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.

The late Richard Swigg, was senior lecturer in English at Keele University. He wrote on D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. He published the collected recordings of Williams, George Oppen, Charles Tomlinson, Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid.

Edited by Richard Swigg
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 281
Bibliographic Info: index
Copyright Date: 2012
pISBN: 978-0-7864-6788-4
eISBN: 978-0-7864-9113-1
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments      vii
Introduction      1

Works by George and Mary Oppen      6

1. George Oppen Interviewed by L.S. Dembo, Madison, Wisconsin, April 25, 1968      7
2. George Oppen Interviewed by L.S. Dembo, Madison, Wisconsin, May 1968      23
3. George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian and David Gitin KPFA, Berkeley, March 30, 1970      35
4. George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian and Don Branning, Polk Street, San Francisco, February 2, 1973      45
5. George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Tomlinson, BBC Radio 3, May 22, 1973      57
6. George Oppen and Ted Berrigan, with the Novelist Marvin Cohen, Interviewed by Ruth Ellen Gruber, London, June 11, 1973      62
7. George Oppen Interviewed by Reinhold Schiffer, Polk Street, San Francisco, May 1, 1975      75
8. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Kevin Power, Polk Street, San Francisco, May 25, 1975      86
9. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Michel Engelbert and Michael West, San Francisco, c. 1976      112
10. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA, Berkeley, January/February 1976      120
11. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Serge Fauchereau, Polk Street, San Francisco, November 22, 1976      126
12. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by David McAleavey, Polk Street, San Francisco, January 9, 1978      143
13. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by David McAleavey, Polk Street, San Francisco, January 12, 1978      156
14. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by David McAleavey, Polk Street, San Francisco, January 13, 1978      161
15. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Tom Sharp, Polk Street, San Francisco, November 10, 1978      189
16. George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel, Polk Street, San Francisco, June 1980      216
17. Mary Oppen Interviewed by Dennis Young, Berkeley, July 2, 1987      239

Index      265