Rachel Blau DuPlessis

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Biographical note:  Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet-critic, whose on-going long poem project, begun in 1986, is collected here in Torques: Drafts 58-76, as well as in Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan U.P., 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnnumbered: Precis (Salt Publishing, 2004). DuPlessis was awarded a residency at Bellagio in 2007; she was the recipient of a Pew Fellowship for Artists and of the Roy Harvey Pearce/ Archive for New Poetry Prize, both in 2002.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713349
ISBN:  9781844713349
Author:  Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Title:  Torques
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Oct-07
Extent:  156pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  234 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 18.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Twisted, knotted, struck by events and emotions at our historical moment, these Drafts register and produce torques—exaltation and tension, torsion and force, in their symphonic and bantering surges. In this book, DuPlessis transposes Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Pound and Rilke; she writes doggerel, a lexicon, dialogues, a mini-manifesto, and lyrics from a spirit voice. This book continues the ambitious long poem project that Ron Silliman has called “one of the major poetic achievements of our time.” Drafts, begun in 1986, manifests thematic and emotional investments centering on loss, struggle, and hope, on the unsayable and “anguage”—the language of anguish. Two main formal and structural principles center this work, repetition and the fold. The works repeat themes and images throughout, a recontextualization of materials, a building of traces, and a repetitive repositioning of images and narrative that also suggests both the waywardness of experience and a pensive responsiveness to what happens. The works are organized on a periodicity of nineteen, what DuPlessis calls “the fold.” Each new draft corresponds in some sensuous, formal, intellectual, allusive way to specific “donor” drafts. This tactic creates a widely spaced recurrence among the poems, and a chained or meshed linkage whose regularity is both predictable and suggestive, textured with malleable and porous internal relationships. The key genre animating Drafts is a strategy from Hebrew interpretive practices called midrash. Midrash is a continuous and generations-long commentary on sacred texts. Drafts as a whole project alludes to—but secularizes—this genre of serious commentary, spiritual investment, and continuous gloss.

Meet the author:

Table of contents:
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Grid of Drafts
Draft 58: In Situ
Draft 59: Flash Back
Draft 60: Rebus
Draft 61: Pyx
Draft 62: Gap
Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul
Draft 64: Forward Slash
Draft 65: That
Draft 66: Scroll
Draft 67: Spirit Ditties
Draft 68: Threshold
Draft 69: Sentences
Draft LXX: Lexicon
Draft 71: Headlines, with Spoil
Draft 72: Nanifesto
Draft 73: Vertigo
Draft 74: Wanderer
Draft 75: Doggerel
Draft 76: Work Table With Scale Models
Notes

Excerpt from book:  

Draft 65: That

Foreword

Oku—farthest-within-dead-end place
no—possessive
hosomichi—path-narrow road.
“Back roads to far towns.”
But the other translator
contested this, declaring his
“Narrow path to the interior” was best.

o

Road, water, mud rock weathered off,
portal in mist,
the fact of a long walk,
to see no telling what.
We were just going to talk.
Some lines, an errant sort, go here and there,
and that was it.

Dotted line around an air in space
there was once
someone there,
that
particular unquenchable
rounded genial and hurt
helpful worn humane

one;
and the space wherein he was
kept filling up with him
just the way one knows
in life
and so it goes.

But the water got down to a dangerous level
like the dark of photographs.

And now a dotted line, a moebius flash
one wakes and asks

what was that falls out
of range, what was that

event at edge of memory
left such a dotted line around a place.

Now you can come back, someone says,
a wish that cannot be fulfilled.

Now you can come back;
the joke is done. Trickster that.

It is not hiding; it is not a mistake.
It is simple, an unassimilable fact.

A moment: one sees “him” and
this must be accounted “ghost,”

another status, diffusing points
that even multiple lines and posts
cannot link.

A wave, a cryptic half
lip half-turned smile, an out-
line of.
He was given a bye
on the rest of his life;
he passed it by
with a wave
unwillingly, but there it was.

