“The poem I write, by itself, will not organize for affirmative action, or abortion. Action, organizing with other people, has to do that. New different poems come out of that organizing experience. I can give a new poem, copied secretly on the office machine, to my fellow workers. Because the images in it come from us, our anger, our resistance, my co-workers care for the poem, and it becomes a part of the gathering force of our solidarity”
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.
drainage, sewer mains and climactic scene where the MC reaches down into a river of bacteria sludge to arrive at the knowledge he needs to set everything right.
JOE HALL 