Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

Abstract

Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 201 1.234pp. $29.95In Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life, Oren Izenberg relentlessly raises questions about the tasks, strategies, values, and accomplishments of the most difficult modern poetry in relation to deep issues regarding the nature of persons as such. The phrase "ground of social Ufe" focuses on personhood as something given, primitive, immediate, and distributed by nature equauy among aU human beings, in contrast to personhood understood as something that involves specific identity, pubhc mastery of language, and responsibihty for routines of sociaUy inteUigible action-personhood as an achievement rather than a given. Traditionally, Izenberg notes, we take the lyric subject or "the artifice of voice in the poem to offer something like a model or a theory of the person.... The poem gives shape to the concept of the person who can think, say, and make these things." This traditional understanding focuses, one might say, on persons in the second sense at the expense of the first-on the mastery of voice rather than its givenness as not-yet-formed potential. Izenberg then undertakes to redress this imbalance and to describe and praise a poetry primarily of personhood as potential. This approach leads him to taxonomize varieties of modern and contemporary poetry-ontological-impersonal versus expressive-personal-in a somewhat different way than the often used oppositions of postromantic/postmodern, symbohst/constructivist, and traditionahst/avant-garde. But Izenberg's most radical claims go beyond merely redrawing old maps. Izenberg is specificaUy worried that the traditional understanding of lyric as enactment of exemplary articulated subjectivity is by its very nature comphcit in "a set of civuizational crises," including "decolonization and nation formation, the levehng of consumer culture.. .genocide and the specter of total annihilation." The thought here is that any effort to teU this story of a sequence of perceptions, thoughts, feehngs, and verbal articulations of them as exemplary, formed for the sake of sympathy and resonance, inevitably suppresses the independence and distinctiveness of the stories of some others.Izenberg poses against this traditional picture of lyric a less personally expressive poetry of pure "attentiveness" and of "the greatest possible opening of the self"-to other people and to contingencies that are simply experienced sequentially and registered paratactically. This poetry turns away from emplot- ment, articulation, and formai construction. It is hostile to art and artfulness, "deliberately hostile... to any reading." This poetry of the non-poem seeks to make something happen, to awaken its readers to the quite different contingencies of their own Uves in "being numerous"-that is, in being simply cast into the world along with others, where no common course of thought, feeling, or action can be plotted without attendant repression and horrors. Its slogan is Celan s idea that "making and falsifying.. .take place in the same breath." Away, then, from making (and expressing and forming and singing), and on to paratactic registering, noting, stuttering-and quizzicality.George Oppen is arguably the central figure of Izenberg's study. The phrase "being numerous"-being simply with others, in the absence of any common plot-is taken from the title of Oppens 1968 long poem, where it also appears at the end of a section that Izenberg dubs "Crusoe's Silence." The statement of simple being in the poem s silence is deeply significant for Izenberg: poems, in Oppen's words, are "still too fluent." "I would like the poem to be nothing, to be transparent, to be inaudible, not to be," he cites from another work of Oppen's. Izenberg turns away from the poems, then, to Oppen's daybooks, where he finds an inaudible-disclosive "undersong" that enacts "the determination to Usten" in place of expression and assertion. …