POETRY
UB celebrates work of Pulitzer poet George Oppen
By Jana Eisenberg
- SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Updated: 04/22/08 9:06 AM
The work of American poet George Oppen is not widely known to a general audience, but some scholars at the University at Buffalo think it should be.
The UB Poetics Program is hosting “George Oppen: A Centenary Conversation,” a three-day event celebrating the life and work of the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet, on what would have been his 100th birthday.
“We study not so much ‘poetry,’ but its applications; how it works, what it teaches us about the world,” said Andrew Rippeon, a graduate student in the UB Poetics Program and a co-organizer of the event. “Oppen is perpetually relevant in this context for the ways he shows us how to respond to crisis. The 20th and now the 21st centuries have been a catalog of crises.”
“Oppen comes up again and again in seminars in both the English and Comparative Literature departments,” added Siobhan Scarry, another poetry grad student and event co-organizer.
Oppen, who died in 1984 at age 76, had a dramatic early life. His mother committed suicide, and he was rebellious, eventually getting expelled from college. He and his young wife rejected the trappings of his comfortable family and, in the late 1920s, traveled to Europe and became involved with other anti-establishment poets.
They returned to the States in the mid-’30s, but the war and political causes soon motivated him to stop writing poetry and become active in what he later called “liberal and anti-fascist” politics, but which were at the time characterized as Communist. (He actually was a Communist Party member.)
He also fought in World War II. He and his family then lived for a time in California, but to avoid further governmental persecution due to his political affiliation, they moved to Mexico, where they stayed until 1960.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, feminist literary critic and editor of “Oppen’s Selected Letters” (Duke, 1990), will be speaking and reading.
“Although Oppen won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, he is not yet well known,” she said in a recent interview. “He is one of the most important poets of U. S. late modernism for his extraordinary philosophic, lyrical and politically nuanced poetry, his ethos of critique and resistance, and his incisive literary mind.”
DuPlessis said she met Oppen in 1965 at Columbia University. “Because he had been in political exile, when he came back to the U. S., he wanted to connect with young people. I was one of these people.”
DuPlessis’ belief in his importance is reflected both in her 10-year effort to bring Oppen’s letters to light and her own recent completion of a poem written in relationship to a long poem of Oppen’s titled “Of Being Numerous (Draft 85: Hard Copy).”
She will read from her own work on the last evening of the event. And she spoke about her reasons for editing his letters.
“I thought that these letters should not be lost, nor be slow to have an impact on contemporary poetry,” she said. “The project records important and defining literary activity, a remarkable mind and poetic sensibility. The edition of his letters became my deeply motivated intervention into his reception and a contribution to future readers of his poetry.”
For a complete schedule and other information, go to http:// www.english.buffalo.edu/oppenConference/
