Taking place the day after the Celebration of George Oppen's 100th Birthday at the Kelly Writers House, the monumental George Oppen Centennial Symposium, organized by Poets House, was held at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on April 8th.
The day began with two panels discussing various aspects of Oppen's work. The first, "The Biographical-Historical Continuum," featured presentations by Eric Hoffman, Kristin Prevallet, Stephen Cope and Norman Finkelstein, discussing, among other topics, the role of ideology in Oppen's work, and his affiliation with the Communist Party. This was followed by a second panel, "The Literary-Philosophical Spectrum," during which Romana Huck, Burt Kimmelman, Peter O'Leary and John Taggart traced connections between Oppen and both Whitman and Heidegger, as well as the place of song, death and femininity in his work.
Later in the evening, a comprehensive reading took place, during which poets — including Michael Heller, Peter Gizzi, Harvey Shapiro, Thom Donovan, Stacy Szymaszek, Lee Spinks and Hugh Seidman — shared their favorite Oppen poems, from his 1934 debut, Discrete Series, through to 1978's Primitive. Oppen's own voice is woven through the proceedings, as he reads sections of his masterpiece "Of Being Numerous," as well as "Anniversary Poem" and "The Translucent Mechanics," the latter two from the same 1973 video from the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University which concluded our event at UPenn. There's more than five hours of audio altogether, and you can start exploring by clicking on the title above.
Speaking of our Oppen Centennial event at the Kelly Writers House check out our new page of photos from the event, including shots of all the participants, as well as members of the Philadelphia writing community present in the audience. We've also scanned the program from the poetry festival George Economou mentions in his presentation.
PennSound Contributing Editor, and proprietor of J. Henry Chunko, Danny Snelson has selected the latest batch of PennSound Featured Resources, which which you can browse on the sidebar to the left, or on its own page, here.
Snelson's list brings together groundbreaking poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jack Spicer and Jackson Mac Low, along with important contemporary voices, including Craig Dworkin and Gregory Whitehead (both of whose author pages he's been involved in editing), as well as Darren Wershler-Henry and Caroline Bergvall. You'll also find works by Charles Bernstein, Helen Adam, Clark Coolidge and Rosemarie Waldrop, plus Henry Hills' film, Money.
Even more exciting than this ambitious mix, however, is "also this: no title (essay and reprise)," an original audio/textual work created by Snelson himself, which cannibalizes his selections, weaving together sundry fragments of sound and syntax to create a rich palimpsest, reminiscent of the experiments of both Whitehead and Mac Low, which not only traces the spidery lines of influences running through 20th Century poetics, but also allows these discrete entities to communicate with one another, interrupting, bolstering and contradicting preceding statements. These techniques have their origins in Snelson's earlier work, my Dear coUntess, a video-poem which systematically reconfigures texts by Ron Silliman, Walter Abish, Amos Tutuola, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Kathy Acker, among others, and in true Cagean fashion, in both works, our attention is just as often held by speech as by the "silences" — the pauses, the non-verbal tics and glitches.
After you've listened to Snelson's selections, you might also want to check out our previous Featured MP3 lists by Marjorie Perloff, Thomas Devaney, Eric Baus, Steve Evans and Al Filreis.
