SOURCE: “‘Feminine Technologies’: George Oppen Talks at Denise Levertov,” in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 22, No. 3, May-June, 1993, pp. 9-15.

In the following essay, Hatlen suggests Oppen's poem “Technologies” is a response to Denise Levertov's “Who Is at My Window.”

In 1958 George Oppen returned to New York City determined to resume the literary career he had suspended in 1935, when he and his wife Mary joined the Communist Party. But the New York cultural scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s was very different from the one Oppen had left behind in 1935. By 1959, various currents which would later issue in the New Left and the counter-culture of the 1960s were already stirring in New York City. In this paper I want to focus on Oppen's response to one movement which would swell in force throughout the 1960s: the new wave of feminist consciousness, which revived a movement largely dormant...