Speaking with George Oppen

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.