Bitter the Uses of Adversity

Cyclophosphamide, Hydroxydaunorubicin, Oncovin, and Prednisone altogether equal CHOP—Joel Oppenheimer's chemotherapy and the subject of one of his last and best poems, “The Uses of Adversity.” It is a poem of nearly 700 (Oppenheimer-short) lines and was published by Zelot Press: staple-bound; Oppenheimer-thin—3.5 by 8.5 inches; cover lettering in lower case of course. Joel inscribed my copy “News from the front,” a heavily ironic sideways look at one of his favorite William Carlos Williams quotations:

                          It is difficult

to get the news from poems

             yet men die miserably every day

                          for lack

of what is found there.

The inscription is dated 2/18/87; Joel died in October the following fall. Lung cancer had spread to his brain. He was 58.

Joel believed that poetry, like myth, was a way of understanding the universe; he saw myth as “quintessential fact.” And as his work moved from the discursive assertions of The Woman Poems (published in 1975) to a shorter, calmer line and the compressed diction that he had learned years earlier from Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, his own perceptions of his immediate surroundings increasingly took on the importance of myth.

This sea change in style and approach took place during the early 1970s after what he called “the last shout of the old [poetic] line.” He saw himself as a poet of middle-age, a single father with two sons at home, starting a new life having satisfied himself that he'd dealt in The Women Poems with the various Jungian “mothers” of Robert Bly and Erich Neumann—and with his own. Also, and of considerable significance, was the fact that his mind was clearing up. Joel had been an earnest and dedicated drunk until he took his final drink in 1970. A new focus and an ability to concentrate, which gradually returned to him over the next few years, balanced in some ways the nightmare of early sobriety, which he accomplished, for the most part, alone. The disease of alcoholism stayed with him until it was overtaken by one more immediately, but no less, deadly. In “The Uses of Adversity,” writing about mixing prednisone and booze, he admits, “of course i want / to take a drink // i've wanted to / take a drink since / that August day in 1970 / i took my last one.” But he never did, and in the next stanza he gives himself a pass on the 1.4% alcohol in his cough syrup.

The cough syrup detail deserves mention because it indicates the tone that drives the poem: witty, ironic, and bitter. Further, there is something wickedly funny about the premise: elevating to myth status a government pamphlet describing the side effects (he rightly calls them head-on effects) of the four “poisons” that comprise CHOP. But what might in other hands remain merely an annotated compilation—albeit with great care paid to line breaks—becomes a poem about language, suffering, myth, and, of course, death. He tips his hand in an introductory section after dismantling the prefixes “mal-,” “mis-,” “and dys-“ as they apply to “functioning”:

all words break down

into their parts

even as you and i

even as you and i

The reader is put on notice that we're dealing with basics here. His doctors warns of cankers, and even though “there is / a more precise / latinization / available to him / for obfuscation”:

. . . this is not

necessary

                  canker

cancer  chancre cancel

are all the same

Most of the rest of the poem follows a call-and-response pattern. A listing of side effects will elicit a response in the form of a trenchant wisecrack, each time revealing the simultaneous hopelessness and importance of the new information being relayed. For example, after listing “unusual bleeding or bruising,” he writes,

but what is usual

bruising and bleeding

i question

after “blood in urine”:

as if going to pee

and peeing blood

would not prompt

some concern

after “shortness of breath”:

                  hell

it's my damned lungs

at the seat of this

so of course i have

shortness of breath

and after another ridiculous collection that includes agitation, confusion, dizziness, lightheadedness, and loss of appetite, he embraces the irony:

doesn't this all

begin to sound

like being in love

And for evidence he offers a half-dozen lines of Lord Byron parading love “symptoms” in rhyming iambs from a translation of Catullus, then translations of Sappho by Sir Phillip Sydney and Mary Barnard. Before returning to real-life symptoms, he asks, but doesn't answer, a question toxic with sardonic wit:

so is it not love

these racing chemicals

and poisons chasing

down the cankers

to cancel all

Although the naming of side effects is repetitious, sometimes absurd, and, in the final analysis, beside the point, we can be sure that Joel knew them all. They were the monsters lurking under the sick room bed; each had the power to become momentous. One in particular turns the tone of the poem: “wounds that don't heal”:

for which i read

stigmata or

emotionally

as feuds

And he wonders about his enemies, if they have “these medicines / these cancers / growing in them.” “The Uses of Adversity” is a decidedly self-referential poem, as is much of Joel's poetry. But he has the gift of welcoming us in, even into the horror of chemotherapy, because he knew that we are, all of us, connected by the curse we share:

i take CHOP

every three weeks

a time span

called a course

combining thus

the words curse     

and corse:  the body

****************

During a lifetime of teaching, Joel was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project in Manhattan, visiting professor of poetry at CCNY, and associate professor of communications at New England College in New Hampshire. In the mid-1980s he held a Gannet Distinguished Professorship at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

His poetry booklist is an impressive one: eleven collections, as well as a number of broadsides and single-poem chapbooks as was common during the 1960s and 1970s. His short fiction was collected in Pan's Eyes, and he wrote three plays and two popular nonfiction books: one about Marilyn Monroe and the other about the New York Mets. He was a regular columnist for the Village Voice from 1969-1984, and a selection of those pieces has been gathered in Drawing from Life. Of particular note is a 1983 White Pine Press project Poetry the Ecology of the Soul, which collected transcriptions of three Oppenheimer master classes as well as a generous group of selected poems. “The Uses of Adversity” was reprinted in New Directions 52: An International Anthology of Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin.

Books about Joel Oppenheimer and his work include Robert Bertholf's Remembering Joel Oppenheimer, Lyman Gilmore's Don't Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer, and David Thibodaux' Joel Oppenheimer: An Introduction.