Rosmarie Waldrop – författare

In her new volume of prose poem “dialogues,” Reluctant Gravities, Rosmarie Waldrop once again pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical “you” addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. Some of Waldrop’s concerns are formal. As the author herself says, she “cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference” in an attempt to compensate for the lack of margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Instead, her “gap gardening” tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. Yet the overriding point of the dialogues is determinedly human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of “Aging,” “Depression,” “Desire,” and even ’’The Millennium.”

The latest book of prose poems by one of America's premier philosophical poets. For the title of her newest collection of prose poems, Rosmarie Waldrop adopts a term"blindsight" used by the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio to describe a condition in which a person actually sees more than he or she is consciously aware. "This is one reason," explains Waldrop, "for using collage: joining my fragments to other people's fragments in a dialogue, a net relation that might catch a bit more of the 'world.'" The collectionthe author's fourth with New Directionsis divided into four thematic sections. The first, "HÜlderlin Hybrids," resonates against the German poet's twisted syntax, while using rhythmic punctuation in counterpoint to sense. "'As Were,'" says Waldrop, "began with looking at the secondary occupations of artistsfor example, Mallarme teaching English, Montaigne serving as mayor of Bordeauxbut this soon gave way to playing more generally with particular aspects of historical figures." The title section, "Blindsight," is most consistent in its use of collage, juxtaposing words and images to jolting, epiphanic effect. "Cornell Boxes," in contrast, has a formal unity, inspired by the constructions of Joseph Cornell, each prose poem "box" composed in a structure of fours: four paragraphs of four sentences each, with four footnotes.

Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body.  For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.

“If memory serves, it was five years ago that yours began to refuse,” Rosmarie Waldrop writes to her husband in The Nick of Time. “Does it feel like crossing from an open field into the woods, the sunlight suddenly switched off? Or like a roof without edge or frame, pushed sideways in time?” Ten years in the making, Waldrop’s phenomenally beautiful new collection explores the felt nature of existence as well as gravity and velocity, the second hemisphere of time, mortality and aging, language and immigration, a Chinese primer, the artist Hannah Höch, and dwarf stars. Of one sequence, “White Is a Color,” first published as a chapbook, the Irish poet Billy Mills wrote, “In what must be less than 1000 words, Waldrop says more about the human condition and how we explore it through words than most of us would manage in a thousand pages.” Love blooms in the cut, in the gap, in the nick between memory and thought, sentence and experience. Like the late work of Cézanne, Waldrop’s art has found a new way of seeing and thinking that “vibrates on multiple registers through endless, restless exploration” (citation for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize).

Incisive essays on modern poetry and translation by a noted poet, translator, and critic. As an immigrant to the United States from Germany, Rosmarie Waldrop has wrestled with the problems of language posed by the discrepancies between her native and adopted tongues, and the problems of translating from one to the other. Those discrepancies and disjunctions, instead of posing problems to be overcome, have become for Waldrop a generative force and the very foundation of her interests as a critic and poet. In this comprehensive collection of her essays, Waldrop addresses considerations central to her life's work: typical genres and ways of countering the conventions of genre; how concrete poets have made syntax spatial rather than grammatical; and the move away from metaphor in poetry toward contiguity and metonymy. Three essays on translation struggle with the sources and targets of translation, or the degree of strangeness or foreignness a translator should allow into any English translation. Finally, other essays examine the two-way traffic between reading and writing, and Waldrop's notion of reading as experience.

In this collection, Waldrop has dedicated many poems to other writers whom she esteems, and in each poem, echoes subtly that writer's forms, tones, and textures. From this synchronism, Waldrop evolves her own unique mediums of address that suggests a slipperiness in human emotion and in human speech.

No detailed description available for "Against Language?".

”Så långt tillbaka vi kan spåra människan har hon överlämnat sånger och verk till kommande generationer. Även om detta kollektiva minne förändras, så kan poesin – ‘Denna gamla krigskorrespondent’ som Luque kallar den – med historiens hjälp ge nuet ett djupare sammanhang.” Ur numrets ledare Poesi av Adrienne Rich, Aurora Luque, Lizette Romero Niknami, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jesper Svenbro, Signe Gjessing och Linnéa Enström. Essäer av Elisabeth Friis, Balsam Karam, Anna Smedberg Bondesson och Sinziana Ravini. Recensioner: Maria Küchen om Athena Farrokhzad, Erik Bergqvist om Camilla Hammarström, Arne Melberg om Göran Sonnevi, Theodor Hildeman Tognér om Axel Winqvist och Sarra Anaya om Sorin Masifi.