This is the first comprehensive critical edition of the unpublished writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984).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

Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers

Literature & Fiction

Oppen, George

History & Criticism

University of California Press

This is the first comprehensive critical edition of the unpublished writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984).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

Cope, Stephen

Of Being Numerous

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

New Directions

1969 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry written by a man who was among those victimized by the anti-Communist hysteria of the '50s.

First printing.  "First edition" appears on the title page with no indication of a later printing.  The pages are clean and unmarked.  The binding/spine is tight and straight.  The corners are sharp/unbumped. Unfortunately age or production paste deterioration have caused the spine and the board edges near it to appear stained or foxed. Similar discoloration appears along the near-spine edges of the pastedowns and front endpapers.  The top text block is foxed.  The jacket is in "good" condition.  The bends are age discolored.  There are some small abrasions along the spine, and there are three tears along the bottom edge, the longest two of which are about an inch long.  There is light residue from a price sticker that was removed from the front flap where the original price of $3.50 appears.

This in Which

from DISCRETE SERIES to 1975 (excluding PRIMITIVE)

The Collected Poems of George Oppen

Poetry

George Oppen's New Collected Poems brings together all of the great Objectivist poet's published work, together with a selection of his previously unpublished poems. George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost modernists. A member of the Objectivist group that flourished in the 1930s (which also included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky), he was hailed by Ezra Pound as "a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's book." Oppen's New Collected Poems (which replaces New Direction's earlier, smaller Collected Poems of 1975) is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction to 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 references in the poems.

New Collected Poems

A selection of innovative poems by the groundbreaking Pulitzer Prize winner.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.

George Oppen: Selected Poems

“Michael Davidson has done a masterful job of editing this new edition of the Collected Poems.... Few poets significantly alter and enhance the state of the art. Oppen is one of them.”―Michael Palmer, Bookforum 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.”

Here put your head, that desires nothing except familiarly: There your feet, bending your knees so that, bare (I remember from childhood), they would smell salt-sweet. ―from 21 Poems
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.

21 Poems (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)

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Books by Oppen, George

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oppen, George. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers

Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers

Of Being Numerous

Of Being Numerous

This in Which

The Collected Poems of George Oppen

New Collected Poems

George Oppen: Selected Poems

New Collected Poems

21 Poems (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)