Vulcan

By George Oppen 1908–1984 George Oppen

The householder issuing to the street

Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff

Exterior. ‘Peninsula

Low lying in the bay

And wooded—’ Native now

Are the welder and the welder’s arc

In the subway’s iron circuits:

We have not escaped each other,

Not in the forest, not here. The crippled girl hobbles

Painfully in the new depths

Of the subway, and painfully

We shift our eyes. The bare rails

And black walls contain

Labor before her birth, her twisted

Precarious birth and the men

Laborious, burly—She sits

Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly,

Deliberately she sees

An anchor’s blunt fluke sink

Thru coins and coin machines,

The ancient iron and the voltage

In the iron beneath us in the child’s deep

Harbors into harbor sand.

Source: New Collected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2002)

Biography

"George Oppen," wrote Michael Adams in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, "had one of the most unusual careers of any American poet." Oppen was one of the chief exponents of Objectivism, a school of poetry that emphasized simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme. He established the movement with William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukosfky, and other poets in the early 1930s. In 1932 Oppen helped found the . . .

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