Drafts: Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Precis - Softcover

Duplessis, Rachel Blau

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844710726 ISBN 13: 9781844710720

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Review

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 "Jacket "

Drafts is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our time.--Ron Silliman "Silliman's Blog "

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 "The Philadelphia Inquirer "

This volume continues what Ron Silliman has heralded as "one of the major poetic achievements of our time," an ongoing, open-ended and life-long poetic series, Drafts, in the spirit of Robert Duncan's H.D. Book, Passages and Structure of Rime; bpNichol's Martyrology; and Nathaniel Mackey's fictional F/rom a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate as well as his poetic Songs of the Andoumboulou. In fact it is hard to find something to say about this powerful serial that hasn't already been said, and with eloquence worthy of its subject - often by the poet herself both in the poems and in the many poetics statements this most self-reflexively rigorous poet has disseminated in public space. To wit this beautiful fragment, from "Draft 52: Midrash": an impossible draft of half-built, half-crumbledall-suspicious poetry. --Maria Damon "HOW2 "

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 "How2 "

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1844710726
• ISBN 13: 9781844710720
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 252