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Rachel Blau DuPlessisDraftsDrafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis |
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Biographical note: Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the author of eleven books of poetry; her long poem project, begun in 1986, is collected as Drafts 1-38, Toll, from Wesleyan University Press (2001) as well as this volume. DuPlessis is also known for her innovative essays in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice and the forthcoming Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke, 1990) and co-editor of The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Her critical books include Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge, 2001). DuPlessis has received the Roy Harvey Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize (2002) as a scholar poet. In 2002 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship for Artists.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844710720
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PAPERBACK
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Short
description/annotation: Since 1986, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been writing a long poem in canto-like sections, grouped in nineteen units. The individual poems fold over each other, using repeated elements to construct a sense of memory and traces or reminders of prior statements. Their themes involve history, gender, mourning and hope, all in “socio-twisty” language. Among their themes are awe, astonishment, skepticism, mourning, pleasure.
Main description: This book brings Drafts, the long poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to its mid-point. A polyphonic work, both monumental and provisional, Drafts asks how to represent our sense of direness and ethical crises, the awe, asonishment, skepticism and pleasure: that all this is. This installment of nineteen Drafts is dedicated to its own poetic and political communities, offering these dedications as pledges to transformation out of social rage and out of grief-inflected hope. The book also contains a witty “summary” of all fifty-seven Drafts to date. This book makes clear the ways DuPlessis’ long poem is a midrashic response to the long poems of modernism and the tolls of modernity. She is a poet of polysemy, of negativity, of critique. Of Drafts, Walter Kaladjian remarked, “DuPlessis’ avant-garde procedures are imbricated in an ethicopolitical mode of poetic testimony.” Nathaniel Mackey said that Drafts “affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between.”
Table of contents:
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Excerpt from book: from Draft 41: Of This
Review quote: DuPlessis has created one of the most sustained and magnificent meditations written by a contemporary poet on loss, presence, and the haunting persistence of language to redeem what has vanished. Patrick Pritchett
Review quote: Given the beauty and complexity of these drafts, it’s not much of an axaggeration to say DuPlessis has invented a new way of integrating poetic form and content. Readers get to choose between standing back to stare in awe of the compex formal structure or to step inside and spend hours eyeing the fine detail of each poem up close. Andrew Ervin
Review quote: Drafts is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our time. Ron Silliman
Review quote: What characterizes Drafts 39-57 is the specificity of historical/contemporary cultural and political referents, the density of essayistic allusion and cerebral engagement, and the poems’ insistence on displaying the degree to which they are inflected – but not determined – by a range of compelling axes of identifications or “identities” as they are materially experienced: “woman,” “Jew,” “writer,” all of which seem inseparable from each other and from “thinker.” Maria Damon |
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