Saturday, December 17 - 6:00 pm PS to 7:30 pm PST
Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), San Francisco
Frances Richard's complete lecture and responses to the audience
Video highlights: Frances Richard on the quarrel between George Oppen and Denise Levertov | Richard on the “effeminate and effeminizing” characterizations Oppen opposes to “truth-seeking art" | Richard on Oppen and John Milton
Video highlights: Frances Richard on the quarrel between George Oppen and Denise Levertov | Richard on the “effeminate and effeminizing” characterizations Oppen opposes to “truth-seeking art" | Richard on Oppen and John Milton
"The Mind's Own Place and Feminine Technologies: George Oppen and Possibilities of the Political"
The Poetry Center's annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, presented each year since 1985, was given this December by poet, scholar, and art writer Frances Richard. The lecture series is supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.
The Poetry Center's annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, presented each year since 1985, was given this December by poet, scholar, and art writer Frances Richard. The lecture series is supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.
Frances Richard is the author of Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003), as well as the chapbooks Shaved Code (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) and Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008). She writes frequently about contemporary art and is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005). She has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and an Editors Prize for Reviewing from Poetry magazine; currently she is editing a volume of essays titiled Joan Jonas Is On Our Mind (Wattis Institute). She teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism and later moved to Mexico to avoid the repressions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry — and to the United States — in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Early and late in his life, Oppen lived in San Francisco, where he befriended many of the younger poets active in the area.
The George Oppen Memorial Lecture, established at The Poetry Center in 1985, generally addresses the work of Oppen and his contemporaries. An edition of the Selected George Oppen Memorial Lectures, edited by Michael Cross, is scheduled for publication in 2017 by the National Poetry Foundation, in Orono, Maine.
Event contact:
The Poetry Center
Event email:
poetry@sfsu.edu
Event phone:
415-338-2227
Event sponsor:
The Poetry Center