Michael Heller

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Biographical note:  Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. Recent books include Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems, Uncertain Poetries, a collection of his essays, and Earth and Cave, a memoir of Spain in the 60s. Among his many awards are the Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America and grants from the National Endowment, NYFA and The Fund for Poetry.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714407
ISBN:  9781844714407
Author:  Michael Heller
Title:  Speaking the Estranged
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-08
Extent:  152pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  228 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Speaking the Estranged brings together the work by Michael Heller on the distinguished American Objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984), written over the past twenty years since Heller's first book on the Objectivists, Conviction's Net of Branches. These essays cover the range of Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s. Heller's sustained and astute attention to Oppen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1968, illuminates what many consider to be one of the most remarkable, complex and original bodies of work in twentieth-century literature.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Utopocalyptic Moments: Objectivists in the Thirties
“Writing Occurs”: Reflections on Oppen, Zukofsky and Objectivist Poetics
A Mimetics of Humanity: Reading Oppen’s Of Being Numerous
“Knowledge Is Loneliness Turning”: Oppen’s Going Down Middle-Voice
Oppen, Stevens, Wittgenstein: Reflections on the Lyrical and the Philosophical
Speaking the Estranged: Word and Poetics in Oppen’s Poetry
A Note on Oppen’s Selected Letters
“Towards the Incomplete Work”: An Addendum on Oppen’s Daybooks
The Voice of the Impersonal: Oppen and Celan
Encountering Oppen: A Memoir
Works Cited

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Preface


This book collects the majority of my essays on the work of George Oppen written after publication of my 1985 study of the Objectivist poets, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry. These essays further develop aspects of Oppen’s poems and his thinking about poetry and poetics as shown in his letters and notes written across his entire career. They stand, overall, as originally published or presented, but have been updated and corrected where necessary. Reprinted here also is my memoir “Encountering Oppen,” which appeared in my previous collection of essays, Uncertain Poetries (Salt Publishing, 2005), but which I felt belonged as a kind of coda to bring this collection full circle. My introduction, an overview of Oppen’s work, has not appeared before, nor has the essay on his recently published Daybooks.

I was fortunate to have known George and Mary Oppen, to speak personally and correspond with them frequently for many years. I cannot imagine having written poetry or about poetry without the sense of their companionship, a feeling that continues to this day. Other friends, now gone, to whom I owe debts of insight and historical information were Carl Rakosi and Armand Schwerner. My thanks to Linda Oppen for her support and friendship of many years.

I have been aided greatly by the work of other writers. I am indebted to Michael Davidson for his labors on behalf of Oppen’s work. All quotations of the poetry of George Oppen are taken from the recently published New Collected Poems, edited and introduced by Davidson, which brings together the poems of Oppen’s 1975 Collected Poems, his Black Sparrow book, Primitive, along with some twenty pages of poems published in magazines but previously uncollected. Another 37 pages, entitled A Selected Unpublished Poems, are culled from the George Oppen archives at the University of California at San Diego. Davidson rightly justifies these inclusions as deriving from Oppen’s compositional method, his tendency to embed poems in the midst of a kind of textual rubble (NCP xiv) consisting of scratched-out and rewritten words, of phrases and whole poems cut from previous drafts and pasted down over existing texts. These newly found poems give us a more complete idea of Oppen’s working methods; many of them are equal in quality to Oppen’s published work. If a few seem weak or slight, still they help us to understand a difficult poet whose life and career, sketched out in Eliot Weinberger’s memoir-like preface to the New Collected Poems, are curiously truncated by Oppen’s twenty-five years of silence. While I have a few reservations, discussed below, concerning Davidson’s introduction, I want to express my deep gratitude for this book, especially for the meticulous notes Davidson has written to the poems, describing their composition, publication and links to Oppen=s life, his thought and readings of other writers and for Davidson’s restoration of the original spacing and format of Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series. This well-produced and carefully edited collection must be regarded as definitive as well as indicative of Oppen’s importance in contemporary poetry.

I want to thank Rachel Blau DuPlessis for the Selected Letters of George Oppen, another careful labor of love and critical attention without which I could not have written most of the essays included here. My thanks also to Steven Cope, whose edition of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is a major event for the study of Oppen’s work. In addition, I want to express my gratitude for the writings and conversations I have had with other poets and critics, among them Hélène Aji, Jane Augustine, Marcel Cohen, Yves DiManno, Norman Finkelstein, the late Larry and Justine Fixel, Serge Gavronsky, Eric Hoffman, Steven Jaron, Burt Kimmelman, Abigail Lange, Jack Marshall, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Nicholls, Anthony Rudolf, Naomi Schwartz, Mark Scroggins, Hugh Seidman, Eric Selinger, Harvey Shapiro, John Taggart, Nathaniel Tarn, Robert Vas Dias and Henry Weinfield.

Unpublished endorsement :  Michael Heller’s engagement—personally, critically, and poetically—with George Oppen is without parallel. Extending from his early correspondence with Oppen to his groundbreaking book on the Objectivists, Conviction’s Net of Branches, to the acute ethical probing of his own poetry, Heller has attempted to take the measure of Oppen’s achievement from every conceivable angle. This new book, published in the year of Oppen’s centennial, displays the full fruits of one major poet’s encounter with another.

Stephen Fredman, author of A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemma of American Poetry and The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition

Unpublished endorsement :  Not just a great book of literary criticism, Michael Heller’s Speaking the Estranged is an exhilarating examination of those 20th century literary, political, and philosophical currents that have carried us into our tumultuous present. As luminous a critic as he is a poet, Heller renews our engagement with “the mind operating in a marvel which contains the mind,” as George Oppen once put it. Through Oppen, Heller locates us and brings us home. When you finish this book, you won’t want to put it away.

Forrest Gander, poet and author of Eye Against Eye and A Faithful Existence