Sam Heaps put out a call for writers to explain George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous.” Oppen was one of the early poets C & I could love together. His poems can seem crystalline, oblique, yet still somehow warm, and we both admired his integrity. Rereading the poem after Sam’s call, I felt it explained more of this quaking moment than I could explain the poem. But I shaped some things in dialogue with lines from the poem. Here they are in full at Have Has Had. Oppen had to operate through the Red Scare, McCarthyism. He fled HUAC hearings to Mexico. He worked as a cabinet maker and carpenter, was involved in radical labor organizing and the fight against fascism. I’m damn sure where he’d land on things in 2025. I’m less sure he’d bother writing poems about it while he still had the power to act in a more direct fashion.