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“... We​ had seen bare land/And the people bare on it’: two lines from a retrospective poem by George Oppen that appeared in 1963 in a small magazine published out of New Rochelle, the poet’s birthplace. Oppen (b. 1908) had recently broken a long silence and become a poet of his time – the 1960s and 1970s – however much he may have insisted, as he did in the same poem, that he was ‘of the Thirties ...”

“... Recollections of George Oppen in a Letter to a Friend ‘This lime-tree bower my prison’                                         Coleridge That lime-tree – no, what is it? mulberry? – bower at combe’s bottom, your Brook Cottage where the light sleeps so evenly in silence one would not say even in summer’s heat it pulses ...”

“... In ‘The Building of the Skyscraper’, a short poem which appeared in the Nation in 1964, George Oppen wrote: The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo ...”

“... Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of the ...”

“... an academic, rather conservative, literary canon. Then, in the mid-1960s, he became friendly with George Oppen, around the time Oppen began writing again after a long silence. ‘I was still reading, or trying to read The Mills of the Kavanaughs,’ O’Brien later wrote. ‘...”

“... or spurned in the cause of their unfashionable art. Two such individuals are Louis Zukovsky and George Oppen, both American Jews, one-time associates of Williams and so-called ‘Objectivists’. The chapter concerning them is, I think, the least satisfactory in Tomlinson’s book. Not because it is ill-written – far from it. Zukovsky’s ...”

“... Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them incorporated key elements of the ...”

“... watching the flies on his desk. In the late 1920s he met two younger poets, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. The three, all Jewish New Yorkers, shared an admiration for Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and a belief, along with Williams, that American modernism should be relocated from Paris and London to the US. Asked to edit an issue of Poetry ...”

“... he appeared in Alida Monro’s anthology Recent Poetry in 1933 alongside Yeats, Eliot, Auden and George Barker. Then, on leaving school, he published a novel, Opening Day, and before long his work could be found in the small magazines of his time such as Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and his friend Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing ...”

“... a single page of her introduction contains references to Wayne Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call ...”

“... they engage with a post-Poundian poetic tradition (Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) of a kind that gives modern American poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ‘Time Passing, Beloved’ and ...”

“... produced something quite unlike the verse he seems greatly to have admired – including that of George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, both driven to lengthy silence, between twenty and thirty years in each case, Rakosi recovering the possibility of poetry as a direct result of Crozier’s intervention in 1965, long after the term ‘Objectivist’ had ceased ...”

“... Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for some, or for some at some ...”

“... is no other issue ... to think about politically, but I don’t know how to measure happiness,’ George Oppen wrote to June Oppen Degnan in 1970 (an extract from his letter is the epigraph to Midnight Salvage). How, then, should women see themselves? As mosaics, fractured with the lines of putative and possibly ...”

“... writing. At university in the 1990s the coolest young poets I knew were reading Rimbaud and Oppen – two very great and very different writers who had in common their abandonment of the art (though Oppen’s was only temporary). Rimbaud stops at twenty or so and starts running guns; ...”