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Showing posts with label <b>Rachel Blau DuPlessis</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Rachel Blau DuPlessis</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, October 15, 2011</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:center;line-height:normal'><a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6100/6244190984_9329ec556f_o.jpg"><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:windowtext;mso-no-proof:yes;text-decoration:none; text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="145" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/rK0uH3wgBJuf9WWmuUn3qF7A0VRAjaXXM5xKosK12qwzLTeKkSSFUOecrZdekwOf8SV6w8qpIyXZeHNXVaQWwltJADXYnHymo0HkTN6pNpvAjyM%3Ds0-d" width="624"></span></a><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-top:3.75pt;mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;text-align:center;line-height:normal;background:#F9DB80'><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>October 21, 2011 - 10 am to 5 pm - <br> 1810 <span class=SpellE>Liacouras</span> Walk -<br> Temple University, Main Campus <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<div style='mso-element:para-border-div;border-top:solid #CC0033 1.5pt; border-left:none;border-bottom:solid #CC0033 1.5pt;border-right:none; padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;text-align:center;line-height:normal;border:none;mso-border-top-alt:solid #CC0033 1.5pt; mso-border-bottom-alt:solid #CC0033 1.5pt;padding:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 0in 0in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>It's a reading, hardly personal, really, though, of course, deeply engaged, made of poems and sentences constructed to see what meanings we are all inside of.<br> (From &quot;Précis&quot;) <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal'><b><span style='mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>10 am - </span></b><span style='mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Welcome from Dean Teresa <span class=SpellE>Soufas</span>, College of Liberal Arts<br> <br> <b>10:15 am - </b>Bob Perelman, University of Pennsylvania, &quot;The Mothers of Us All, and Their Fathers: <u>Drafts</u> and the Epic Tradition&quot;<br> <br> <b>11:15 am - </b><span class=SpellE>Libbie</span> Rifkin, Georgetown University, &quot;<span class=SpellE>Deixis</span>, Midrash, Footnote:&nbsp; Experiencing Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Present.&quot;<br> <br> <b>11:40 am - </b>Eric <span class=SpellE>Keenaghan</span>, SUNY Albany, &quot;<span class=SpellE>re:''Openings</span>' and RBD's <span class=SpellE>Étude</span>: A Footnote on Politics and Vision.&quot;<br> <br> <b>Lunch Break</b><br> <br> <b>1 pm - </b>Ron Silliman, &quot;Un-scene, Ur-new: Time, History &amp; Ambition in The Collage Poems of <u>Drafts</u>&quot;<br> <br> <b>2 pm - </b>Reading by Rachel Blau DuPlessis<br> <br> <b>3 pm - </b>Reading by Jena Osman, Temple University <br> <br> <b>3:30 pm - </b>Reading by Brian <span class=SpellE>Teare</span>, Temple University<br> <br> <b>4 pm - </b>Readings by alumni and members of the Philadelphia poetry community: Emily <span class=SpellE>Abendroth</span>, Holly Bittner, C.A. Conrad, Thomas Devaney, Sarah Dowling, Ryan <span class=SpellE>Eckes</span>, Lucia <span class=SpellE>Gbaya</span>-Kanga, Pattie McCarthy, Michelle Taransky, Heather Thomas, Kevin Varrone<br> <br> <b>4:50 pm - </b>Closing remarks by Eli Goldblatt, Temple University<br> <br> <b>5 pm - </b>Reception, Women's Studies Lounge in Anderson Hall, Room 821<br> <b><br> Please RSVP by Oct. 14 at <a href="mailto:CLAevent@temple.edu"><span style='color:windowtext'>CLAevent@temple.edu</span></a>. <span style='color:red'>Seating is limited</span>. Lunch will be provided.<br> <br> For questions about the conference, please call 215-204-1756.</b><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:center;line-height:normal'><a href="http://www.fact-simile.com/Rachel%20Blau%20DuPlessis_front.jpg"><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:windowtext;mso-no-proof:yes;text-decoration:none; text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="458" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/cDkhuhVRVAdfKm_paz8S0Al8T3kxG3CLmU7JvRh0a2zb5HzdXrZ-UB4pMasn1osHV7D4pyv7kSuT7aXK7ZoQarxmNtaoSaEABVpNnBYRblrRZg%3Ds0-d" width="341"></span></a><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:center;line-height:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family: Arial'>Photo by Melody Holmes<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, August 20, 2010</span></h2>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, July 26, 2009</span></h2>

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<p align=center style='text-align:center'><a href=" http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/duplessis/"><span style='color:windowtext;mso-no-proof:yes;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="325" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/a5Z44BGaGI0sfecHVMoOlhkAzvITUsa9QA_yr7O_OsLyPRI-wPWCE-V9u4txcNaVCHmRjbo4VHJhLvYC8SefB-5tEroMKb6PkREe0TWAZf9ABYg%3Ds0-d" width="433"></span></a><br> 
<span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Photo by Tom Orange</span></p>

<p align=center style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:20.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Rachel Blau DuPlessis</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p align=center style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Recent Work<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p align=center style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></b></p>

<p style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Recent <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts<span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></b></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>&#8220;<a href="http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/intervalles4/21_duplessis.pdf"><I style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Draft</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 78: Buzz Track</span></a>.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Interval(le)s </i>II.2-III.3 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>&#8220;<a href="http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue3/RachelBlauDuPlessis.html"><I style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Draft</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 81: Gap</span></a>.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>BlackBox Manifold</i> (Summer 2009).&#185;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>&#8220;<a href="http://www.saltpublishing.com/saltmagazine/issues/02/text/DuPlessis_Rachel_Blau.htm"><I style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Draft</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 84: Juncture</span></a>&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Salt Magazine </i>2 (March 2009).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>&#8220;<a href="http://www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds/Draft91_Proverbs.pdf"><I style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Draft</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 91: Proverbs</span></a>.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>17 seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics</i> (Fall 2008).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>&#8220;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Draft</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 92: Translocation</span>.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>EOAGH</i> 5 (July 2009).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>&#8220;<a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/37/ma/ma00.shtml"><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Draft</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 94: Mail Art</span></a>.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Jacket Magazine</i> 37 (March 2009).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>&#8220;<a href="http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue3/RachelBlauDuPlessis.html"><I style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Draft</span></i><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 97: Rubrics</span></a>.