Joel oppenheimer biography

Reviewing a biography of Oppenheimer, Don’t Touch the Poet (1999), Stephan Delbos noted, “His great theme was love: Requited and otherwise, domestic and wild. The poetry combines tenderness with the chatty intellectualism of the New York avant-garde, by way of Black Mountain’s Occam-sharp line breaks and diction.”

When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he [Oppenheimer] had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast".

In the autumn of 1928, Oppenheimer visited Paul Ehrenfest's institute at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, where he impressed by giving lectures in Dutch, despite having little experience with the language. There he was given the nickname of Opje, later anglicized by his students as "Oppie".

Poet and newspaper columnist Joel Oppenheimer grew up in Yonkers, New York, and was educated at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and Black Mountain College, where he studied with poet Charles Olson. In his poetry, Oppenheimer explored domesticity and intimacy, using line breaks to create tension.