Tyrone Williams, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 6, 2019

Opening with an autobiographical recollection of his early aspirations to become a professional songwriter, and the conviction that pop songwriters "were talking to each other" via such modes as the "answer song," Tyrone Williams offers a complex reading of Oppen's work, focusing closely on his poem "The Zulu Girl," hearing it as "a response to and rewriting of" a much earlier 1930 poem of the same name by white South African poet Roy Campbell, and offering speculations regarding Oppen's motives for the poem. Williams also reads Oppen's work alongside more directly contemporary poets as Lorenzo Thomas, Charles Olson, Philip Levine, and Amiri Baraka, responding, after the talk's conclusion, to questions and remarks from the audience.