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>BlackBox Manifold</i> (Summer 2009).&#185;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;tab-stops:176.25pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>     </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>A Periodicity of 19<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:5.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'><a href="http://www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol39/duplessis/index.html"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>The &#8220;Line of 15&#8221; from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts</i></span></a><I style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>All poems to date (2009) from this thread, which is &#8220;the little.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Other Voices Anthology</i>, ed. Roger Humes. (Journal sponsored by UNESCO)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-bottom:6.0pt;tab-stops:176.25pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>     </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Six Vispo Works<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'><a href="http://drunkenboat.com/db10/10vis/duplessis.html"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Drunken Boat</span></a></span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'> 10 (July 2009).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;line-height:115%'>&#185; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>81 &amp;97 appear on the same web page. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My instantaneous reaction on first seeing Rachel Blau DuPlessis&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Draft 68: Threshold </i>was that it looked very much like my own FBI file. Here are the second and third stanzas:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It does not take much to figure out where the initiating theme of the &#8220;unsaid,&#8221; the effaced, the &#8220;roar of the missing,&#8221; which runs consistently through what DuPlessis calls the &#8220;line of eleven&#8221; of her life poem <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts, </i>happens to be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In fact, even before the first redacted line &#8220;goes black&#8221; in the eighth line of the first stanza, there has been a more subtle erasure:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>This what you wanted<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp;      </span>When you said you wanted &#8220;more&#8221;?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The absent term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>is, </i>whether present or past tense, and which could appear either before or after the initial <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This </i>is so slight, so apt to be skipped over in our own daily speech, that it&#8217;s omission<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>here might not even be felt. It might be below the threshold of recognition. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Plus, the key term in this first sentence, literally the subject, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This </i>is not defined, at least not yet. Are we alluding to the text here at hand? <span class=GramE>A key literary journal of the 1970s?</span> <span class=GramE>The project that is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts?</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i><span class=GramE>The whole idea of poetry after not just </span></span><st1:place><span class=GramE><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Auschwitz</span></span></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, but also after </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class=GramE><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Cambodia</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span></span><st1:place><st1:City><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Kosovo</span></span></st1:City><span  class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span></span><st1:country-region><span  class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Chechnya</span></span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, <span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Rwanda</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> or </span></span><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Darfur</span></span></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>?</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> DuPlessis offers something toward a definition in the second sentence, a complex noun phrase that is short of a complete sentence: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This being the other side of amusement. </i>The third sentence is even shorter: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Damage. </i><span class=GramE>And the fourth a quotation, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;Boiling <span class=SpellE>gurge</span> of pulse.&#8221;</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i><span class=GramE>The moment in Keats when he comes closest to foretelling directly the work of Clark Coolidge over a century later.</span> It is not until the fifth sentence that we get one that actually has its master verb, which as it <span class=GramE>happens</span> is all it has: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Listen. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is the sixth sentence where suddenly we get the full package of syntax, and it has the feel of water suddenly bursting through a wall or dam&#185;: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>You have stumbled across terrain and / Still could not escape this twisted <span class=SpellE>langdscape</span>. </i>That last neologism is, however, a huge (and deliberate) stumbling block. No wonder sentence 7 asks <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>What words? </i>And the eighth, tho it has a final period, feels cut short (again deliberately): <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Eroded, choked, and stun. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is here where we get our first black block of redacted text &#8211; an entire line&#8217;s worth. If it is a single word, it is a long one, since the block takes up the space of 40 letters, indented roughly  three (unlike lines 2, 4 &amp; 6, which have all had an indent equivalent to a tab bar: 5 spaces.) The question here is obvious &#8211; it&#8217;s the same one that I had when I first saw my FBI files some 30 years ago: What&#8217;s behind the  block?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But, also like my FBI files, which were photocopied from a redacted original, there is no way here really to find out. Unlike, say, Joyce&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Finnegans Wake </i>notebook up in the archives at SUNY Buffalo or the Archimedes Codex in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Baltimore</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, you can&#8217;t x-ray or use spectral imaging to figure out what&#8217;s behind the surface. In printing, a black block is exactly that. <span class=GramE>WYSIWYG.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Which is a detail that has kept me awake at night.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> There are, I would think, two distinct ways to do this. One is to write actual text, then to block it out so that  what remains carries within itself the weight of the missing. The other is the far simpler: the blocks are graphic elements only &#8211; there is no real &#8220;missing&#8221; text. Making it something of a game: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>is it or isn&#8217;t  it. </i>And if it is, if there is truly &#8220;hidden&#8221; writing here, is it something we will confront later, perhaps in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 87 </i>or possibly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>106? </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is at the end of this first line of blocked, blacked-out text that DuPlessis writes the sentence that gives rise to the title of this book: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>You wanted to torque. </i>That is a sentence that can be understood so many ways, from the purely linguistic to the completely erotic. And certainly the text above the redaction suggests something akin to a dreamscape &amp; the psychological. