SOURCE: An interview in Contemporary Literature, Vol. X, No. 2, Spring, 1969, pp. 155-77.

In the following interview, Dembo questions Oppen about his life and his poetry.

In February 1931 Poetry, under the acting editorship of a young man highly recommended to Harriet Monroe by Ezra Pound, issued an “Objectivist” number. As that young man, Louis Zukofsky, tells it, the term “Objectivist” was little more than a response to Miss Monroe's insistence that he produce a movement and a label to go with it. And Zukofsky is here generally supported by three other poets to whom the term has been applied, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi. According to Reznikoff, the main reason a group formed at all was economic, and The Objectivist Press, which grew out of Oppen's To Publishers, was organized simply to facilitate publication of its members and their friends. The fact remains that Zukofsky did write...