Rachel Blau DuPlessis – författare

In Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetries, Rachel Blau Duplessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of modernity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls 'social philology' - a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies - Duplessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society.

In Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetries, Rachel Blau Duplessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of modernity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls 'social philology' - a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies - Duplessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society.

The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women's Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late 1960s. These thirty-two writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in the late twentieth century. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation. What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their activism? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such a struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, Eve Ensler, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Roxanne Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein, Alice Wolfson and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. Their stories trace the ways the world has changed.

This volume presents cultural readings of the objectivist poets, a group characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological view. The essays analyze and evaluate objectivist politics, and focus on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised by objectivist affiliations with Judaism.

In her now-classic, ""The Pink Guitar"", Rachel Blau DuPlessis examined a number of modern and contemporary poets and artists to explore the possibility of finding a language that would question deeply held assumptions about gender. In the 12 essays and introduction that constitute ""Blue Studios"", DuPlessis continues that task, examining the work of experimental poets and the innovative forms they have fashioned to challenge commonplace assumptions about gender and cultural authority. The essays in ""Attitudes and Practices"" deal with two questions: what a feminist reading of cultural texts involves, and the nature of the essay itself as a mode of knowing: how poetry can be discursive and how the essay can be poetic. The goal of ""Marble Paper,"" with its studies of William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson, is to suggest terms for a ""feminist history of poetry."" ""Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world,"" Theodore Adorno wrote, and in the section ""Urrealism"" DuPlessis examines the work of poets from several schools (the Objectivists, the New York School, the surrealists) whose work embodies that displacement, among them George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, H.D., and Barbara Guest. These writers' radical deployment of line, sound, and structure, DuPlessis argues, demonstrate poetry's power not as a purely literary, artistic, or aesthetic force but as a rhetorical form intricately tied to issues of power and ethics. And in ""Migrated Into,"" the author probes the ways these issues have informed her, as a poet and a critic; how the political has ""migrated into"" and suffused her own work; and how the practice of poetry can be an arousal to a deeper understanding of what we stand for.

The Pink Guitar is a landmark study of women's writing and poetics - and representations of women artists - in the 20th century. It probes the work of H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp, among others, and includes DuPlessis's pioneering essay ""For the Etruscans,"" described in American Literature as ""one of the finest pieces of criticism in the feminist literary tradition.

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators  A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

A masterful meditation on our most mercurial and abiding of poetic forms—the long poemFor decades, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown readers how genres, forms, and the literal acts of writing and reception can be understood as sites of struggle. In her own words, “writing is a praxis in which the author disappears into a process, into a community, into discontinuities, and into a desire for discovery.” It is cause for celebration, then, that we have another work of warm, incisive, exploratory writing from DuPlessis in A Long Essay on the Long Poem.Long poems, DuPlessis notes, are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. She cites both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in thinking of the poem as a “box,” both in the sense of a vessel that contains and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. This study’s central attention is on the long poem as a sociocultural Book, distinctively envisioned by a range of authors.To reckon with these shifting and evolving forms, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and a composite she terms “assemblages.” The poets she surveys include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Louis Zukofsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Robert Duncan, Kamau Brathwaite, and, finally, MallarmÉ and Dante. Instead of a traditional lineage, she deliberately seeks intersecting patterns of connection between poems and projects, a nexus rather than a family tree. In doing so she navigates both some challenges of long poems and her own attempt to “essay” them. The result is a fascinating and generous work that defies categorization as anything other than essential.

In Drafts 1-38, Toll, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has built a work which mimics memory and its losses, and which plays with the textures of memory, including its unexpectedness, its flashes and disappearances. Her recurrent motifs and materials include home, homelessness and exile; death and the memory of the dead; political grief and passion; silence, speech, the sayable and the ineffable. Drafts 1-38, Toll functions as a long poem comprised of 38 pieces, or drafts. These poems are conceived as autonomous "canto-like" sections that work on two procedural principles. One is the random repetition of lines or phrases across poems, a self-questioning, processual, and reconceptualizing strategy that honors the term "drafts." A second procedural principle is "the fold." This is the reconsideration of a "donor draft" and the deployment of some aspect in the donor draft in a related draft. The periodicity of this reconsideration is the number 19; hence drafts 1-19 make up the original layer, while drafts 20-38 constitute the first fold on top of this material.

From experimental poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis comes a major work over three decades in the making: a long poem addressing the intimate and dynamic nature of poetry, culture, and life.The Complete Drafts comprises 114 endlessly innovative cantos engaging the poet’s life and our times. Saturated with polyphonic responses to the historical and artistic sweep of the 20th and 21st centuries, all emotions are double and conflicting: wonder and bedazzlement at the world alongside grief for what we have made of it.Transcendent and ethically inquisitive at once, The Complete Drafts is an urgent contemporary long poem of hope, critique, resistance, and melos.

This book brings Drafts, the long poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to its mid-point. A polyphonic work, both monumental and provisional, Drafts asks how to represent our sense of direness and ethical crises, the awe, asonishment, skepticism and pleasure: that all this is. This installment of nineteen Drafts is dedicated to its own poetic and political communities, offering these dedications as pledges to transformation out of social rage and out of grief-inflected hope. The book also contains a witty “summary” of all fifty-seven Drafts to date. This book makes clear the ways DuPlessis’ long poem is a midrashic response to the long poems of modernism and the tolls of modernity. She is a poet of polysemy, of negativity, of critique. Of Drafts, Walter Kaladjian remarked, “DuPlessis’ avant-garde procedures are imbricated in an ethicopolitical mode of poetic testimony.” Nathaniel Mackey said that Drafts “affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between.”

Twisted, knotted, struck by events and emotions at our historical moment, these Drafts register and produce torques – exaltation and tension, torsion and force, in their symphonic and bantering surges. In this book, DuPlessis transposes Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Pound and Rilke; she writes doggerel, a lexicon, dialogues, a mini-manifesto, and lyrics from a spirit voice. This book continues the ambitious long poem project that Ron Silliman has called “one of the major poetic achievements of our time.” Drafts, begun in 1986, manifests thematic and emotional investments centering on loss, struggle, and hope, on the unsayable and “anguage” – the language of anguish. Two main formal and structural principles center this work, repetition and the fold. The works repeat themes and images throughout, a recontextualization of materials, a building of traces, and a repetitive repositioning of images and narrative that also suggests both the waywardness of experience and a pensive responsiveness to what happens.

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.

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.

A surge into twenty-first century poetry and poetics, a book of passionate poetic energies and odic verve, Surge is the provocative, open-ended ending to DuPlessis's twenty-six year long poem project, Drafts. This work exemplifies a tertium quid, transcending poetic schools and critical binaries with its fusions of intellection and emotion, with its reassessments of Dante, Eliot, Duchamp, with its witty genre experimentation, with its strands of eco-poetics, feminist analysis, conceptual torques, and unstinting poetic commitment. The book contains a contemporary mirror of The Waste Land, a striking political-emotional reflection on divided cities, an investigation of gender in a work of poet's theater, a ballad on science and reality, an index, a canzone and--over all--a scintillating texture of meditation in which the analytic lyric is intensified by the refractions of gloss.