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>But you ended up here </i>&#8211; that may be the most frightening line in all of DuPlessis&#8217; work. I don&#8217;t see how it can be read as anything other than an accusation, recalling as it does the opening lines of Dante&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Inferno. </i>What follows is yet another incomplete sentence: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Impotent rages locked in these mazes. </i>Five syllables on each side of the caesura &#8211; we&#8217;re intended to hear the near-rhyme. The next line says what was evident the instant we confronted the look of this page: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>The page is slowly turning black. </i>Note, however, that here there is no terminal period, because what follows &#8211; the last line of the first stanza &#8211; is our second moment with these redacted blocks: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><img height="41" id="_x0000_i1026" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/xd1LHMmqaP73OycCYGbT72LjB8VElW44Nr43VBA6HHXtThtnSYOBQACnX517JmkIPlePSghjYOH0zZWe47qlpYM8jH7e5-u5plMsL2nLBKT5CAM%3Ds0-d" width="416"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My mind immediately wants to plug in the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>as </i>into that first block, but frankly I don&#8217;t know what to do with the two that end this sentence (note the period!). This is what I think of later in the second stanza (the first of two printed at the top of today&#8217;s note) as a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>truculent syntax threshold. </i>Although, it is worth reminding myself, that&#8217;s not what that later phrase says either, exactly. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My point is not to close-read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Threshold </i>(tho ultimately I don&#8217;t see how you can read DuPlessis any other way) as it is to point to dimensions in the text that reverberate from section to section along the &#8220;line of eleven&#8221; within the sequence that is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts, </i>to suggest just a little what this second direction of reading will get you to. You can see why, in one sense, reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>is an athletic event. There are very few poets who build so much in to an extended text, to write with concision &amp; density that we more often associated with writers of short, compacted texts (early Creeley perhaps, Rae Armantrout) and do so over such a broad expanse &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>is 622 pages long, just through number 76. And, as I suggested on Monday, the potential feels limitless. If <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>is exhausting, it is in the same sense that, say, viewing all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Godfather </i>is similarly draining, because it engages all of the reader, all of the author, and <span class=GramE>all of the</span> world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Recall the six-lined stanzas of the &#8220;failed&#8221; sestina in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 49: Turns &amp; Turns, an Interpretation. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, February 19, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="276" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Gnv0gmlUeQN6TI56G9JmZm6j5s8Lx9OdYnHgMQj6oomrWUbnLoslHz2zQtQnOkXvP6UvQGr3D18t7M_gvN21D45iOgx5bosjOD3FL59eYedN%3Ds0-d" width="368"><br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Photo by Ben Friedlander</span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s taken me years, decades in fact, to figure this out &#8211; in retrospect it seems obvious &#8211; but there are at least two ways to read through Rachel Blau DuPlessis&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts. </i>One might read, for example <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 68: Threshold </i>between <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 67 </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>69, </i>the way it appears in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/proddetail.php?prod=9781844713349"><span style='color:black'>Torques</span></a>, </i>the latest collection from this project. But one should also read it along what DuPlessis refers to as &#8220;the line of eleven,&#8221; following <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Draft 11: Schwa, Draft XXX: Fosse </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Draft 49: Turns &amp; Turns, an Interpretation, </i>a reading that entails having at least three separate books out on the table more or less all at once. And, oh yes, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Draft 87, </i>which is not yet written tho the two that come immediately after are already &#8220;in print.&#8221;&#185; This recognizes the underlying cycle of 19 poems that is reiterated as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>stretches out. 19 because, as DuPlessis once informed me, it just &#8220;felt right.&#8221; It&#8217;s yet another instance where poetry derives its metric, its measure from a prime number, the way we talk of iambic pentameter instead of ten-syllable lines, the way Williams built his stepped verse by what he termed a &#8220;triadic&#8221; line, the way haiku resolves into the numbers 3, 5, 7 and 17. So <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts, </i>because it is cyclical, growing richer &amp; deeper with each sweep, is becoming not unlike <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Cort%25C3%25A1zar"><span style='color:black'>Julio <span class=SpellE>Cortázar&#8217;s</span></span></a> great Oulipo-inflected novel, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayuela"><span style='color:black'>Hopscotch</span></a>, </i>a text that must be read in different directions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I have an idea &#8211; maybe even a theory &#8211; <span class=GramE>that</span> reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>straight through accentuates the autonomous nature of the poems, to harken back to DuPlessis&#8217; characterization of them as a &#8220;series of autonomous, but interdependent canto-like poems.&#8221; Reading them in this other direction, however, accentuates what is or can be interdependent between them. Thus I turn to the very first lines of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Draft 11<span class=GramE>:Schwa</span> </i>and read this:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The &#8220;unsaid&#8221; is a shifting boundary<br> 
resisting even itself.<br>
Something, the half-<span class=SpellE>sayable</span><span class=GramE>,</span><br>
goes speechless. Or it can&#8217;t<br>
<br>
and <span class=SpellE><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>I</b>nbetween</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>what is, and<br>
that it is<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>is &#601; <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>I</b>nside <br>
<br>
&#8230;&#8230;an offhand<br>
sound, a <span class=SpellE>howe</span> or swallowed<br>
<span class=GramE>shallow.</span> <span class=SpellE><span class=GramE>Sayable</span></span><span class=GramE> Sign<br>
