1. The ocean is so large and enveloping and unpredictable and powerful that you will surely drown in it. But: life began in the ocean, and took a long time to crawl out of it. And: It wasn’t until recently, the nineteenth century, that visiting the ocean became a popular tourist activity.

2. The cover of This Ocean, or Oppen Series pushes the letters of its title against each other, offering alternate crisscrossing paths of reading. But the name of the author is clearly stamped at the bottom: Joseph Bradshaw.

3. The first piece starts: “‘Hell,’ by George Oppen, may not exist.” We can look at an early draft of an Oppen poem: it is a “palimpsestic draftsheet”. That poem, first called “The Extremes”, underwent many violent edits, was attacked by scissors and scribbles, but finally emerged as “Anniversary Poem”; “What we’re calling ‘Hell,’ however, is materially incoherent.” “Hell” is, perhaps, the poem made of the scraps that don’t, or didn’t cohere for Oppen.

4. There is, of course, no poem called “Hell” in Oppen’s New Collected Poems.

5. “‘You,’ by George Oppen” is a thirteen-line poem with three editorial notes at the bottom, as if from a critical apparatus. The last three lines:

Away—
no bird without you
is a bird you

The notes suggest a variant: for “bird” read “wolf”.

6. There is no poem called “You” in New Collected Poems. But one poem mentions “wolf”. “A Political Poem” has the lines:

wolf walks in my footprints fear fear
birds, stones, and the sun-lit

earth turning, that great

loneliness all

or nothing
confronts us

7. For “earth” read “ocean”.

8. And there are several poems in the book about Idaho, which is not near the ocean, and which is not where Oppen was from. Oppen was from New York, and grew up in San Francisco, which is near the ocean. He moved to Oregon for college, which is where Joseph Bradshaw lives, though he is from Idaho.

9. The centerpiece (or, at least, the center piece) of the chapbook is a transcribed conversation between George Oppen and Joseph Merrick (not Bradshaw), the “Elephant Man”. Merrick professes to have become interested in Oppen from the first lines of Oppen’s poem “West”:

Elephant, say, scraping its dry sides
In a narrow place as he passes says yes

This is true

They discuss Oppen’s poem “Our Own Private Idaho”, which Merrick seems to be familiar with, even though Oppen says that “there is no such poem, and in a way there never really was. There were instead many drafts, endlessly unfinished. And they’re all gone now—I burned them.”

10. To be sure, there is no poem called “Our Own Private Idaho” in the New Collected Poems, nor even a mention of Idaho. And Joseph Merrick died eighteen years before Oppen was born; Joseph Bradshaw, at least, was born a few years before Oppen died.

11. It is not as if I’ve looked into any Oppen archives to see if Bradshaw is drawing material from notes. Oppen’s poetry doesn’t “do much” for me. It doesn’t threaten that it will drown me, and it doesn’t allure me as a seaside resort. But this is perhaps what makes Bradshaw’s reaction to Oppen’s work, and his relationships with Oppen’s work, all the more interesting to me.

12. From the preface to “A Ballad to Be Finished by George Oppen”:

As we know, the fragments of the Ancient Greek poet George Oppen can’t tell us anything about our century.

Or:

Like tanks we advance: your Knight for my Queen, your knife for my thumb. The metaphor’s bad and, as we know (I’m merely copying this), not for humans: I love you. How could Oppen possibly continue on with this?

13. We visit the ocean as tourists, or we visit the ocean to become like the ocean.