"Things explain each other, not themselves." How true....of all of us, but especially of Oppen.I love the late reading style - the voice weak but well suited to the run-on digressive, seemingly narrative (but not), lazy-toned yet ethically sharp poetics. Listen to the 23-minute reading he gave at the 92nd Street Y in 1967. Dazzling - moving and beautiful. He reads "Of Being Numerous."
Perhaps the most moving of Oppen's statements or readings is his introduction to Charles Reznikoff, before a reading by "Rezzi" in 1974:
[Reznikoff] had bought a letterpress, and everyday, every evening after work, Reznikoff set two lines of verse, teaching himself to set verse, as he worked at it. And this way he printed all of his first books by himself. We, Mary and I that is, have carried these poems in our minds through everything that has happened to us since we were nineteen or twenty years old. I don't know of any poems more pure, or more purely spoken, or more revelatory. I professed before, I think the young of my generation were luckier than the youngest in this audience, in that we had to go searching for our own tradition and our own poets. What we found was Reznikoff, and he's played — I cannot say how important he has been to us, as I think he will be to you, and this is what I wanted to say to Charles Reznikoff when he said to me, 'George, I think we all do the best we can.'
(The whole text of the introduction is here.)
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
