#georgeoppenmemoriallecture

The Poetry Center presents Divya Victor, delivering the 39th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. We are grateful and excited to welcome poet, scholar, editor, and educator Divya Victor for this latest manifestation in a forty-year-long opportunity to address and awaken the possibilities of poetic thinking in the vicinity of poet George Oppen and peers, opening routes toward inheriting, reinterpreting, and transforming such work and its legacy. Please join us in downtown Berkeley. The George Oppen Memorial Lecture is supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust. 

• "Whether it could be lake / Or fog": Reading the Scenic in a Time of Rubble
  Divya Victor reads George Oppen's and Charles Reznikoff's treatments of landscapes against those of Robert Duncan, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop to consider how Objectivist approaches to space and place offer us ways of imagining kithships across geographic and identitarian borders.

NOTE: This event follows Victor reading from her poetry, then joining in conversation with Tonya M. Foster at 2:00 pm (with an early dinner/late lunch break scheduled from 4:00–6:00 pm). 

This event is free and open to the public.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books, winner of PEN America Open Book Award and the Kinglsey Tufts Poetry Award); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays  (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2.

Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada).

She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. Photo by Hannah Ensor. More at divyavictor.com

Related event

Undisciplining the Fields, Divya Victor reading and in conversation with Tonya M. Foster

Audio and Video: George Oppen at The Poetry Center

Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen: February 19, 1963

George Oppen: February 21, 1968

George Oppen: October 29, 1969

Robert Duncan and George Oppen: February 22, 1973

Charles Reznikoff (introduction by George Oppen): March 21, 1974

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.
• Masks are requested for those attending in person.

Join us, either in person or via live-stream video, for the 37th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, delivered this year by poet and scholar Ariel Resnikoff. The title of Resnikoff's talk — “Among the Heaps of Brick and Plaster Lies”: Toward a Poetics of Translingual Refuse — comes from a line by Oppen's friend and contemporary Charles Reznikoff, in one of many poems he read at this 1974 occasion when Oppen introduced him for The Poetry Center: Charles Reznikoff: March 21, 1974. Resnikoff will also be reading his own poems on this visit, two nights earlier at the same location, together with poet 최 Lindsay | Lindsay Choi. The East Bay Media Center is a short walk west from the Downtown Berkeley BART station. 

The George Oppen Memorial Lecture is supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.

Ariel Resnikoff is a writer, translator, editor and educator. His most recent works include the poetry collection, Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020), the chapbook, raisin in every bite (Furniture Press, 2022), and with Jerome Rothenberg, the translingual epistolary collaboration, A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021). His poetry and essays have been published widely and appear or are forthcoming in Boundary 2, Golden Handcuffs Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Dibur Journal, Caesura Magazine and Full Stop Quarterly. Ariel is a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and prose, and his own writing has been translated into and published in German, Russian, Spanish and French. He has taught poetry, translation, creative non-fiction and multilingual diaspora writing at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (University of Pennsylvania), and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2020 he was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Translingual Poetics.

Related event: 

최 Lindsay | Lindsay Choi and Ariel Resnikoff, at East Bay Media Center

George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff at The Poetry Center:

Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen: February 19, 1963

George Oppen: February 21, 1968

George Oppen: October 29, 1969

Robert Duncan and George Oppen: February 22, 1973

Charles Reznikoff: March 21, 1974

Recent Oppen Lectures: 

Chris Nealon, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 11, 2021

Erica Hunt, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 12, 2020

Tyrone Williams, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 6, 2019

David Hobbs, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 2, 2017

Frances Richard, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 17, 2016

Roberto Tejada, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 12, 2015

Introduced by Brandon Brown

The George Oppen Memorial Lecture is supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

We are delighted to host poet and scholar Chris Nealon to deliver the 36th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Nealon's subject will be "George Oppen and the Future." Brandon Brown will introduce Nealon, with the event supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.

…Look around you now        and ask yourself

Which of these—

                The innovators, profit-makers, the ones behind high walls,

                                The ones who are planning for the great catastrophes—

                Or the ones with no ability to plan,

                Who live from hour to hour, year to year,

                                In whom terror waits to be uncurdled,

                Who live in the great wide world—

Which of these will be the victorious ones?

Nobody knows.

—Chris Nealon, from “The Victorious Ones”

Chris Nealon is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020) as well as two books of literary criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as three earlier books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.

Related event:

Chris Nealon and Stephanie Young, reading and in conversation

Recent Oppen Lectures:

Erica Hunt, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 12, 2020

Tyrone Williams, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 6, 2019

David Hobbs, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 2, 2017

Frances Richard, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 17, 2016

Roberto Tejada, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 12, 2015

George Oppen at The Poetry Center:

Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen: February 19, 1963

George Oppen: February 21, 1968

George Oppen: October 29, 1969

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

(415) 338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center