Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers [Paperback]

This is the first comprehensive critical edition of the unpublished writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984). Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay The Mind's Own Place as well as Twenty-Six Fragments, which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's Daybooks, composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958.Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papersis an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.

George Oppen(19081984) was born in New York and died in San Francisco. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 forOf Being Numerous.His work is available inNew Collected Poems,edited by Michael Davidson (2002);Selected Poems,edited by Robert Creeley (2003); andSelected Letters of George Oppen,edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1990).Stephen Copereceived his PhD in 2005 from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a research fellow at the Archive for New Poetry, where Oppen's papers are housed. He has taught at universities in California, Iowa, and Ohio.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Textual Apparatus

PROSE
Three Poets
The Minds Own Place
A Review of David Antins Definitions
On Armand Schwerner
A Note on Tom McGrath etc.
A Letter
Untitled:  . . . will
Non-Resistance, etc. Or: Of the Guiltless
Statement on Poetics

DAYBOOKS
I
II:I
II:II
II:III
II:IV
II:V
III
IV:I
IV:II
V
v

TWENTY-SIX FRAGMENTS

List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Stephen Cope approaches Oppen's various prose writings--essays, bound daybooks and papers of interestwith the same intensive and self-reflexive care that Oppen's poems cultivate tl%