Divya Victor, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 9, 2023

The Poetry Center presents Divya Victor, delivering the annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Victor's talk, " 'Whether It Could Be Lake Or Fog': Reading Oppen in a Time of Rupture," was presented at the East Bay Media Center in downtown Berkeley, during the evening following her public conversation that afternoon at the same site with Tonya M. Foster, as part of Foster's "Undisciplining the Fields" series. 

Publisher
BECA (Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts)
Location
East Bay Media Center, Berkeley
Date
2023-12-09
Event Run Time
00:54:08
Contributors
Steve Dickison
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Divya Victor (00:52:34)

Divya Victor's talk on George Oppen focuses specifically on his treatment of land and landscape that is, in Victor's words "suggestive of material relationships with real places with geopolitical histories concerning more than the lyric self."

After looking at poems by Robert Duncan, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop, Victor brings in works by Charles Reznikoff, Mahmoud Darwish, and Subhadra Kumari Chauhan that use landscapes to "offer us new genealogies of relation." Victor asks us to think about "what a landscape preserves" in the context of Western colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence, especially as we witness the occupation and ongoing genocide in Palestine, alongside the targeting of other groups such as the Kashmiri people in South Central Asia.

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