Description
Book SynopsisGeorge Oppen's standing in American poetry has never been greater. Yet despite the mass of critical writing since his death in 1984, the essential basis of the verse—the words on the page and their acoustics—has rarely been the subject of discussion. In this book therefore Richard Swigg breaks away from the general trend of Oppen studies studies and offers the reader a direct way into the visual and auditory dimension of the poems. Ranging across the entire span of the work, from the 1930s to the 1970s, he traces for the first time the full extent of Oppen's engagement with the concrete world and his important poetic relationships with Charles Reznikoff, Denise Levertov, Charles Tomlinson and others.
Trade ReviewSwigg (formerly, Keele Univ., UK) is an astute reader of the intersection of linguistic acoustics and the page, as evident in his Quick, Said the Bird (CH, Oct'12, 50-0755). In this volume, Swigg presents a textual biography of Oppen’s work and its relation to contemporaneous and historical influences. The early chapters cover Oppen’s engagement with Charles Reznikoff and other Objectivists, but most of the study is devoted to the work Oppen did after he returned from a 25-year hiatus from writing poetry. Later chapters cover Oppen’s poetic conversations with an array of writers—e.g., Denise Levertov, William Bronk, Charles Tomlinson, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Historically, Oppen encounters writers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil—along with William Blake and medievalists—to articulate metaphysics as “a language that talks about physical fact" (quoted by Swigg in chapter 3). Swigg connects the poetics of the early Oppen—marked Objectivism and working-class politics—to Oppen's later work, which has not received the critical treatment it deserves. Throughout his career, as Swigg makes clear, Oppen focused not only on the visual presence of the word on the page but also on the material production of the sounds those words produce. This study produces a unified sense of Oppen's work. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
Table of ContentsWords and World: An Introduction 1. Parts, Pairs, Positions: A Reading of Discrete Series 2. To Write in the Great World Small 3. That the Stones Stand: Materials for a New Poetry 4. The Test of Belief: or Why George Oppen Quarrelled with Denise Levertov 5. We Want to Be Here: Oppen, Bronk and the Concrete World 6. Speak If You Can: Language and Counter-Language in New York 7. In Defense of Metaphysics 8. The Edge of the Continent: the San Francisco Poems 9. Voice, Line and Verticals: Seascape and Beyond 10. Out of the Whirlwind: the Evolution of a Poem 11. The Narrow End of the Funnel Selected Bibliography Index About the Author