of the un-.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This is followed by a line of twenty-five periods. As I type this, I&#8217;m not even certain that HTML will let me get away with a &#8220;&#601;&#8221; or that readers will see that the capital <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>in <span class=SpellE><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>nbetween</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>and <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>nside </i>is boldfaced. I know that I missed that the first time through. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Now remember this same passage as you read the opening words of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Draft XXX: Fosse</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Imagine a book, a little book<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>  &nbsp;  &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;    </span>whose words are covered<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>     &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp;  &nbsp;  &nbsp;        </span>one by one<br>
with the smallest pebbles &#8211;<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>   &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;                 </span>fossils imprinted, shale splinters<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
slag and gnarls from <span class=SpellE>fossick</span>,<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;                 </span>cheep sweepings arrayed,<br>
a road of <span class=SpellE>morse</span> lines<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>  &nbsp;  &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;     </span>step by step<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>   &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp;                </span>down the page. <br>
<br>
It looks like poetry, runs along depths<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>   &nbsp;  &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;    </span>on the surface, slugs<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>   &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;                </span>of a text that is lost<span class=GramE>;</span><br>
the instruction it offers<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>     &nbsp;  &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;  </span>is delicate,<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>   &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp;               </span>may be misplaced.<br>
<br>
The words and their syntax<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>   &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;     </span>come<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;     &nbsp;              </span>not to nothing<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;                 </span>(for the lover of pebbles<span class=GramE>)</span><br>
but to an irradiating splayed out<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>  &nbsp;  &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;     </span>Something<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp;               </span>so large<br>
it can only be<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>  &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;   &nbsp;    </span>marked thus:<br>
<br>
+ It could say erosion of the book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This as it happens is a description of an actual book by conceptual artist <a href="http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/"><span style='color:black'>Ann Hamilton</span></a>. Where in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Schwa </i>DuPlessis offers us the <span class=SpellE>unsayable</span>, the unmarked vowel that could be any vowel, or the silent &#8220;e&#8221; appended to a word (turning &#8220;how&#8221; itself into an allusion of poets Fanny &amp; Susan), here we find language eroded, &#8220;a text that is lost.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Draft 49: <span class=GramE>Turns<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>&amp;</span> Turns, an Interpretation </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>covers this same terrain, but in entirely different ways. The poem is itself two poems, not unlike Zukofsky&#8217;s &#8220;Mantis&#8221; and &#8220;&#8217;Mantis,&#8221; an Interpretation,&#8221; a work that at one point the &#8220;interpretation&#8221; discusses. While this is perhaps the closest DuPlessis gets an actual homage in any of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>yet written, its substance comes from an entirely opposite direction, the tale of a dream, giving rise to an interpretation of the dream, to the process of interpretation itself, to the social roles of gender in that process &#8211; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.3in'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Here is something!<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>   &nbsp; </span>women propelled<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;    </span>with analytic rages every day<br>
&#8221;Adventurous for him&#8221;<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;   </span>turns &#8220;careless for me.&#8221;<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;   </span>&#8220;Prolific for him&#8221; comes<br>
to &#8220;facile for me.&#8221;<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;   </span>He is opinionated<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;   </span>but I am hectoring;<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;   </span>he passionate<span class=GramE>,<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp; </span>I</span> strident.<br>
We see, we see, we see! <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp; </span>&#8220;We are demanding<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  &nbsp;  </span>an end<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  &nbsp;  </span>to hypocrisy!&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The long lines broken with visible (but not necessarily audible) caesurae is intended to remind some readers of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Alice</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Notley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Descent of <span class=SpellE>Alette</span>.</i> In this third round of the &#8220;unsaid,&#8221; what is effaced is nothing less than the role &amp; contribution of women. &#8220;The roar of the missing,&#8221; DuPlessis calls it in the 25th of the poem&#8217;s 28 six-lined stanzas. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is worth noting not only that &#8220;Turns, an Interpretation&#8221; begins with an epigram, but that the epigram itself is preceded by simple, but vital word:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>or &#8220;To write history is so difficult that most historians<br> 
are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Thus Erich <span class=SpellE>Auderbach</span> in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mimesis.</i></span></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I might have said that narrative has its own demands. What follows is the closest moment to direct address thus far in all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts, </i>beginning by examining images from the dream &amp; the ways in which her six-line model never successfully resolves into a sestina<span class=GramE>:&#178;</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Besides I don&#8217;t have the skill.<br>
It is difficult enough even claiming<br>
a &#8220;political poem&#8221; given I am hardly<br>
writing &#8220;to program,&#8221;<br>
with any correct itinerary or conclusion.<br>
Could only propose<br>
gender justice in the context of social justice<br>
enacted in particular struggle or location.<br>
Those six words (gender, justice, social, struggle, location, enacted<span class=GramE>)</span><br>
might trace through the poem, and be repeated there,<br>
but to use them as such was too positive, positivist.<br>
I did not use them.<br>
<br>
What I wanted was an openly &#8220;negative&#8221; poem turning on<br>
contradictory feelings, the ungainliness<br>
of those edgy feelings, the fullness<br>
of what happened, but symbolized distantly.<br>
Not one &#8220;side,&#8221; but the &#8220;technique of legend.&#8221;<br>
For &#8220;the historical comprises<br>
a great number of contradictory motives in each individual<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
a hesitation and ambiguous groping<br>
on the part of groups.&#8221;<br>
<span class=GramE>Ongoing urgency, choice and act.</span> <br>
