Life & Wisdom Quote by George Oppen

Oppen’s “discrete series” is less a literary technique than a moral posture: don’t smooth the world into a singable lie. By insisting that each term be “empirically derived” and “empirically true,” he borrows the authority of measurement for poetry, a deliberate rebuke to the grand, continuous lyric line that pretends experience arrives as a seamless whole. The word “discrete” matters: separate units, counted rather than flowed, like steps taken carefully on broken ground.

That insistence explains the “fragmentary character” he defends. Fragmentation isn’t modernist décor; it’s the form that honesty takes when you refuse to invent connective tissue you can’t verify. Oppen’s poems often feel like they’re built out of perceptions you could point to in the street: object, angle of light, a hard-edged fact of labor or politics. The gaps aren’t failures of craft; they are the record of restraint, the poet stopping where certainty ends.

Context sharpens the stakes. Oppen’s Objectivist commitments, his left politics, and his long silence before returning to poetry all orbit the same suspicion: rhetoric can become a kind of coercion. “Empirically true” reads like an antidote to propaganda and to the self-flattering stories art can tell about itself. The subtext is a challenge to readers, too: if the poem comes in fragments, it’s because reality arrives that way when you’re paying attention, and because any easy continuity might be the most suspicious fiction of all.