The stumbled byway,
split and split again.

The newly-dead try to say something. “Like poetry.”
They have information. They know what they are feeling

but no words. There are no words
they say for it.

Something goes speechless, or it can’t
fully explain itself,

it uses foreign phrases “comme ci, comme ca”
and “que sera, sera.” It is debonair

like this, and not. It sickens and loses
slow and fast, it swells or sinks,

the body formers itself, as a former body.
Hands don’t do the same or what they did

can’t count on them and
breath, well, breath

goes slowly in the night, and here obstructions grow,
blackness lengthens and there are no

objects and nothing stands
in the way, in that one way

except carafe or crumpled sheet gleaming “normal!”
“Here!” Or in another tiny dawn,

that place: of its blankness,
of plenitude and unsortable impact.

Uprising is trying to invest words with alterest sdstated
altered states I mean

of meaning,
hopes and rages funnel into

one strange word. In Stranger change of scale.

That encapsulates narrative,

that uncanny opening layers everything.

Who knows about completeness?

That is a fragment. Like everything else.



January-March 2004

Previous review quote:  True to their name, Drafts, the poems accent provisionality, risk, the absence of guarantee, delving into words and word parts with a heteroglossic verve that seems vengeance at times. With recourse to an astonishing range of techniques and material devices, formal concern as inclination and qualm, these poems register, lament, react to and wrestle with erosions on multiple fronts — psychic, social, historical, somatic … They affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between.”

Nathaniel Mackey
American Poet

Previous review quote:  In Drafts, DuPlessis combines narrative and lyric elements, crosses genres (documentary, report, ode, elegy, autobiography, midrash), creates palimpsests, uses gloss, creolisation, over-writing, multiple fonts, punning, and word-hinges, all of which contribute to a sense of the text as being at once inclusive (polyvocal, multi-cultural, and symphonic) as well as filled with gaps, hesitant, and conflicted. Blacked-out patches of text in “Draft 5: Gap,” “Draft 52: Midrash,” and “Draft 68: Threshold” remind the reader of the overlay of social censorship that regulate such tracings of the past.”

Ann Vickery
Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions

Previous review quote:  More than a craft, the poet’s job of work for DuPlessis assumes the ethical demands of a ‘vocation.’ Such a calling, moreover, borders on the priestly, speaking as it does here out of the ‘ossuarial shadows’ that connote literally the crypt where the bones of the dead are interred. Not unlike Wallace Stevens’s poet as ‘metaphysician in the dark,’ DuPlessis’s authorial personal is committed to working conditions that demand a special form of attention to the via negativa wherein is revealed ‘[n]othing that is not there and the nothing that is.’

Walter Kalaidjian
The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past

Previous review quote:  DuPlessis asks us to take seriously Olson’s call for the poetry-page as a wide-open field on which historical, theoretical, social and aesthetic problematics unfurl, twist, evolve and mutate dialectically and/or dialogically, bouncing off each other in collision or play, interlocking in agonistic intensity or affectionate rapprochement. Drafts (the series and the present volume under review) is one manifestation of that Duncian meadow to which we are permitted to return as often as we can handle the immersion it compels … DuPlessis is after nothing less than a “dolce stil nuovo” for “women’s poetry” -one that is “outside gender” but indebted to the insights of the women’s movement in which she participated. A new form. New forms, unpredictable, that inch into being as the poems find their appropriate forms … Adorno and his tortured dialectic, especially in the wake of the European Jewish genocide, also become interlocutors as the poet searches for rigorous but supple means of reckoning with history and the wayward intellect. Knots, quipus and other textile figures abound as models for poetry, for language and for thinking; so does terrain, textual or terrestrial, verdant or menacing, florally bucolic (“Draft 40: One Lyric”) or gutted by an imperial warfare (“Draft 47: Printed Matter”) in which the poet, as US citizen, is implicated.

Maria Damon
HOW2