Education
Harvard University; University of Iowa.
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book
People on Sunday
( "O'Brien's is a poetry that asks for patient attention,...)
"O'Brien's is a poetry that asks for patient attention, and gives back all the void's abundance."—Rain Taxi "Whether in a poem composed using words and phrases from the Patriot Act, a sestina with dauntingly common repeating end words, or in flat-out theory, O'Brien shows himself to be capable of portraying the muddled traffic of life in the Internet age."—Publishers Weekly (starred review for Metropole) In his most autobiographical collection to date, Geoffrey G. O'Brien explores—via the "promise of happiness" in great works of art—the dream of a working freedom not relegated to Sundays. Crossing traditional poetic material with contemporary political struggle, O'Brien captures the complex feelings of the present. Here again just a few minutes To see what we've done with what they let us have. Like spring in Washington, D.C. The way we're taught to imagine days As reprieves from other days, cherries snowing Inexpressiveness, the nation's capital An experience of how it is to be Caught up in pink and white again. Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from University of California Press. He is the co-author (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien (Minus A Press, 2012). O'Brien teaches at UC Berkeley and also for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933517727/?tag=2022091-20
Metropole (New California Poetry)
( Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set...)
Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O’Brien’s poems measure the vague cadence” of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O’Brien’s prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged space of this hybrid form, objects become subjects and sense pivots mid-sentence into song: The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520268873/?tag=2022091-20
Metropole (New California Poetry) by Geoffrey O'brien (2011-03-11)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HCA0PFA/?tag=2022091-20
Green and Gray (New California Poetry)
( Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s second collection documents the ...)
Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s second collection documents the remorse of the senses” that attends each moment of experience, the pain and pleasure of not exiting a world in which injustice and distraction secure every sensual event. Attempting to reestablish experience as something other than complicity, these poems insist on desiring that which is as if it were not,” making poetry out of neighborhood flyers, the Patriot Act, and the poverty of presidential speech. Given this mandate to stay within limited resources, Green and Gray makes a virtue of refusing to abandon them, often relying on an emphatic recirculation of words and phrases to generate its own system complexities. These are poems whose materials remember their former use: the gray of the city and the green it used to be.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520250192/?tag=2022091-20
People on Sunday by Geoffrey G. O'Brien (2013-09-03)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N3MEXRE/?tag=2022091-20
Geoffrey O'Brien
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For the New York City critic and poet, see Geoffrey O'Brien
Educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa, O'Brien has taught at Brooklyn College, The University of Iowa Writers' hop and has been the Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary's College of California and the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently teaches. He also teaches in the Prison University Project at San Quentin. On November 9, 2011, O'Brien suffered a rib injury in an altercation with police, while attending a peaceful protest.
"If O'Brien's poems have a sameness of diction and rhythm that verges on monotonous and impersonal, it's the same sameness of heartbeat and breath, prayer and meditation. It's a poetry that asks for patient attention, and gives back all the void's abundance."
On November 9, 2011, O'Brien took part in Occupy Cal, a demonstration on the Berkeley campus in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. According to reports O'Brien spoke out to a police officer who was hitting a Berkeley student because he would not break his link in a human chain.
The police officer hit O'Brien in the ribs, a reaction he would later call "brutal.".
Works
book
-
People on Sunday
( "O'Brien's is a poetry that asks for patient attention,...)
-
Metropole (New California Poetry)
( Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set...)
-
Green and Gray (New California Poetry)
( Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s second collection documents the ...)
- Metropole (New California Poetry) by Geoffrey O'brien (2011-03-11)
- People on Sunday by Geoffrey G. O'Brien (2013-09-03)
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People on Sunday
