Rachel Blau DuPlessis

RBD

Born New York 1941

Studied at Barnard College and at Columbia

Poet, essayist, critic, scholar, professor

Since 1986: a long poem, Drafts

“social philology”: how language resonates of social, cultural and political relationships, how poetic language reflects, represents and criticizes these issues

DRAFTS

On-going, open-ended, serial poem

Self-reflexively rigorous poet: what she says cannot be contained in the lyric form

Combine: Western poetryJewish experienceFeminist cultureUS politics

DRAFTSSTRUCTURE: folding spirals of 20 (see grid, p.35)

Structural features:

Echoes and allusions: to one's own poems, to other's, to other texts, to other cultural objects, etc. > exploration of difference and freedom

Specificity of historical and cultural referents

Density of allusion and intellectual engagement

Insistence on a range of mobile identifications and identities: “Jew”, “woman”, “American”, “writer”, etc.

Revision

Resorting to Midrash

Midrash

Midrash (Hebrew: מדרש) is a Hebrew term for the stories told by Jewish rabbinic sages to explain

passages in the Bible.

Midrash is a method of interpreting biblical stories. It fills in gaps left in the biblical narrative regarding

events and personalities that are only hinted at.

The purpose of midrash was to resolve problems in the interpretation of difficult passages of the text

of the Hebrew Bible.

DRAFTS' genres

“Selva oscura” : poetry itself, a mix of genres = documentary, report, elegy, autobiography, lyric, meditation, midrash…

Historiography that is not linear

Narrative that is not reductive and melodramatic

Poetry that is not 'pretty' or triumphalist

> polyvocality

(see Intro. p.8)

DRAFTS' themesLoss

Mourning

Language's powerlessness in telling what is most necessary

The persistence of language to redeem what is vanished

Time as circular, non-linear

Memory

Shoah

Women's marginality and empowernment

The dispossessed

US's tragic debacle

Translation as a space of reinvention

EACH DRAFT• 16: time, remembering and forgetting

• 17: witnessing the Shoah

• 36: translation and the unsayable

• 42: translating and re-writing the self

• 52: Shoah and poetry (useless decoration or means of cherishing memory?)

• 60: the riddle of living

• 72: playing around with the manifesto style

• 88: poverty and poetry

• 98: the soul-child-muse

DRAFTS' style

• Recurring motives:

– Swimming (walking, working, labouring...)

– Eating (drinking, nurturing...)

– Display of disparate objects (garbage, litter...)

– The voice/s (screams, sounds…)

– Light (darkness, translucence...)

– Gaps (holes, bits, margins...)

– Language and translation (poem, words, writing...)

– Quivering (twisting...)

(Motif: any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce aspects such as theme or mood, establishing patterns of ideas.)

DRAFTS' style

• Allusions, repetitions across the texts

• Repetitions of words and sounds (anaphora, allitteration, etc.)

• Coinages

• Dignified meditation interwoven with slang or low register

• Compressed syntax

Problems for ex.:

• I / eye (106)

• Hopes hopes hopes… (132)

• Work work work… (82)

• A hole, a line, a hold... (178)

• I fall to the tarmac… (46)

• Cottage, pottage (42)

• Ancient cameras (42)

problems

• This otherwhere... (56)

• Words ending in –ette… (62)

• So little wordth… (58)

• A cloud secret… (84)

• A moonlight fall… (128)

• Silent fall… (98)

“Drafts: Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis”

a review by Maria Damon

 

Selections from reviews of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work in

Drafts, the long poem project

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: an interview with Adam Fieled

Selected pages(in addition to the preface and the notes)

• Draft 16

• Draft 17

• Draft 42: p. 76 (from «Somewhere» to «In fact»); p. 78 (from «Every day a diggin out» to «its ebb and eddy»); p. 82, from «for all the clouds» to the French»; pp. 84-86, from «Thus when» to «ashes and tombs»)

• Draft 52: epigraphs; sections 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 27.

• Draft 60: p. 128, from «A moonligh» to «blow-hard time»; p. 130, from «Not possessions» to «like speech»; p. 132, from «Now we feel» to «did not understand myself in this»

• Draft 72: p. 148, from «Insist on» to personal cow»

• Draft 88

• Draft 98: p. 172-178, from «I carried» to «passage? There is not.»