Geoffrey G. O'Brien

For the New York City critic and poet, see Geoffrey O'Brien

Geoffrey G. O'Brien (May 10, 1969) is an American poet. Educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa, O'Brien has taught at Brooklyn College, The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop 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.

Works online

• "from Metropole" The Offending Adam, Issue 22
• "Logic of Confession" at No: a journal of the arts.
• "Poem Beginning to End," Boston Review, September/October 2009
• "Mixed Mode," Poets.org

Criticism

• An essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot.
• "Keeping Company," an essay which explores the work of poet Michael Palmer
• A Critical Response to John Ashbery's "Clepsydra"
• "The Left Margin" a talk on Whitman and Ashbery

Works

• People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013)
• Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien (Minus A Press, 2013)
• Metropole (University of California Press, 2011)
• The Guns and Flags Project (University of California Press, 2002)
• Green and Gray (University of California Press, 2007)
• 2A (Quemadura, 2006; collaboration with poet Jeff Clark)
• Hesiod (The Song Cave (chapbook), 2010)
• Poem with No Good Lines (Hand Held Editions (chapbook), 2010)

Review

"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."

Political protest

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."

External links

• "Gillian Hamel interviews Geoffrey G. O'Brien," Studio One Reading, June 4, 2009
• A link to 2A.
• Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poem "Six Political Criteria" in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts (24.1).
• O'Brien's books at UC Press.

• Mixed Mode- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
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• Jesse Kornbluth: The Police Riot at Berkeley: If They'll Beat a Poet Laureate, Will They Kill a Student?
• "A review of The Guns and Flags Project", Rain Taxi
• "Poet Geoffrey O’Brien joins the Occupy Berkeley protest fray"