>I'd like to find out more about the man Oppen myself - can we make these
>frontchannel?
>
The Oppen critical bibliography is now quite extensive, but a couple of
places one might start are
_George Oppen: Man and Poet_, ed. Burton Hatlen, National Poetry
Foundation (Orono, Maine). Essays and an annotated bibliography to 1981.
_The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics_, ed. Rachel Blau
DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, U of Alabama Press. (This is fairly
recent, 1999, and a very good collection: Alan Golding, Peter Nicholls,
Stephen Fredman and others on Oppen.)
Edward Foster's journal _Talisman_ has published a number of good essays on
Oppen over the years. _Ironwood_, _Sulfur_, and I think _Conjunctions_
published annotated portions of Oppen's notebook or "daybook" and the first
two have run various essays on or around GO also. _Sagetrieb_, also at the
U of Maine, is worth consulting for numerous essays on Oppen published over
the years.
John Taggart's _Songs Of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and
Poetics_ (Alabama) has several essays on Oppen.
Joseph Conte's _Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry_ (Cornell)
has a chapter on GO's _Discrete Series_.
Marjorie Perloff has an essay on GO in _The Dance of the Intellect_
(Cambridge UP) and remarks scattered elsewhere throughout her many books.
Michael Heller's _Conviction's Net of Branches_ (Southern Illinois UP)
reads GO among his peers.
Eliot Weinberger has a little note on GO in _Works on Paper_ (New Directions).
Ron Silliman's "Z-Sited Path" in _The New Sentence_ (Roof) remains of
interest though like much else is more broadly on Objectivism (and its
reception).
The American poet laureate Robert Pinsky weighs in on GO in _Poetry and the
World_.
There's Crozier, Tomlinson, and Davie in various sites too, many others.
Some of Davie's more controversial remarks on GO were published in PN
Review, as I recall, one Crozier essay in _Modern American Poetry_, ed. RW
Butterfield; Tomlinson on GO can be found in _Some Americans_..
DuPlessis edited Oppen's letters for Duke UP.
And so on and so on--there's much else, but maybe this will help those
interested get started. Perhaps Alan Golding can offer a crucial title or
ten I'm forgetting while typing this quickly.
Keith Tuma
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