George Oppen

George Oppen (1908 – 1984) var en av 1900-talets stora amerikanska poeter, vars smått mytomspunna debutbok Diskret serie från 1934 blev ett avgörande verk för den rörelse som kom att kallas “objektivismen” i USA. Efter denna bok gjorde Oppen ett längre uppehåll från poesin för att ägna sig åt politisk aktivism, innan han återkom med bland andra Pulitzervinnaren Of Being Numerous (1968). Peter Thörnebys översättning är anmärkningsvärt nog Oppens första bok på svenska.

The Objectivist Press published George Oppen’s first book Discrete Series, a collection of thirty-one short poems with a preface by Ezra Pound, in 1934. Four years earlier, the twenty-one-year-old poet had sent an unbound sheaf of typewritten poems with the title 21 Poems hand-written in pencil on the first page to the poet Louis Zukofsky, who forwarded them on to Pound in Paris. These poems, suffused with Oppen’s love for his young bride Mary, as well as his love of sailing, are strikingly different from what they’d eventually become in Discrete Series. The scholar David B. Hobbs recently found 21 Poems buried in Ezra Pound’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and they appear here as a collection of their own for the first time.

George Oppen s New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poet s books published in his lifetime (1908 84), as well as his previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, whose writing was championed by Ezra Pound when it was first published by The Objectivist Press in the 1930s, has become one of America s most admired poets. In 1969 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Of Being Numerous, which The New Yorker recently said is unmatched by any book of American poetry since. The New Collected Poems is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction about the poet s life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as keys to references in the poems. The award-winning essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offers a personal remembrance of the poet in his preface, Oppen Then. This newly revised paperback edition also includes a generous CD of the poet reading from each of his poetry collections.

This is the first comprehensive critical edition of the unpublished writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984). Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's "Daybooks," composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958. "Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers" is an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.

The Selected Poems is a unique selection of Oppen's work from the seven books he published during his lifetime. Edited by one of our most respected contemporary poets, Robert Creeley, who provides an informative introduction, George Oppen's Selected Poems includes Oppen's only known essay, A Mind's Own Place, as well as Twenty-Six Fragments which Oppen wrote on envelopes and scraps of paper and posted to his wall, edited by Stephen Cope. Also incorporated is a helpful chronology and bibliography of his writings by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, celebrated editor of Oppen's letters. On his death, Hugh Kenner wrote, George Oppen, gentlest of men...prized what took time, found the grain of materials, exacted accuracy. Oppen's Selected Poems is the perfect text for teaching and a remarkable window into a world of lasting light and clarity.