Unintended consequence, debates about fact.<br>
Besides, &#8220;the woman&#8217;s side,&#8221;<br>
the &#8220;other-side of everything&#8221; &#8211;<br>
emerged with full force<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
yet before that binary, there was<br>
another kind of start --<br>
a sense of <span class=SpellE>juncted</span> tracks,<br>
woven intersections, knotted lines<br>
with all their merges, switches, turns.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The contrast between the two sections, or poems, within this poem could not be more pronounced. Against the worked &amp; tightly compact passages of the opening section, this free verse is meant to feel almost artless &#8211; at least until DuPlessis sticks in that end-rhyme of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>act </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>fact. </i>&#8220;Turns, an Interpretation&#8221; continues for five more pages.&#179; Turning not only figures thoughts &amp; second thoughts, but prefigures the concept of torque as well, the definition of which in physics is a vector that measures the tendency of a force to rotate some object about an axis. In short, it gives it a turn.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>More tomorrow. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></i></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 88 </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>89 </i>appear in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Jacket 35 </i>and can be found <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/35/duplessis-draft88.shtml"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a> &amp; <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/35/duplessis-draft89.shtml"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>. DuPlessis tells me that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Draft 86 </i>is approximately 99 percent done. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#178; Tho we note what DuPlessis does not, that the 28 stanzas carry within them the echo of a double-sonnet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#179; One of the interesting elements of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, </i>as this volume is subtitled, is the length of its poems. DuPlessis has been quite consistent. The works in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 1-38, Toll </i>as well as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Torques: Drafts 58-76 </i>have averaged just a hair over seven pages each. <span class=GramE>Yet during this third run through the set of 19, the average swells up to 11, even factoring in the curious free-floating &#8220;unnumbered&#8221; poem.</span> The obvious question is why &#8211; what is going on in this run that did not apply either before or, at least thus far, after? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><img height="372" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/kZTPBtgLLSm5EVg5DajuuZ8CQEORjpNHWYeiW8TAIivLoyPATIzI9Opta04UJzuOUbhUWbQkw2lJOYNTsJc-SK1Mp2zNwPyqKNwGqd0tD64nNL0%3Ds0-d" width="241"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The only thing I&#8217;ve ever been able to find &#8220;wrong&#8221; with <a href="http://etc.temple.edu/English/dbpages/people/DuPlessisR.asp"><span style='color:black'>Rachel Blau DuPlessis&#8217;</span></a> marvelous life poem <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>is the idea that some day it&#8217;s going to end, and that day is drawing increasingly near. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/yscxa8"><span style='color:black'>Torques: Drafts 58-76</span></a> </i>incorporates DuPlessis&#8217; fourth pass of 19 poems &#8211; there is one &#8220;unnumbered&#8221; piece that was gathered in her last volume. The plan has been to have six cycles, tho I more than once have argued for more. More than any other text, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>has made me understand the difference between the longpoem and the life poem, and I read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts, </i>like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A,&#8221; </i>like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos, </i>like Bev Dahlen&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Reading, </i>like my own project, as an instance of the latter. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/duplessis/"><span  style='color:black'>DuPlessis</span></a> started <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>in 1985 &amp; the first two numbers first appeared in Leland Hickman&#8217;s great journal, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Temblor, </i>two years hence before being collected into a volume entitled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/2rvcmt"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Tabula</span></span><span style='color:black'> Rosa</span></a>, </i>published by Peter <span class=SpellE>Ganick&#8217;s</span> Potes &amp; Poets Press. I listened to Rachel read from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Torques </i>a week or so ago, then sat down with all my DuPlessis books going all the way back to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Wells, </i>published as a <span class=SpellE>Montemora</span> Supplement in 1980&#185;, and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>Gypsy / Moth, </i>a chapbook that contains two poems from the sequence that makes up the first half or so of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tabula</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Rosa, </i>&#8220;from &#8216;The &#8216;History of Poetry.&#8217;&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Sometimes the smallest things at, or surrounding, or before, the conscious beginning of a life poem will point you to things you might not notice until much <span class=SpellE>much</span> later. For example, Ezra Pound &#8211; a poet DuPlessis has characterized as &#8220;haunting&#8221; her work &#8211; sets up <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos </i>so that one numbered section feeds right into the next in a way that is not nearly so sculptural or angled as are the individual sections of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mauberly. </i>You can see Pound actively worrying about this connection right at the start. He ends the first canto with a colon &#8211; &#8220;So that:&#8221; &#8211; and ends the second with &#8220;And&#8221; followed by an ellipsis. It&#8217;s a curious step back from the abrupt shifts of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mauberly </i>or those he gave to Eliot&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Waste Land, </i>and by the time we&#8217;ve reached the Van Buren cantos, the sameness from section to section, passage to passage, has begun taking its toll. It took the fall of Italy &amp; Pound&#8217;s capture by the U.S. Army to finally shake him loose from this, which explains in part why the <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pisan</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Cantos </i>suddenly feel like such a great forward, even as they were written when Pound himself was almost certainly psychotic, writing on toilet paper in a cage in World War <span class=SpellE>II&#8217;s</span> version of Gitmo, awaiting trial for treason. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Happily, DuPlessis has had her own wits about her since Day One. Following Louis Zukofsky&#8217;s sense of the part<span class=GramE>:whole</span> relation in the life poem more than Pound&#8217;s, she has characterized <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>as a &#8220;series of autonomous, but interdependent canto-like poems.&#8221; But this process of cumulative poetry and of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>writing through, </i>even writing over other texts &#8211; exactly what she refers to here as torquing &#8211; is what one finds in both &#8220;Writing&#8221; and the excerpts from &#8216;The &#8220;History of Poetry.