Speaking with George Oppen: Interviews with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968-1987

Description

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. — 281 p. — ISBN-10: 0786467886; ISBN-13: 978-0786467884.Seventeen interviews with George and Mary Oppen, conducted between 1968 and 1987, are here brought together for the first time. Two are fresh discoveries, while re-audited recordings of other interviews have given a new authoritative accuracy to the text. These conversations provide a unique account of a major American poet's evolution, through the Depression, war, exile and a return to poetry after two decades of silence. They span Oppen's early years as an Objectivist, his assessments of such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and his views on the merits of his later contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Jerome Rothenburg and others. Above all, it is Oppen's detailed commentary on his own writing, and his explanations of how individual poems unfold, which gives special importance to these new collected interviews.IntroductionWorks by George and Mary OppenGeorge Oppen Interviewed by L.S. Dembo, Madison, Wisconsin, April 25, 1968George Oppen Interviewed by L.S. Dembo, Madison, Wisconsin, May 1968George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian and David Gitin KPFA, Berkeley, March 30, 1970George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian and Don Branning, Polk Street, San Francisco, February 2, 1973George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Tomlinson, BBC Radio 3, May 22, 1973George Oppen and Ted Berrigan, with the Novelist Marvin Cohen, Interviewed by Ruth Ellen Gruber, London, June 11, 1973George Oppen Interviewed by Reinhold Schiffer, Polk Street, San Francisco, May 1, 1975George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Kevin Power, Polk Street, San Francisco, May 25, 1975George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Michel Engelbert and Michael West, San Francisco, c. 1976George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA, Berkeley, January/February 1976George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Serge Fauchereau, Polk Street, San Francisco, November 22, 1976George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by David McAleavey, Polk Street, San Francisco, January 9, 1978George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by David McAleavey, Polk Street, San Francisco, January 12, 1978George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by David McAleavey, Polk Street, San Francisco, January 13, 1978George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Tom Sharp, Polk Street, San Francisco, November 10, 1978George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel, Polk Street, San Francisco, June 1980Mary Oppen Interviewed by Dennis Young, Berkeley, July 2, 1987