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craft.

      Wisdom Literature

      One of the most influential and widely read poets seeking this ground is George Oppen. Drawing from both Marxism and phenomenology, Oppen’s poetry, which he explicitly describes as “a test of truth,” insistently moves toward the “metaphysical.” It is a word to which he has recourse at a number of important points in his work, despite his insistence that his goal, as he writes in his poem “Route,” is “The purity of the materials, not theology, but to present the circumstances” (Oppen 2002, p. 194). Oppen’s rejection of theology does not preclude his enduring concern for the transcendental horizon of poetry. Indeed, Henry Weinfield calls Oppen’s famous “Psalm,” “one of the great religious poems of the twentieth century,” while at the same time explaining why “it is by giving up the quest for transcendence—for God—that we solidify our faith in existence” (Weinfield 2009, p. 188).

      Blessed art thou, oh God, in thy impotence.

      If there is another way to live, as we wish

      there were, we would. What more were there?

      Love God. We are at one in this.

      (Bronk 1981, p. 187)

      These lines come from “He Praises Nescience and Impotence,” but Bronk also encourages us to “Draw Near with Faith”:

      The stew, the wine: we take these sacraments

      to our comfort. And talk awhile. What do we mean

      to say? We don’t know this, or what

      our comfort is. We take it anyway.

      (Bronk 1981, p. 191)

      Here, the sacraments seem secularized—a dinner party and not a mass—but our hungers of the body and the soul are somehow satisfied in this poetic transformation.

      If these streets, this world, are the arena,

      then each person passed, each bidding building

      unentered, leaves room for ruminations

      illumined by an edge, a backlit otherness

      positing a liberty to think or not think…

      (Heller 2019, p. 188)

      Here, “the arena” of the bustling city, with its crowds and buildings, presents itself as a meditative space and an opportunity to achieve a mindfulness which in turn leads Heller to an almost mystical intuition of “a backlit otherness.” Ruminating upon this otherness, the poet comes to

      a sense of world-depths that no longer crowd the mind,

      thus a rich compost of the literal

      of what is said.

      (Heller 2019, p. 189)

      Harvey Shapiro, who was also close to Oppen, likewise finds unlikely moments of revelation in the urban world. Consider “Lower East Side”:

      On Houston Street, walking west,

      the moon coming up over Katz’s Delicatessen,

      we pass a synagogue ancient as Tiberias.

      You don’t have to be touched

      by the hand of God

      to pick up on these New York clichés.

      We get finished walking the dog

      and climb to your Catholic-kitsch apartment

      where your Mother of God helps me out of my clothes

      and history and the ruined smell of these lives.

      (Shapiro 2006, p. 184)

      On the Lower East Side, rich in ethnic memories, the religious signifiers (the synagogue, the hand of God, and what I assume to be a statue of the Virgin Mary) seem to be undermined by the secular New York clichés (Katz’s Delicatessen, walking the dog, the tenement apartment with its Catholic kitsch). But there is a lingering sense of the sacred here toward which the poem can only gesture. For Shapiro, Katz’s Delicatessen is as much holy ground as the synagogue. His lover may or may not be a practicing Catholic, but like Shapiro, she is still rooted in her religious tradition. The Jewish poet’s desire for his Catholic lover frees them from “history and the ruined smell of these lives.” Their sexual relationship is both profane and sacred; transgressive in Jewish and Catholic traditions alike, it is redemptive, for they are momentarily taken out of the fallen world of historical and personal ruin.

      Only the converts, six of them in the corner,

      in their prayer shawls and feathery beards,

      sing every syllable.

      What word

      are they savoring now?

      If they go on loving that way, we’ll be here all night.

      Why did they follow us here, did they think

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