A Public Quality

George Oppen – Ballad (1’18”), from Of Being Numerous. Text, courtesy Languagehat. About Swan’s Island. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, writing about “Ballad” for Big Bridge. More of DuPlessis’s dialog with Oppen, as presented at Eric Baus’s To The Sound. • One of the tracks on a tape from Robert Creeley’s archive (4’16”), newly available on PennSound. The tape opens with Oppen’s remarks, clearly in medias res, on Paris and an unnamed reviewer who inspired his “Epigram: I have been insulted in St. Peter’s” (New Collected Poems 297). He then reads (at 0’48”) “Ballad” (NCP 207-08) and (at 2’25”) “Power, the Enchanted World” (NCP 204-06).