Michael Davidson

Contemporary American poet and literary critic

Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson was born in Oakland, California in 1944, and has served as Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, since 1988. He has written eight books of poetry, including: Analogy of the Ion (1988), Post Hoc (1990), and The Arcades (1999).

Davidson has also contributed criticism to the fields of disabilities studies and gender studies. His work, Concerto for the Left Hand (2008), explores impacts of disability through various artistic mediums, from literature to visual art and photography.

He is the editor of George Oppen, New Collected Poems, published in 2002 by New Directions.

cover image of the book New Collected Poems of George Oppen

New Collected Poems of George Oppen

by George Oppen

Edited by Eliot Weinberger

With a contribution by Michael Davidson and Eliot Weinberger

George Oppen’s New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poet’s books published in his lifetime (1908–84), as well as his previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, whose writing was championed by Ezra Pound when it was first published by The Objectivist Press in the 1930s, has become one of America’s most admired poets. In 1969 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Of Being Numerous, which The New Yorker recently said is “unmatched by any book of American poetry since.” The New Collected Poems is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction about the poet’s life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as keys to references in the poems. The award-winning essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offers a personal remembrance of the poet in his preface, “Oppen Then.”

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