George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism
Author: Peter Nicholls
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2007-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199218269

This study of 20th-century American poet George Oppen promises to become a key resource for those interested not only in Oppen himself, but in the history of literary modernism. Drawing extensively on largely unpublished papers and presenting material that has not yet appeared in print, Peter Nicholls gives a detailed account of Oppen's life and work, enriched by close readings of many of his poems.

George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism
Author: Peter Nicholls
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2007-10-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191527335

Regard for George Oppen's poetry has been growing steadily over the last decade. Peter Nicholls's study offers a timely opportunity to engage with a body of work which can be both luminously simple and intriguingly opaque. Nicholls charts Oppen's commitment to Marxism and his later explorations of a 'poetics of being' inspired by Heidegger and Existentialism, providing detailed accounts of each of the poet's books. He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen's poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many of his poems. Oppen emerges from this study as a writer of mercurial intensities for whom every poem constitutes a 'beginning again', a freeing of the mind from thoughts known in advance. A strikingly innovative and challenging poetics results from Oppen's attempt to avoid what he regards as the errors of the modernist avant-garde and to create instead a designedly 'impoverished' aesthetic which keeps poetry close to the grain of experience and to the political and ethical dilemmas it constantly poses.

The Zukofsky Era

The Zukofsky Era
Author: Ruth Jennison
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2012-07-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 142140611X

Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an anticapitalist poetics. Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave expression to the complex contours of culture and politics in America during the Great Depression. This study of Zukofsky and two others in the Objectivist constellation, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, elaborates the dialectic between the formal experimental features of their poetry and their progressive commitments to the radical potentials of modernity. Mixing textual analysis, archival research, and historiography, Ruth Jennison shows how Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker braided their experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, and feminists into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Using the tools of critical geography, Jennison offers an account of the relationship between the uneven spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the Objectivists’ paratactical textscapes. In a rethinking of the overall terms in which poetic modernism is described, she identifies and assesses the key characteristics of the Objectivist avant-garde, including its formal recognition of proliferating commodity cultures, its solidarity with global anticapitalist movements, and its imperative to develop poetics that nurtured revolutionary literacy. The resulting narrative is a historically sensitive, thorough, and innovative account of Objectivism’s Depression-era modernism. A rich analysis of American avant-garde poetic forms and politics, The Zukofsky Era convincingly situates Objectivist poetry as a politically radical movement comprising a crucial chapter in American literary history. Scholars and students of modernism will find much to discuss in Jennison’s theoretical study.

Poetry as Re-Reading

Poetry as Re-Reading
Author: Ming-Qian Ma
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2008-08-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810124831

Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma's book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and post-modernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernism--and to force a new and different kind of reading."--Pub. desc.

Questions of Poetics

Questions of Poetics
Author: Barrett Watten
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2016-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 160938430X

Object Lessons -- Subject Formations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

21 Poems

21 Poems
Author: George Oppen
Publisher: New Directions Poetry Pamphlets
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: American poetry
ISBN: 9780811226912

Here put your head, that desires nothing except familiarly: There your feet, bending your knees so that, bare (I remember from childhood), they would smell salt-sweet. --from 21 Poems

Writing Not Writing

Writing Not Writing
Author: Tom Fisher
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2017-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609384806

Writing Not Writing is both a detailed analysis of four individual poets who left poetry behind and a theoretically provocative exploration of the political and ethical possibilities of silence, not-doing, and disavowal. Reading the silences of George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Bob Kaufman, the renunciation of Laura Riding, and other more contemporary instances and modes of poetic abnegation, Tom Fisher explores silence, refusal, and disavowal as political and ethical modes of response in a time of continuous crisis. Through a turn away from writing, these poets offer strategies of refusal and departure that leave anagrammatical hollows behind, activating the negational capacities of writing and aesthetics to disrupt the empire of sense, speech, and agency.

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
Author: Peter Howarth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2011-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139502328

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism

The Cambridge History of American Modernism
Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 948
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108808026

The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.