&#8221;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>Even in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Wells, </i>written entirely in the 1970s, we find DuPlessis engaging Grecian figures, the work of Emily Dickinson, the serial forms of George Oppen, offering us in one piece, &#8220;Oil,&#8221; alternate endings, even as they confront the present &amp; the world (&#8220;Oil&#8221; is an extended metaphor for menstruation, a topic still not found all that often even in today&#8217;s post-feminist verse). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;The &#8216;History of Poetry&#8217;&#8221; &#8211; note exactly how those quotation marks fall &#8211; and &#8220;Writing&#8221; both read, twenty years later, like rehearsals for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts. </i>&#8220;&#8217;History&#8217;&#8221; has never been published in its entirety &amp; &#8220;Writing,&#8221; though it is included in the section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tabular Rosa </i>entitled &#8220;Drafts,&#8221; and is mentioned&#178; in the acknowledgements to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 1-38, Toll, </i>has never again been published with it. Personally, I still want to see &#8220;The &#8216;History of Poetry&#8217;&#8221; complete in its own volume &#8211; I have no idea if the missing parts constitute 2 pages or 200 &#8211; with perhaps <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Wells </i>and &#8220;Writing&#8221; combined in a volume of its own as well. This is because I think DuPlessis is one of the poets whom we need to have entirely available at all times. And I don&#8217;t want to wait forty years for the Library of America to figure this out. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It was Robert Duncan &amp; Charles Olson who first recognized that one practical lesson of Ezra Pound&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cantos </i><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>was that writing is always also reading, not in the theory-driven fashion one might take from Derrida, but insofar as each of us walks around surrounded by (invaded by) these constellations of articulation that are our educations &amp; literary passions. Not that one <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>needs </i>to get the footnotes &#8211; that is almost always the wrong way to read anything &#8211; but insofar as these voices whisper to &amp; through us. Both &#8220;Writing&#8221; &amp; &#8220;The &#8216;History of Poetry&#8217;&#8221; show DuPlessis wading right into this issue, trying to sort &amp; shake things out. In <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>she takes what she has learned there &amp; turns with it to confront the world. Which may be why <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>feels social, even political, overtly so at moments &#8211; tho not in the narrow sense of that term &#8211; rather than literary. In one way, I&#8217;ve always thought that Rachel Blau DuPlessis actually writes the work that Amiri Baraka always talks about writing, but never really does. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So it is no surprise that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Torques </i>is a masterpiece. DuPlessis is completely on top of her game &amp; willing to do just about anything if it will further the poem. I find that I read one section and then have to think about it for days before I&#8217;m willing to go onto the next &#8211; that&#8217;s an effect I associate with very few poems &#8211; a few sections of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A,&#8221; </i>individual sections of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Pisan</span> Cantos, </i>Barrett Watten&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Progress </i>&#8211; &amp; more akin to how I feel after a truly major motion picture (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Children of Paradise, Weekend, Blow-Up, <span class=SpellE>Pierrot</span> le <span class=SpellE>fou</span></i>, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Red Desert, Ran</i>). If you read a section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>&amp; it doesn&#8217;t completely drain you &#8211; and haunt you &#8211; you&#8217;re just skimming. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>More tomorrow.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Available <a href="http://www.durationpress.com/archives/rduplessis/wells.pdf"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a> in PDF format from Duration Press.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#178; Where it is referred to as the &#8220;pre-Drafts work.&#8221;</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, June 02, 2006</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">When I read the sexist language in Olson&#8217;s &#8220;Projective Verse,&#8221; my instinct is to see Olson as a not-too-atypical male of his generation, chronologically positioned midway between my grandfather&#8217;s generation born in the late 1890s &amp; my father who was born in 1927. He sounds like a case of testosterone poisoning &amp; is no doubt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the </i>person intended by the rubric given to the macho side of the New American Poetics as the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Wounded</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Buffalo</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">. <span class="GramE">Yet dismissing that language as a sign of generational ignorance &#8211; Zukofsky &amp; Pound &amp; Eliot all had their visibly patriarchal sides &#8211; and keeping in mind that the Allen anthology has just four women among its 44 contributors &#8211; is not too unlike dismissing the equally unmistakable anti-Semitism in Pound, Cummings, Stevens or Eliot.</span> You do it at some risk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">You could also take exactly the other tack, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis did about ten years back in an issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diacritics, </i>in an essay called &#8220;Manifests&#8221; that likewise close reads &#8220;Projective Verse,&#8221; but as a sexual text rather than merely one on poetics whose arteries are clogged with the prejudices of the time. It&#8217;s a fascinating alternate path into the work, informed externally by the discovery of Tom Clark&#8217;s &#8211; the real literary coup of his Olson bio &#8211; that Olson&#8217;s primary mentor in the post-War years before he met up with the chicken farmer from New Hampshire named Creeley was a book designer, Frances <span class="SpellE">Motz</span> Boldereff, with whom he had an intense &amp; informing affair that he subsequently kept secret from very nearly everyone, so that it came as news two decades after his death. Reading Olson through the <a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6363-3.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">Boldereff correspondence</span></a>, now quite thoroughly in print, reminds one of nothing so much as Olson&#8217;s own way of reading Shakespeare into Melville, the informing thesis of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Call Me Ishmael. </i>The cover of the Wesleyan University Press edition shows photos of Olson &amp; Boldereff from the 1940s &#8211; his (from the same shoot as the <a href="http://www.charlesolson.ca/gifs/familyalbumgifs/13.gif"><span style="color: windowtext;">photo</span></a> I used on May 23, wearing dark shirt &amp; tie) above the title, hers below. So far as I know, no photo of the two together was ever taken. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">In that wonderful way she has in her poetry as well as her criticism of looking at an issue from all perspectives, DuPlessis doesn&#8217;t just dismiss the <span class="GramE">replete</span> sexism with a sigh, nor throw Olson overboard for it, but uses it to interrogate Allen Grossman&#8217;s critical work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/0801842433?&amp;PID=30048"><span style="color: windowtext;">Summa <span class="SpellE">Lyrica</span></span></a>, </i>which, in DuPlessis&#8217; words &#8220;announces the force of poetics as ideology.