"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poet's books published in his lifetime (1908-84), as well as his previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work." "Editor Michael Davidson has written an introduction to the poet's life and work and supplies generous notes that give readers a deeper understanding of the background of the individual books and references in the poems. Essayist Eliot Weinberger provides a personal remembrance of the poet in his preface, "Oppen Then." This new, revised paperback edition also includes an extraordinary CD of the poet reading from each of his poetry books. Culled from obscure, rarely heard recordings of Oppen when he was in New York, San Francisco, and London at different times in his life, the CD adds a unique dimension to the lifework of one of America's finest poets."--BOOK JACKET.

A selection of innovative poems by the groundbreaking Pulitzer Prize winner.

This is the first comprehensive critical edition of the unpublished writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984). Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's "Daybooks," composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958. Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.

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

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 He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen's poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many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.