Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet-critic, whose long poem project, Drafts, begun in 1986, is collected in several book-length instalments. These include Pitch: Drafts 77-95 as well as Torques: Drafts 58-76, Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnnumbered: Précis and Drafts 1-38, Toll. In 2006, two books of her innovative essays were published: Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work on gender and poetics, along with the ground-breaking The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717583
ISBN:  9781844717583
Author:  Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Title:  The Collage Poems of Drafts
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  30-Mar-11
Extent:  84pp
Height:  254 mm
Width:  178 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  126 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 17.99
Price:  USD 19.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Collage Poems of Drafts are two sequenced works for reading and looking that move back and forth across the porous border between language and image. These mixed media constructions join the whole long poem project by DuPlessis with a particular flair for juxtaposition and evocativeness beyond and within language.

Main description:  Rachel Blau DuPlessis has, to cite Walter Benjamin, “an edgy attraction to history’s material residues.” This has been one motivation of Drafts as a decade-long project, and it is a central motivation for The Collage Poems of Drafts. This book consists of two sequenced mixed-media works for reading and looking that move back and forth across the porous border between language and image. Draft 94: Mail Art alludes to the international collage exchanges send by the post; Draft CX: Primer examines the suggestiveness of the alphabet as one baseline of language and poetry, one method of making signs. Both works suggest the transport of daily life. These collages are acts of making, layering, and evoking by juxtaposition. They are cryptic, gnomic, even partly narrative, but as a whole they announce her fundamental commitment to juxtaposition—via syntax and segment in the poetry, and via image and color in the collages. They produce actualized metaphor, with talismanic signage, gnomic language, color, script, string—a thread of suggestive meanings set in play. These works are part of the bricolaging, anti-monumental sensibility of the work as a whole. They glean, they unpack and layer, they deturn images, they rescue and reframe the debris.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Mail Art
Draft 94: Mail Art
Introduction
Endnotes
Primer
Draft CX: Primer

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (934 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

This book has a backstory. Because of financial and production constraints, Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (also from Salt Publishing in 2010) could only include the black and white sections of “Draft 94: Mail Art.” “Draft CX: Primer” (entirely in color) is part of my next book, the sixth in the Drafts series. The two works published together here as collage poems thus make a bridge between those two books. A publication grant from the Pew Foundation facilitated the appearance of both works as I intended them, in both color and black & white. I am deeply grateful to the Pew Foundation in every way, as well as to Salt Publishing for the honor of this special hybrid presentation, on the model of the artist’s book. The Collage Poems of Drafts would have been impossible without this support.

The conception and some of “Mail Art” was accomplished in February 2007 on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that allowed me to work at Bellagio, Italy for a month. The collages and poems were completed at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina (2008-09). I extend grateful thanks to Phillip Barron of the National Humanities Center, for his technical help with the final and web presentation of this poem. I am very beholden to him for his help and for his insightful commitment to this project. In addition, to scan my work to go into the final version of this book as a whole, I received interested and expert help from the staff at the Instructional Support Center at Temple University, notably Peter Hanley. “Draft 94: Mail Art” originally appeared in Jacket Magazine 37; for this and many other manifestations of his support, I am quite grateful to John Tranter, the editor. “Draft CX: Primer” was composed during the summer of 2009. A few pages of “Draft CX: Primer” have been published in Beautiful Navigator and in Viz: Inter-Arts in 2010 and 2011.

Unpublished endorsement:  In sight, in sound, Rachel Blau DuPlessis returns us to the site of language where "the sun hums with a million tones, solar max in meets and bounds" and the pleasure of struggle struggles.

Susan Howe

Unpublished endorsement:  With DuPlessis’s Collage Poems, readers are pulled into the alphabetic and antialphabetic matrix of Drafts as analog travelers “from dot to dot and mite to mite”: where words fail, swelling the circuits of correspondence, pleasure of color, motility, texture going viral. English: open here.

Jennifer Scappettone