&#8221; Nor does she stop there, but rather proceeds to read the text through the works of other recent theorists, including <span class="SpellE">Deleuze</span> and <span class="SpellE">Guattari</span> (there is that question of incest to deal with, after all, and, following Grossman, the whole oedipal ball o&#8217; wax), Julia <span class="SpellE">Kristeva</span>, Hélène <span class="SpellE">Cixous</span>. But then DuPlessis does this both ways, reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">them</i> through Olson &amp; Grossman. It&#8217;s a process that eventually will lead you to understand what DuPlessis means when she claims that &#8220;I don&#8217;t write &#8216;poetry,&#8217;&#8221; a tricky position to hold if you&#8217;re one of the best poets going, which she  is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Nor does DuPlessis let Boldereff off the hook. What does it mean for a woman to be a muse, to choose that role rather than put her own work forward for what it is? The answers aren&#8217;t simple, and they may not even be answers, certainly not in the &#8220;settled argument&#8221; sense of that term. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">You can get <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/diacritics/v026/26.3-4duplessis.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">DuPlessis&#8217; essay</span></a> from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diacritics </i>if your library belongs to the appropriately named (for this discussion at least) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project Muse, </i>a service whose sole function is to keep critical writing out of the hands of independent scholars and general readers, so as to maintain the two-tier (<a href="http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/01/edge"><span style="color: windowtext;">or more</span></a>) system of authorities by which the tenured speak only to the tenured &amp; tenured-to-be (they hope). Or you can wait until <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/NewSearch4.cfm?id=133172"><span style="color: windowtext;">Blue Studios</span></a> </i>comes forth as a book, which I am told it shall, very soon, from the </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">University</span></st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Alabama</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, July 11, 2005</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A curious fact that I&#8217;ve known now for nearly 40 years &#8211; I am constitutionally incapable of taking in more than one longpoem at a time. Right now, for Rachel Blau DuPlessis&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts, </i>a project that I find as rapturous in execution as it is awesome in its concept, this is just fine. I&#8217;ve been working my way through it very slowly now for two years at least, and at the rate I&#8217;m going it will be another two years before I complete <a href="http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1844710726.htm"><span style='color:black'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts 39-57 Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis</span></a>. </i>In fact, I&#8217;m still in the final stages of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6484-2.html"><span style='color:black'>Drafts 1-38, Toll</span></a>. </i>Perhaps by the time I get through the later volume, the next stage of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts, </i>55-77, will be ready for press. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>While this works just about perfectly for my experience of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drafts </i>&#8211; a poem I frankly never want to end &#8211; this is not such good news for Anne Waldman&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Iovis </i>or Robert Fitterman&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Metropolis, </i>both of which will have to wait their turn. I&#8217;ve tried to read more than one longpoem at once, and finally decided that it does a disservice to the poems as well as to my reading. It&#8217;s as if there were a particular segment of my brain set aside just for such projects, and it doesn&#8217;t allow multi-tasking, even tho it seems to permit me to read an almost infinite number of shorter books &amp; poems, even somewhat large ones. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is a difference between a longpoem and a large one, I&#8217;ve learned. Kenny Goldsmith&#8217;s various &#8220;uncreative writing&#8221; projects are large, as is Vernon Frazer&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Improvisations, </i>a 700-page poem that takes up all of its 8.5-by-11-inch pages, but which took just five years to write. The same is true for several of Peter <span class=SpellE>Ganick&#8217;s</span> booklength projects. Indeed, although no one to my knowledge has yet written the work that will prove this point, I suspect that a longpoem need not be a large one at all, for what makes it long is not page numbers so much as time of composition, the compression of years onto the page. Think of the nine-line poem that Francis Ponge writes over &amp; over during a two-month period whilst hiding out from the Nazis in 1940, recorded in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Notebook of the Pine Woods </i>(available in English, I believe, only in Cid <span class=SpellE>Corman&#8217;s</span> out-of-print volume of Ponge translations, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/drjls"><span style='color:black'>Things</span></a></i>). Imagine this same process now carried out over 20 or 60 years. It&#8217;s certainly an imaginable project, at least in the same sense that the glass bead game in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Glasperlenspiel"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Magister</span></span><span style='color:black'> <span class=SpellE>Ludi</span></span></a> </i>is an imaginable game. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Happily, I do seem to be able to read what one author of a longpoem has written about another, even if the essay is, literally, in verse, as is the case with Fitterman&#8217;s fabulous <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>1-800-Flowers, </i>the text of a talk given at the <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/zukofsky/100/"><span style='color:black'>centennial celebration</span></a> of the work of Louis Zukofsky last fall at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Columbia</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. Subtitled &#8220;Inventory as Poetry in Louis Zukofsky&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>80 Flowers,&#8221; </i>Fitterman&#8217;s critical poem has just been released as a chapbook by <span class=SpellE>porci</span> con le <span class=SpellE>ali</span>, with offices in Bangor, Maine, &amp; <span class=SpellE>Catania</span>, Italy (the press&#8217; title translates into Pigs with Wings, sort of a stockier Pegasus).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Fitterman&#8217;s interest here is not so much in close-reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>80 Flowers, </i>tho he does so at one point, persuasively &amp; with great élan, as it is in understanding the why of Zukofsky&#8217;s strategies, ultimately to the idea  that<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>one composes with what one<br>
finds already there<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>which leads to an art that may appear depictive when it is really constructive.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Fitterman&#8217;s reading &amp; presentation are brilliant, tho finally LZ brings him to the point one so often comes to in Zukofsky&#8217;s work, that instant when the surfeit of meaning simply boils over into a cornucopia of possibility. Fitterman&#8217;s garden ends up, literally, in deep weeds. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What is of extraordinary value here, to my ear at least, is how Fitterman gets there. He describes it himself in a piece that appears to be titled &#8220;Constraints&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Because this catalogue of strategies<br>
drives</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>80 Flowers </i>this piece<br>
<span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>1-800-Flowers </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>is a critical discussion<br>
