The Oxford English Dictionary and George Oppen’s Discrete Series

Abstract

Chapter 3 focuses on George Oppen’s first two books, the lost 21 Poem (discovered in 2017) and Discrete Series (published in 1934). Considered by critics to be inscrutably gnomic, unrelated, and discontinuous (indeed, “discrete”) a reconstruction of Oppen’s source text—the Oxford English Dictionary, which had been completed to much celebration in 1928 just as Oppen was writing his poems—reveals his exhaustive inclusion of even the specialist definitions of certain key words. In addition to establishing continuities among the putatively discrete poems, the chapter offers fresh historical readings of modern mechanism (automobiles and elevators) that populate his poems and that served in turn, for William Carlos Williams, as the figure for the poems’ own lexical machinations. Furthermore, the logic of the signifier that structures the dictionary reveals an unexpected self-portraiture at work, across Oppen’s œuvre, in certain figures of glass enclosures and windows.