|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
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.
"Stephen Cope approaches Oppen's various prose writings--essays,
bound daybooks and papers of interest--with the same intensive and
self-reflexive care that Oppen's poems cultivate toward the world.
This is exemplary editing of exemplary thinking. I was surprised
and delighted by many of the particulars, especially a brilliantly
measured review of Charles Olson. But the major revelation was the
range and precision and constructivist architecture that went into
Oppen's Daybooks: they rival his books of poetry, as if "Minima
Moralia "could thrive on amphetamines."--Charles Altieri
"George Oppen's daybooks, prose and papers offer the singular
record of a mind determinedly thinking toward poetry, the world and
human company, and that elusive point where they converge. In these
pages, scrupulously assembled, edited and annotated by Stephen
Cope, we find the groundwork for some of the finest American verse
of the twentieth century. The collection should prove invaluable to
those interested in the often fitful, yet resolute, steps along the
way of truths not easily attained."--Michael Palmer, author of
"Company of Moths"
"Any number of poets keep notebooks, but George Oppen's are unique
in their rigor, their conceptual profundity, and especially their
ethical awareness and insistent self-criticism. Stephen Cope's
meticulously edited and annotated collection of Oppen's "Daybooks,"
short critical essays, and fugitive pieces should be required
reading for anyone who cares about the place of poetry in the
post-World War II era. With his characteristic modesty, Oppen
didn't set out to formulate a full-scale aesthetic; he just
happened to produce one of the finest we have."--MarjoriePerloff,
author of "Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media"
"Here is the essential record of George Oppen's indelible voice,
astonishing as it wanders and discovers a new mode 'between the
grim gray lines of the Philistines and the ramshackle emplacements
of Bohemia' in order to recover an open ground that is, in the
fact, ' the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth.' Few
documents in our time would better serve to illuminate the hard-won
life of being a poet in the American language than this volume,
brilliantly edited by Stephen Cope. Simply put, what a laboratory
is to hard science, these daybooks are to poetry."--Peter Gizzi,
author of "The Outernationale"
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
|