George Oppen: Negative Culpability and the Poetics of Veracity
Wednesday, April 21 @ 5 PM
University of Colorado at Boulder
Humanities 150
Co-sponsored by the English Department, Creative Writing and the Program in Jewish Studies at CU-Boulder.
Cope's talk will focus on the relationship between history, ethics, and form in poet George Oppen's recently published prose and daybooks. At issue is Oppen's relectance to publish, during his lifetime,essays, manifestos, and poetics statements. Why this reluctance? In what ways do the Daybooks reflect, both formally and thematically, a unified ethico-poetic that is constitutionally suspicious of the certainties and propositions endemic to the major poetics statements of the period? In what ways is Oppen's "negativity" - or "negative culpability" -- historically determined by his position as a Post WWII, Jewish-American, vanguard poet writing in the Pound tradition?
Stephen Cope is the editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (University of California Press, 2007), and a founding editor of Essay Press. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Jacket, The Germ, Sagetrieb, Mirage: A Period(ical), XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and elsewhere. Cope received his PhD from UC San Diego in 2005, and has since taught at UCSD, Drake University, Ohio University, Ithaca College, and the University at Buffalo, as well as serving on the faculty of Bard College's Workshop in Language and Thinking. His chapbooks include Versiones Vertiges (Meow Press, 1999), and his poem “Bellerophonic Sonnet” earned a PIP-Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in 2005. He is currently completing a manuscript of poetry entitled “Bellerophonic Letters” and is at work on a critical book on literary form and cultural politics in 20th century literature. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he produces "Conference of the Birds," a weekly podcast of cross-cultural music and poetic form.
**Events require an RSVP as seating is limited due to fire code restrictions. Attending an event without an RSVP may require waiting until all those who have RSVP'd are seated or being turned away if the room has reached capacity. **