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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Oppen

Born in New Rochelle, New York, on April 24, 1908, Oppen was a key figure in the Objectivist movement of the 1930s and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for Of Being Numerous, after taking a twenty year break from writing...
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If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen

that smoke would remain the forever savage country poem's light borrowed light of the landscape and one's footprints praise from distance in the close crowd all that is strange the sources the wells the poem begins neither in word nor meaning but the small selves haunting us in the stones and is less always than that help me I am of that people the grass blades touch and touch in their small distances the poem begins
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From New Collected Poems by George Oppen, copyright © 1978 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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