George Oppen Quotes

“George Oppen is a tough old bird. If you've never seen what [he] sees, it's because you haven't sat still long enough and looked as he has. The things he sees feel like the gnarled bark of a tree. The tree is there too. You can put your weight against it. It won't give.”
― Carl Rakosi

“[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.”
― George Oppen