind/ ‘and that one’s own,’” the individual synthesizing imagination, willing to see things “at close quarters,” paradoxically attains the transcendent view of “archangel.” Oppen has called this way of seeing existence as one “the imagist intensity of vision”—that is, perception that penetrates the complex interrelationship between language, thought, and things. It perceives the correspondent, dynamic structures of self and universe. Without this unifying vision, “earth crumbles”; the experience of reality deteriorates.
Forms and Devices
Oppen has been associated with Objectivism, a school of poetry that links the structure of objective reality with that of the human mind. The poem mediates the world of things and that of human language; it serves as a nexus of words, images, and things.
Moreover, the poem exists as an object itself, a universe of its own, exemplifying authenticity and coherence. It exhibits organic form, with cadences and contours produced by a particular voice and time. Objectivism’s commitment to integrity, to precise articulation of word and event, and to scrupulously rendered experience decries superfluity or ornamentation. To achieve clarity, the poet rejects mellifluousness or melodic flourishes in favor of the pure resonances of well-honed imagery.
The poem’s spareness, along with its syncopated rhythm, forces the reader to concentrate on words and images one at a time, necessitating their redefinition. According to Jonathan Galassi of Poetry, “Oppen’s lines move in fits and starts; they are slowly accrued ‘discrete series’ of phrases, chains or associations.…The lesson, the articulations of a meaning, is what matters.” Cid Corman, also a poet, has noted that “Oppen often repeats words…as if he were literally discovering the sense in them and he were started by it.” The words Oppen repeats—“fear,” “say,” “what”—suggest the crux of the poem, as symbolized by the wind: a blind groping for definition.
Words that imply communication of meaning dominate the poem: “voices,” “murmur,” “message,” “say,” “prosody,” “sings,” “poetry,” “statement.” Phrases appear in quotes within the poem—“‘things and the self,’” “‘and that one’s own’”—drawing attention to them as language.
The poet indicates that definition is variously mutable and stable by using imagery linking restless wind and transcendent spirit. For example, both express themselves in sound: The wind “murmurs”; angels and powers “say.” This connection harkens back to the Scriptures, in whose original languages the same word signifies both. Significantly, the poem climaxes with an invocation to “Archangel/ of the tide,” suggesting the divine spirit that brooded over the waters of creation.
Bibliography
Duplessis, Rachel Blau, ed. The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.
Hatlen, Burton, ed. George Oppen, Man and Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1981.
Ironwood 5 (1975).
Ironwood 13 (Fall, 1985).
Nicholls, Peter. “Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen.” Journal of American Studies 31 (August, 1997): 153-170.
Oppen, Mary. Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1978.
Paideuma 10 (Spring, 1981).
Thackrey, Susan. George Oppen: A Radical Practice. San Francisco: O Books and the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives, 2001.