21 Poems

Here put your head, that desires nothing except familiarly: There your feet, bending your knees so that, bare (I remember from childhood), they would smell salt-sweet. —from 21 Poems

The Objectivist Press published George Oppen’s 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...