Chris Nealon, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 11, 2021

The Poetry Center presents poet and scholar Chris Nealon, delivering the 36th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Nealon's talk, titled "George Oppen and the Future," ranges across the span of Oppen's poetry, with particular attention devoted to sonic and linguistic elements of the poems, in relation to particulars of Oppen's politics as discernible in the poetry. Brandon Brown introduces Nealon, at the East Bay Media Center, in downtown Berkeley. The George Oppen Memorial Lecture is supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.

Publisher
DocFilm Institute
Location
East Bay Media Center, Berkeley
Date
2021-12-11
Event Run Time
00:59:49
Contributors
Brandon Brown
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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Chris Nealon (00:56:19)

Chris Nealon addresses "George Oppen and the Future," through an extended reading that ranges across Oppen's poetic work. Presented with Oppen's "intermingling of the old and the young, the intermingling of the old and the new," Nealon locates and rehearses continuities of key terms and their peculiar usage, shifts of verb tenses, prevailing vowel sounds, et al., from the poems of Discreet Series forward. Oppen's poetic practice, in this view, offers "the didactics of [a poet] performing for us [his] discovery." Nealon works at a series of subterranean openings onto Oppen's lifelong anti-capitalist predilection, his "theme of social reproduction" via returning attention to the new and the young as sites of natality ("...To be born!") and futurity. 

The lecture draws from writings and thought by Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, while pointing to earlier Oppen Memorial Lectures, by Kevin Killian, Peter Quartermain, and Stephen Cope. 

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