Rachel Blau DuPlessis is professor emerita of English at Temple University. She is a poet (with a long poem called Drafts) and the author of many volumes of essays and criticism, among them The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.

“I know of no other poetics of the long poem that engages such a range of questions and works. This is a must read for anyone working in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century long poem because of its numerous ways of examining its subject. DuPlessis’s intuitive and reasoned understanding of just what it means to write a long poem drawn from her own experience of writing her long poem Drafts, as well as her astute reading of the poetry and poetics of an impressive array of poets, makes this book zing.”—Jeanne Heuving, author of The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics"A Long Essay is a thought-provoking and illuminating exploration of its subject, one that neither this brief review nor a single read can do justice to."—Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is professor emerita of English at Temple University. She is a poet (with a long poem called Drafts) and the author of many volumes of essays and criticism, among them The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.

“I know of no other poetics of the long poem that engages such a range of questions and works. This is a must read for anyone working in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century long poem because of its numerous ways of examining its subject. DuPlessis’s intuitive and reasoned understanding of just what it means to write a long poem drawn from her own experience of writing her long poem Drafts, as well as her astute reading of the poetry and poetics of an impressive array of poets, makes this book zing.”—Jeanne Heuving, author of The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics"A Long Essay is a thought-provoking and illuminating exploration of its subject, one that neither this brief review nor a single read can do justice to."—Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is professor emerita of English at Temple University. She is a poet (with a long poem called Drafts) and the author of many volumes of essays and criticism, among them The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.

“I know of no other poetics of the long poem that engages such a range of questions and works. This is a must read for anyone working in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century long poem because of its numerous ways of examining its subject. DuPlessis’s intuitive and reasoned understanding of just what it means to write a long poem drawn from her own experience of writing her long poem Drafts, as well as her astute reading of the poetry and poetics of an impressive array of poets, makes this book zing.”—Jeanne Heuving, author of The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics"A Long Essay is a thought-provoking and illuminating exploration of its subject, one that neither this brief review nor a single read can do justice to."—Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence