Rachel Blau DuPlessis

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Rachel Blau DuPlessis
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(No Transcript)
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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

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DRAFTS

• On-going, open-ended, serial poem
• Self-reflexively rigorous poet what she says
  cannot be contained in the lyric form
• Combine
• Western poetry
• Jewish experience
• Feminist culture
• US politics

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DRAFTS

• STRUCTURE 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. gt 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

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Midrash

• Midrash (Hebrew ?????) 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.

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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
• gt polyvocality
• (see Intro. p.8)

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DRAFTS' themes

• Loss
• 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

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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

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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...)

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• (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.)

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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

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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)

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problems

• This otherwhere... (56)
• Words ending in ette (62)
• So little wordth (58)
• A cloud secret (84)
• A moonlight fall (128)
• Silent fall (98)

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• Drafts Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft,
  Unnumbered Précis
• a review by Maria Damon
•  

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• Selections from reviews of Rachel Blau
  DuPlessis's work inDrafts, the long poem project

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• Rachel Blau DuPlessis an interview with Adam
  Fieled

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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.