Bøger af George Oppen

Vi søgte en æstetik, vi kunne leve med, og vi søgte den gen­nem vores amerikanske rødder, vores eget land. Vi havde lært på Landbrugsskolen, at der blev skrevet poesi i vores egen tid, og at det ikke var nødvendigt at fordybe sig i akademisk viden for at skrive; vi behøvede ikke andet end de veje, vi rejste på.Fra A til Z er et fyldigt udvalg af den amerikanske maler og digter Mary Oppens selvbiografi om hendes liv sammen med digteren George Oppen samt digte og andre tekster af de fire vigtigste “objektivister”: digterne Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff og Louis Zukofsky, som hermed for første gang præsenteres på dansk i et dækkende historisk, politisk, socialt og kunstnerisk perspektiv.

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poet's books published in his lifetime (1908-84), as well as his previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work.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." This newly revised paperback edition also includes a generous CD of the poet reading from each of his poetry collections.

De starter en diskussion for at have noget at tale om,de bliver urealistiske, uvirkelige, liv mistersoliditet, mister udfoldelse, de kan li’ baseball fordi baseball ikke er etspilmen argumenter og meningsforskellefår hestene til at løbe […] Ovenstående er nok et af de mest berømtecitater af nyere tids amerikansk poesi. Citatet stammer fra George Oppensprisbelønnede digtsamling Om at være talrige fra 1968, bogen handler om NewYork, om den by Oppen forlod og vendte tilbage til, fremmedgjort og forvandlet.Det er en digtsamling som både er en ode og et epos, en ydmyg hyldest, og enstærk social og politisk kritik. George Oppen udgav sin første digtsamlingi 1932. Den politiske og økonomiske krise i 1930erne, og den senere forfølgelseaf anderledes tænkende under McCarthy efter Anden Verdenskrig, fik imidlertidGeorge Oppen til at opgive at skrive digte, for i stedet at blive politiskaktivist. Samtidig var George Oppen flyttet til Mexico med sin kone, kunstnerenMary Oppen af frygt for forfølgelse i det repressive klima under McCarthy. Ibegyndelsen af 1960’erne flytter parret imidlertid tilbage til Brooklyn. GeorgeOppen udgiver da en række digtsamlinger, hvoraf Om at være talrige erdet mest centrale værk. George Oppen tilhørte gruppen afobjektivister, som blandt andet omfatter Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, WilliamCarlos Williams m.fl. Objektivisterne var fokuseret på klarhed og enkelhed iudtrykket. Tidligere på året udgav Antipyrine antologien fra A til Z (red. Mikkel Thykier), der rummer en introduktion til flereaf de amerikanske objektivister, samt ikke mindst et fyldigt uddrag af Mary Oppens selvbiografi Meaning A Life: AnAutobiography (1978), der indgående skildrer parrets liv i perioden omkringudgivelsen af Om at være talrige.

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.

Offers a selection of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" and "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. This work presents an inspiring portrait of this writer and a testament to the creative process itself.