Round 53

Yusef: "What the Paymaster Said" by Kevin Prufer

Bob: "Twenty-Six Fragments" by George Oppen

This hardly seems fair! Oppen has been dead since at least the mid 1980s. Prufer's prose-poem is clever if a bit obvious. The paymaster is the voice of management offering absurd payments to his employees. I liked it well enough, but how can I compare it with a page or two ripped out of Oppen's notebooks, ranging from the banal to the sublime?

In the play, the actors cry out
But in the poem the words
themselves cry out

Oppen wins it for Creeley on historical interest.

After 53:

16-27-9