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From a Photograph

By George Oppen 1908–1984 George Oppen

Her arms around me—child—

Around my head, hugging with her whole arms,

Whole arms as if I were a loved and native rock,

The apple in her hand—her apple and her father,

and my nose pressed

Hugely to the collar of her winter coat—. There

in the photograph

It is the child who is the branch

We fall from, where would be bramble,

Brush, bramble in the young Winter

With its blowing snow she must have thought

Was ours to give to her.

George Oppen, “From a Photograph” from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Poetry (March 1962).

Biography

"George Oppen," wrote Michael Adams in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, "had one of the most unusual careers of any American poet." Oppen was one of the chief exponents of Objectivism, a school of poetry that emphasized simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme. He established the movement with William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukosfky, and other poets in the early 1930s. In 1932 Oppen helped found the . . .

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