The other night we celebrated George Oppen's 100th birthday. Tom Devaney and Rachel Blau DuPlessis organized the proceedings. Ten of us spoke for ten minutes each. Fifty minutes, a break for food and wine, and then another fifty minutes. It went fast. I could have listened to people to Tom Mandel and Ann Lauterbach and the others for hours more. You can have a look at the program printed for the occasion. And you can already go to the PennSound page with links to audio recordings of each of the 10-minute talks. My own talk was about the poem "Myth of the Blaze." Here is the recording of that talk. And here is the poem read aloud by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Here is the text of the poem.
In the previous entry I've presented a slightly revised version of that talk, entitled "Oppen's Antifascism: Guilt in 'Myth of the Blaze.'"
"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 
