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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). A poem from this latter book appears in Best American Poetry 2004.
In 2006, two books of her innovative essays were published: Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work on gender and poetics, along with a reprint of the ground-breaking The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, both from University of Alabama Press. 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.
Among her critical works are a book on modern U.S. poetry from Cambridge University Press — Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934, studies of the poet H.D., and the edited Selected Letters of George Oppen. She is the author of the classic Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Among her co-edited book are The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics and The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation which Rutgers University Press has republished in 2007. Her poetry has been translated into French, Italian and Finnish. DuPlessis teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her website is http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/duplessis.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844717477
ISBN: 9781844717477
Author: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Title: Pitch: Drafts 77-95
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 22-Mar-10
Extent: 196pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight: 294 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 9.99
Price: USD 15.95
Rights: World
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description/annotation: Pitch is a skeptical monument, tracking an encounter with an edge we might pitch over, with the pitch dark of our time, with our lurching desires to do the necessary work of seeing and understanding. This book manifests one of the more distinctive ethical-aesthetic practices in contemporary poetry.
Main description: Pitch: Drafts 77-95 is a skeptical monument built and reassembled by a continuous folding over itself—tracking an encounter with an edge we might pitch over, with the pitch dark of our time, with our lurching desires to do the necessary work of seeing and understanding.
Anchored by two major serial poems proposing a poetics of the trace and responding to a key work of George Oppen, DuPlessis continues in this fifth book of nineteen poems working with themes of awe and grief, of confrontation with the world as it is and the projection, from the shards, of chips and gleams of another world.
The work is multi-generic, with a dazzling range from proverbs, fragments and interrogations to lists and open-page works. Drafts embodies and exfoliates a poetics of critique inside poetry, producing one of the more distinctive ethical-aesthetic practices in contemporary poetry. Other highlights of this collection are a two-poem dialogue with a work of Ingeborg Bachmann, a rewriting of a work of S.T. Coleridge, and an investigation of the meaning of writing that incorporates a serio-comic playlet between R and her Pen.
Table of contents:
Draft 77: Pitch Content
Draft 78: Buzz Track
Draft 79: Mass Observation
Draft 80: Envoi
Draft 81: Gap
Draft 82: Hinge
Draft 83: Listings
Draft 84: Juncture
Draft 85: Hard Copy
Draft 86: Scarpbook
Draft 87: Trace Elements
Draft 88: X-Posting
Draft 89: Interrogation
Draft XC: Excess
Draft 91: Proverbs
Draft 92: Translocation
Draft 93: Romantic Fragment Poem
Draft 94: Mail Art
Draft 95: Erg
Notes View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample ( KB)
Excerpt from book:
Draft 88: X-Posting
free variation on “Keine Delikatessen”
by INGEBORG BACHMANN
X at that place where there
are long tables and platters of food.
Some throwing selves eagerly
into the banquet of engorgement.
There was patent appetite, was simply
wanting more, as if innocently,
were self-fed patches of avidity,
fashions of hysterical attraction
to largesse. To largeness.
Ate through that buffet, falling
on the array as if we’d never eaten.
Plate after plate — such fancy things,
smoky, salt or sweetened,
crunchy, costly, lavish.
Because this did not nourish
we stuffed and ate the more. Oh yes.
And then the shock.
To have ingested this as such
To have swallowed it down.
Without delicacies, without delicacy,
no rhetoric either
and certainly without refinement
I stand before you
foreign and distant,
(although near and constant)
wondering
whether any part of this is worth it.
Questioning
whether I feel anything
I can talk about, and
whether thinking about feeling,
were I to bring myself to “do” it,
to make that effort,
is particularly worth it.
What is the force of my conviction?
I have no appeal in the court
in which I am standing.
I seem to be sentenced by the sentence.
So what’s the compulsion makes me
begin this debate yet again,
either to stuff it to Metaphor
forever, or to stuff it full
of Metaphor, tinkering around
with such skill in finding likenesses
as once I might have gotten praised for.
Who was that self?
It isn’t as if this “I” had gotten nowhere,
is it?
Should I dabble onto easy easels
all the pretty little pictures
that used to give such pleasure,
almond blossom petals as my brush?
