21 Poems

The Objectivist Press published George Oppens first book Discrete Series, a collection of thirty-one short poems with a preface by Ezra Pound, in 1934. Four years earlier, the twenty-one-year-old poet had sent an unbound sheaf of typewritten poems with the title 21 Poems hand-written in pencil on the first page to the poet Louis Zukofsky, who forwarded them on to Pound in Paris. These poems, suffused with Oppens love for his young bride Mary, as well as his love of sailing, are strikingly different from what theyd eventually become in Discrete Series. The scholar David B. Hobbs recently found 21 Poems buried in Ezra Pounds papers at Yales Beinecke Library, and they appear here as a collection of their own for the first time.