Richard Swigg – författare

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.

George Oppen's standing in American poetry has never been greater. Yet despite the mass of critical writing since his death in 1984, the essential basis of the verse—the words on the page and their acoustics—has rarely been the subject of discussion. In this book therefore Richard Swigg breaks away from the general trend of Oppen studies studies and offers the reader a direct way into the visual and auditory dimension of the poems. Ranging across the entire span of the work, from the 1930s to the 1970s, he traces for the first time the full extent of Oppen's engagement with the concrete world and his important poetic relationships with Charles Reznikoff, Denise Levertov, Charles Tomlinson and others.