David Hobbs, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 2, 2017

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The Poetry Center presents the 33rd annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture featuring David B. Hobbs at the Unitarian Center. Hobbs's talk is titled "Oppen and His Early Others," and builds on his research on a formerly lost manuscript of Oppen’s early poetry which he discovered in Ezra Pound's papers, and subsequently edited for publication as 21 Poems by George Oppen (New Directions, 2017). The lecture is followed by his response to a question from Frances Richard, in the audience, then his reading of two of Oppen's early poems.

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DocFilm Institute
Location
Unitarian Center, San Francisco
Date
12/02/2017
Total Run Time
00:54:16
Contributor
Steve Dickison, Frances Richard
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©© 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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David B. Hobbs (00:52:10)

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David Hobbs presents his talk, "Oppen and His Early Others," building on the archival research that led to his locating George Oppen's manuscript of early poems, which preceded his first book, Discrete Series (1934), among Ezra Pound's correspondence at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Hobbs, who subsequently edited and introduced Oppen's 21 Poems (New Directions, 2017), speculates on early poetic influences (outside the "Objectivist" nexus of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, et al.) that could, in Hobbs' view, include e.e. cummings, Countee Cullen, and Emily Dickinson. Following his talk, Frances Richard (who delivered the George Oppen Memorial Lecture in 2016) asks a question from the audience regarding Hobbs' surmise regarding Cullen instead of Langston Hughes, published alongside Cullen, as early influence on Oppen's poetry. After responding to Richard, Hobbs concludes the evening by reading and remarking briefly on two of Oppen's 21 Poems: poem I ("Round muscles in the damp womb....") and poem XIV ("The light unadvancing thru unregainable unterraced heights....").

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