The Selected Letters

by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Objectivist poet George Oppen (1908–1984), along with his contemporaries Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakoski, provide an important bridge between the vanguard modernist American poets and the later works of poets such as Robert Creeley. In work often compounded by the populist urbanity of city lives, the Objectivists explored the social statements poetry can make. Because Oppen wrote only one essay and one essay-review, his correspondence, in effect, constitutes his essays. Oppen is emerging as one of the major poets of the postwar era; he was the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the PEN/West Rediscovery Award, and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collection Of Being Numerous received the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
These working papers include a rich correspondence, letters which provide access to the sustained, perceptive body of critical and aesthetic thinking of Oppen’s poetic career. Provocative and witty comments on poetry and poetics, especially interesting for the development of an Objectivist aesthetics, and shrewd, deeply felt assessments about the politics of the twentieth century and its moral dilemmas are some of the issues attended to. This edition offers primary documentation about an influential poetics, a little-known movement, and its active figures. Given the aggressive studies of the politics of canon-formation, the interest in describing a historical context for individual literary achievement, and current debates about mainstream poetry, the rethinking of the Objectivist movement, and the collection of documents contributing to its poetics, is an important achievement in literary scholarship.

471 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 1990

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

For long I thought Oppen's Selected Letters was the signal achievement in poetics in postwar American poetry. Recipients of Oppen's letters include a whole range of modernist and late modernist poets from Harvey Shapiro to Robert Duncan to Sharon Olds to friends like Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky. My review of these letters is in a Fall/Winter 1991 issue of The Black Warrior Review. Other Oppen books have since made good company for this one without ever having replaced it.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had George Oppen been able to muster the ego to match his humanity, he would'v written an autobiography. And if our culture had the heart to match its wallet, we'd all read in school what he left instead, which is this book. You can buy it over the internet for between sixty and several-hundred bucks, or check it out through many fine inter-library loan programs, so thank god for that. Here, read this:

"I remember my father and my grandfather. I think of my daughter. I'm aware that the subways are pretty old (did you notice) and that the Queen Mary is fairly new. The ground seems very old to me. I write about nothing else."

[Al Filreis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully and thoughtfully edited collection of compelling letters written by a poet whose political commitments--and others matters--kept him from poetry for several decades. Some of these letters trace his return to poetry and his semi-disillusionment with partisan politics. No one knows Oppen better than Rachel Blau DuPlessis.