Full program video: Roberto Tejada, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 13, 2015
Highlight video clips: "Roberto Tejada reads Oppen's poem, "Eclogue" | Tejada prefaces then relates the story, via Mary Oppen's Meaning a Life, of George Oppen's dream and its interpretation by a Mexican psychologist, that led directly to George resuming writing poetry after many years
Poet, scholar, and art historian Roberto Tejada delivers The Poetry Center's 31st annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture.
Roberto Tejada
Roberto Tejada is author of the poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). An art historian, Tejada has published National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), A Ver: Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and other critical writings on contemporary U.S. and Latino American artists. In Mexico this year, a volume of his selected poems will appear as Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015) with translations into Spanish by poets Alfonso D’Aquino and Gabriel Bernal Granados (Mexico) and Omar Pérez (Cuba). He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston where, as faculty in the Creative Writing Program, he teaches in the English and Art History Departments.
The George Oppen Memorial Lecture
Each late autumn, since 1985 and the initiation of The George Oppen Memorial Lecture series, a poet — or very occasionally a scholar who doesn’t, as a practice, write poetry — has delivered a talk, at the invitation of the The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University. This year's guest lecturer is renowned poet, scholar, and art historian Roberto Tejada, founding editor of the bilingual Spanish-English journal Mandorla, which was instrumental in introducing George Oppen's poetry in translation to Latin American readers of poetry.
The Oppen Memorial Lecture series benefits from the support of the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust. Our gratitude to the late Dorothy "Dottie" Fowler.
Photo: Roberto Tejada, by Hillsman Jackson.