Drawing from Life: A Selection of Joel Oppenheimer's Work from the Village Voice

This book, partly ephemeral, partly endearing, helps capture a period in a changing America and a changing bohemia. Poet and essayist Oppenheimer (1930-1988), author of Marilyn Lives and The Wrong Season, contributed columns to the Village Voice from 1969 to 1984. His recurring themes, the editors write, were ""baseball, domestic affairs, the community of the Village, lesser-known holidays and, in the last years, alternative (to New York City) places."" Until 1977, Oppenheimer wrote in cummings-inspired lowercase, which gave bite to his criticism of political powers (Nixon, for example) and personalized his worries: ""to have no teeth at forty-three is to know loss as well as anomie."" He resists some of the emerging sexual politics, criticizing a feminist who inveighed against Anglo-Saxon sex terms and arguing that sexist D.H. Lawrence did more to foster the sexual revolution than any other writer. He laments the emerging identity politics in the world of poetry as Imamu Baraka and Adrienne Rich distance themselves from white males, such as him. He enjoys his son's bar mitzvah ""as a ritualist, if not a good Jew"" and observes that ""fairness exists only in baseball and such."" And his fond reminiscences of Greenwich Village bars suggest a more intimate era (and Voice) than could be sustained in the 1980s. The editors--Bertholf is curator of the poetry collection at the University at Buffalo (New York), Landrey teaches English at Buffalo State--provide a helpful introduction. (Sept.)