Oppenheimer's grandparents were from Czechoslovakia. His mother's father, Samuel Rosenwasser, migrated to America from the village of Stropkov in Czechoslovakia in the 1880s. One presumes they lived, originally, in those tenements on the Lower East Side before migrating northward, and out of the city, to Yonkers, just beyond New York's northernmost border in The Bronx. His sirventes, no doubt, bears some emotional echo back to these progenitors. How else explain the depth of sympathy—perhaps this might be another definition of that which isn't kitsch—the poet brings to the old lady coming down the stairway in the tenement where he had lived. (This is not a poet who writes of "mauve stars" when he can say they are nipples, which perhaps is another way of saying "no ideas but in things.") On her way down the stairs, the old woman loses her control, and shits on the stairway. The daughter—a kind of knight of kitsch—is in full denial about the shit.

and on her way

up the stairs an old lady loses

her control...i will write

against that which is in us to

make age an embarrassment in the

season of coming alive

Writers as diverse—and as great—as Jonathan Swift, Rabelais, Aristophanes, and James Joyce all had obsessive interests in the topic of shit. All were satirists of one sort or another. Oppenheimer joins their ranks with his poem, not just because the sirventes is a satirical form which the troubadours used. But there is no question in my mind that Joel Oppenheimer satirizes political, social, or moral themes in his poem. What better way to attack the sentimental world of kitsch, where shit is not only denied but morally objected to? For objecting to her mother shitting in the hallway, the daughter shows incredible bad taste, even "a pretentious bad taste," and that says my dictionary, exemplifies kitsch, a word whose German origins means "to put together sloppily." By putting her life together so sloppily, i.e., without compassion, though with kitsch, the daughter makes a virtue of her own denial about her mother. Joel the poet wants to tell the old woman:

old lady, it's spring, i love

you great grandma, this is a

natural act, why will you

fear me for it, i see each day

more shit than you could ever

dream of making, screw your

daughter, let mrs. stern watch

out for her own steps, i am just

standing here waiting for you

to pass, too late now for me

to go back up the stairs.

Oppenheimer goes on to tell her:

there is room for it, need for it,

labor does not create wealth, wealth

does not create wealth, shit creates

wealth, old lady, old lady, you are

the creator spirit, tho your tits

hang shrunken in your wrapper, tho

your man's long dead

In its way, the poem goes back to what that module about "Shit and City" at the University of London is about—civilization and wealth, not ignorance and poverty. This poet of tits and asses, of shit in hallways, this slovenly anarcho-bohemian poet of wild hair and unkempt beard is also a civilized person, and therefore a civilizing influence on the anarchy of the Lower East Side. At the denouement of this narrative poem, the poet reflects on a former lover, perhaps because that is what Piere Vidal, the great troubadour balladeer, would do. But as this is a sirventes, and so a satire, he is not writing a courtly love poem, and instead reflects on a lover who would pee his bed as she had an orgasm. Then he goes back to the old woman in the hallway of the tenement. He exhorts her to "let it go, old woman, let it go, shit on it, let it go." And then in one of his more considerate moments as a poet, Oppenheimer shares with her that he worries if he farts too loud:

in his own silent room, who pisses

to the edge of the bowl it shouldn't

make no noise, who, like so many

of us, wakes each morning to either

constipation or the runs, this

much i can grant you, shit on

the stairs of my house, you

are old enough for that.

The sirventes concludes with Oppenheimer, still addressing the old, embarrassed woman—with the assumption being that the mortified daughter is somewhere in the shadows of the tenement hallways—that this grandmotherly creature should not worry because this is the Lower East Side.

guns crack, people snort

their noses full of life, and you

are dying because you shat

upon these steps?

The vernacular speech joined to the spokenness of the line, the hip voice, New Yorky, Jewish, educated but not showing off about its intelligence, even the allusiveness of the poem, harking back to the troubadours, has many archaeological layers of poetic depth. From the troubadours, I hear the exaggerated tones of a Rabelais. Then there is an almost Elizabethan tone to that lovely word "shat," creating a past-tense verb of "to shit." But in a 20th century sense, the progression from the Provencal poets to Joel Oppenheimer, is a direct line to that tenement hallway of his poem. It goes from Ezra Pound directly to Paul Blackburn, and then to Joel Oppenheimer.

Blackburn was a big influence, not only on Joel Oppenheimer's poetry, but all the poetry written on the Lower East Side. He had known Ezra Pound since the late 1940s when he would visit the legendary poet in Saint Elizabeth's hospital in Washington, D.C. Blackburn was at ease with forms like the alba and the sirventes, and his poem, "Sirventes," leaps off the pages of Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology, drunken, playful, erudite, wildly lyrical:

I have made a sirventes against the city of Toulouse

and it cost me plenty of garlic:

and if I have a brother, say, or a cousin, or a 2^nd cousin,

I'll tell him to stay out too.

As for me, Henri,




I'd rather be in Espana

pegging pernod thru a pajita

or yagrelling a luk

jedamput en Jugoslavije,

jewels wide and yowels not

permitted to emerge—

or even

in emergency

slopping slivovitsa thru

the brlog in the luk.

Paul Blackburn needs to have the last word here. He was the person whom everyone thought would be the director of the new Poetry Project. Instead the last person in the world was given the directorship. Still, as Sam Abrams has said, Paul never bore any grudge against Joel; they were long, lasting friends. Paul wore the black cowboy hat; Joel wore the white one. They drank like sailors together in the bars on the Lower East Side and westward into the Village along University Place where all the Abstract Expressionist painters used to hang out before they got too famous and moved to the Hamptons. In fact, Blackburn would teach poetry workshops at the City College of New York, sending his best students down to the Poetry Project for Joel's workshops. In turn, Paul got Joel a job at City College after Joel got Paul one at the State University College at Cortland in upstate New York. Paul would move to central New York; Joel would work uptown at City College after his two-year stint at Saint Mark's Poetry Project ended, and the great wheel of poetry would spin ever onward.

At Cortland, Blackburn would suffer mortally from cancer of the oesophagus. Toward the end of his life, he continued to keep a poet's journal. I have always loved this Journal immensely, but no place more tellingly so than its very last entry which reads:

Bigod, I must have been full of shit.

Finally, this issue of shit in the poem highlights that Williams adage about no ideas but in things. I often thought, attending Joel's workshops at the Poetry Project that Williams' words also meant "to tell it like it is," i.e., without bullshit. In his essay, "On Bullshit," Harry G. Frankfurt, emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton University, observes that "when an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false." If you tell it like it is—as Oppenheimer did—you write truthfully. It may offend, as often his poetry did, but ultimately correctness, as Wittgenstein himself noted, is more important than beauty. I have been someone who has found Joel Oppenheimer's poem both beautiful and true. In that sense, he was not full of shit, as Paul Blackburn said of himself, but, like the ancient Greeks, he was a truth-teller and a truth-seeker, a true poet until the very end.