George Oppen - Return To Poetry

Return To Poetry

In 1958, while entertaining becoming involved in Mexican real estate, and following a dream involving "rust in copper" and his daughter's beginning college at Sarah Lawrence, Oppen again began to write poetry. After a brief trip in 1958 to visit their daughter at university, the Oppens moved to Brooklyn, New York early 1960, at first returning to Mexico regularly. Back in Brooklyn, Oppen renewed old ties with Louis Zukofksy and Charles Reznikoff and also befriended many younger poets. The poems came in a flurry; within two years Oppen had assembled enough poems for a book and began publishing the poems in Poetry where he had first published and in his half-sister June Oppen Degnan's San Francisco Review.

But what kind of poetry do you understand with one reading that you go on using and remembering all your life? I mean the poetry that's most important to me is poetry that's been important to me for most of my life. I want to go back to it, and I find new things in it.
Mary Oppen

The poems of Oppen's first book following his return to poetry, The Materials, were poems that, as he told his sister June, should have been written ten years earlier. Oppen published two more collections of poetry during the 1960s, This In Which (1965) and Of Being Numerous (1968), the latter of which garnered him the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

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