Product Description

This is the first comprehensive critical edition of the unpublished writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984).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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #533593 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780520252325
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Though he won the 1968 poetry Pulitzer, Oppen (1908–1984) remained a cult figure for much of his life. Devotees and experts have long heard about, but rarely seen, the daybooks, journals (mostly from the 1960s) in which the poet recorded and revised reactions to American politics, quotations he favored and apothegms about the art of verse. Cope's careful edition gathers those journals together with Oppen's few, and wise, completed essays, among them reviews of Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish and a famous Statement on Poetics (We write to find what we believe and what we do not believe). The results are daunting in their moral seriousness, occasionally hard to assemble given their fragmentation, but finally impressive as a guide to poetry, not only to Oppen's own. Young people—even the brilliant young people—tend to address their immediate elders, whether in hatred or in love, Oppen warns; it is a long step from there to the dialogue... across a number of centuries which is literature. (Jan.)
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Review
"A book that will undoubtedly deepen readers' experience and understanding of Oppen, and broaden the scope of Oppen scholarship."--Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Carefully transcribed and annotated... Cope's book is well organized and makes an admirably clear text for readers."--Times Literary Supplement (tls)

From the Inside Flap
"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."--Marjorie Perloff, 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

Customer Reviews

Grateful
I feel privileged whenever I pick this book up - to be allowed to see into the mind of this serious poet/thinker - to get glimpses into his struggle, his creative process - to move along with him as he searches, delves, makes thought, makes sentences, finds lines for poems: a wonder. There's no one like Oppen. I suspect his work and his mind are for a particular palate - if you are drawn to him, this book is a must.