Mandel-baum, Mandel-stam, Mandel-stein, Mandel-brot.
Almonds
are motivated by the names of people I remember.
Once I was malleable as marzipan — or
rather, I let them think so.
But Who are you? I said to me.
What do you do it for?
Should I continue bending Syntax
to these uses? What uses? Such scintillation
I could certainly still produce:
with all the skill in my sparkle kit
so you may admire
my hyper-sensitive yet completely
idiomatic performance.
What a showing I used to make!
But what could I do with it?
What should I do about it?
Who is that self that ever wanted to?
Am I the one making the work
that seemed endlessly
to flow, bubbling, babbling
Pavlovianly
whenever someone bonged the bell
called “Poetry.”
Who cares about “Poetry”
after hours at the bus stop
when the dragged-out, dogged ones
with their bulky shopping bags and swollen legs
have the bus lowered for them?
Angry
Resigned
Disempowered
Making do amid this Schande
Murky near and murky far.
Disruption, Hopelessness, Malfeasance, Fear.
Isn’t it plausible to feel
impure, baffled, resistant to “the literary,”
ensnared and burdened, split
into resistance and identification,
with chronic entrapment, panic, the incurable,
with fixed-income poverty, terminated benefits, with all the
Costs of Living revealed to me?
So should I consider
that the Words I was called to write
help others? Was I going to be a Helper?
This thought seemed as bad as all the others.
Was this some Rhetorical Bureaucracy of
Social Worker tasks?
Hardly.
It was costing me an arm and a leg,
an eye and an ear, precisely that
eye I suddenly saw with,
that ear they all said I had
my beautiful pitch
(but my ears actually hurt), that
leg, that broken leg (and spent eight weeks
on crutches
and was disabled instead of being “normal”
whatever means “normal” with its mouthful of Words —)
— should I try to do some good?
There are plenty more pleasurable paths
for me to take in writing,
But these seem to be ploys only,
defensive, decorative, deflecting.
No sentences can be made this way.
Sound founders, kitschy gabble.
So do I have to continue?
I feel shelterless,
I feel that the stakes have changed
and I can’t catch up.
And then I could not say one little word.
And felt compelled
to rip up the page and turn from these pronouns:
I? you? we? Who cares about them!
Who cares how they are linked!
Push them over a cliff!
Which then would leave me with nothing
and with no one
in this reckless space called
no where.
Nevertheless.
What is the consequence of responsibility?
Where is mine?
My side of it all, this itself,
you could gloss,
has made me overwhelmingly forlorn.
I’m torn on these barbed questions.
Whatever I’ve said —
take it all as a Loss.
JUNE-JULY, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2007
Unpublished endorsement: Reading Rachel Blau DuPlessis, I am immediately engaged with the breadth of an American “now” that is possible to inhabit, a public rhetoric of habitation of space and —dare I say it— meaning, that is intimate with the reader: questioning the structure from inside, the structures of poem and those of being, of being one and numerous, of being woman and numerous, of having a voice raised and lexicon numerous. Of lifting a pen relentless. Her Pitch absorbs light not to deaden it but to give off a radiance of language that is ours, that we can take on, that I do take on. Here there is a music and variousness of form and address, there is democracy as action, and a mind passionately alive in our my century. And, may I add: the fun of it. Sheer mind is being the fun of it! (Excess explored here too. Where excess is numerousness, and the numerous, is an intimacy too.) Erin Mouré Unpublished endorsement: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ scholarly and personal investigations into associative memories, sonic word-links, letter by letter relays, and the multi-layered knowledges and surprises of language continue to inspire the rich and crucial meanderings of her ambitious poetic project. Dig into this well-pitched, finely patched ensemble of pieces. Caroline Bergvall Unpublished endorsement: One of the most ambitious undertakings by an American poet, Drafts is, at any given moment, a political poem, a philosophic autobiography, a compelling midrash on its exemplary ancestors, a watchful but playful refashioning of its own prior moments. Boldly snatching its title from Pound, its continual formal inventiveness furnishes a most necessary corrective to the epic authoritarianism of The Cantos. It is, at all points, a courageous and witty struggle to open modernism up to feminism, or, more broadly, to imagine how a truly ethical culture might sound. Bob Perelman |
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