sod in the same constructive<br>
verse 8-line 5-words-per-line structure updating<br>
several of Zukofsky&#8217;s sources 1-800<br>
corporate histories how-to gardening relying<br>
on Zukofsky&#8217;s own books indexes<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I love it that Fitterman chooses to replicate Zukofsky&#8217;s own favorite formal cheat: letting a complex construction such as &#8220;5-words-per-line&#8221; count as a single term. To this, Fitterman adds one of his own (tho, in fact, we&#8217;ve seen it before, even just this past week in Aaron Kunin&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Floating Ruler Star</i>) of having titles to segment the text into poems when, in fact, the text itself is continuous, not many poems but one. More so than Kunin, these titles are key terms themselves in the argument &amp; flow continuously into the text (and out of the prior one). The titles range in length from one word to six, so that they literally regulate Fitterman&#8217;s ability to stay within his own set constraints.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>By means of no accident, Fitterman traces <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>80 Flower&#8217;s </i>origins as verbal collage back to many other Zukofsky works &amp; books, right back to the dedication to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;Poem beginning &#8216;The.&#8217;&#8221; </i>The key book, however, at least for Fitterman, is a chapbook selection of short poems that is never mentioned in the big Johns Hopkins edition of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Complete Short Poetry. </i>This is a 43-page stapled edition from 1964 entitled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Found Objects: 1962-1926, </i>published a dozen years ahead of the composition of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Flowers. </i>I have actually never seen a copy of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Found Objects, </i>which Fitterman calls &#8220;this miniature / manifesto reflecting backwards an art / in found objects language predicting / the later <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>80 Flowers </i>dioramas.&#8221; Published by Blue Grass Books, we find Fitterman still <span class=GramE>alluding</span> to it in his essays second portion, called &#8220;Through,&#8221; a demonstration more of method than the argument of the first half, &#8220;About&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Vanity Numbers<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I dreamed I saw St.<br>
Augustine Decline (SAD) arise <span class=SpellE>arise</span><br>
as you are or <span class=SpellE>aries</span><br>
Kentucky blue flux ablaze flog<br>
a new flushing meadow&#8217;s no<br>
private reality is and is<br>
all in the station-to-station directory<br>
Europe newsreels markets across being<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This, to my mind, is the most active reading of another&#8217;s work I&#8217;ve confronted in a very long time. It&#8217;s even great poetry, by no means a requirement for it also to be a superb essay, which it is. Fitterman&#8217;s folly may be fraught with friction, the scrape of consonants (continents) everywhere active, but its value lies precisely in the light it casts into every crevice of Zukofsky&#8217;s garden. <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, February 11, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">I received
multiple emails concerning <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2388705368">my
recent blog</a> on the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the issue of the
subconscious, one of which wanted to know how I could insist that <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">There is never a word
nor syllable nor the slightest scratch upon the paper in any of Rachel Blau
DuPlessis&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upne/0-8195-6485-0.html">Drafts</a></i> that
has not been thoroughly vetted through the mind &amp; imagination of the poet</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">if in fact
her work invokes the unconscious.* DuPlessis, who has very obviously thought
these issues through with extraordinary care, had reactions that are worth
printing in full. I find myself agreeing with most (not all) of her
observations below:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Dear
Ron &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Needless
to say the baby narcissist in me (something the size of a barn) has been
delighted to see your repeated interesting mentions of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drafts</i>, the latest on the issue of subconscious. My thoughts on
this are all one sentence before getting inchoate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">a) I
think you are a little unfair to your "cohort"/generation. Bob
P[erelman]. wittily strikes out with awareness of ps-a thought. Barry
[Watten]'s CRITICISM is articulate to a fault about the point where politics
meets ps-a theory and works that spot brilliantly. Lyn [Hejinian]'s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Life</i> is so against
"depth-psychology" that it is almost a hidden topos. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">b)
me: I always thought with a kind of modernist utopian flair that feminism would
be the/ would make the necessary synthesis of marxism (social-justice thought
is how I translate that) and psychoanalysis. At least that's the way we were
thinking then. I think I am still informed by a version of this hope &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">whatever
it means &#8211; which I think is an awareness of how ideology is inserted in us
(RSAs etc) so that transformational change could occur to create a better, more
just society in distribution of resources and in social power for positive
ends. Which would not be the end of ideology, of course, just of a bad
ideology. Forgive brutally low-level word "bad," please. I didn't
want to use the word repressive as I believe that repression and sublimation
are just dandy, thank you. Anyway, It may be why ps-a is not so foreign to me.
There were many many debates of the use and function of Freud and Freudianism
in feminism, and then also there was HD as a poet who used ps-a. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">c)
H.D. and others like </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> interested in word associations as signifying
chains, palimpsests, underneaths that speak. This is where I come from, or what
part of HD I am fascinated by. You made an interesting slip, in fact, when you
spoke about Ashcroft in your blog, posting one of the few unclear, garbled
sentences I have ever seen you write.** Meditating the force of that kind of
error (an error that had you saying "when when" 2 times) is something
HD and Duncan do a lot. The information sent by words into consciousness by
unconscious. What does yours mean &#8211; that's for you to say, but to me it spoke
from political rage and impatience. (a correct rage and impatience) You also
use puns as condensed knowledge, but keep them located and contained, don't let
them spill out too much (so far as I can see), except by repetition. Cf. other
types of messages that ps-a explores: Messages sent somatically in the body
("pain in the neck" "pain in my butt"). Messages sent in
dreams. Maybe a better word is information and combinations of information. The
term "Messages" is already tainted by what I claim to be against, a
kind of theodocial thinking. Anyway these un-c informations are elements
endlessly to ruminate in some people's poetry</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana;">, Blaser. (Blaser puts all the info on the same
level</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">a wonderful horizontality; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> still believes in DEPTH with capitals.) HOWEVER,
The claim that there is deep universal knowledge to be found in ancient religion
and in words (comically of whatever ancient texts survived or were made
canonical) Can Be a tremendous intellectual problem to some, and I think this
marks the issues that LP (langpo folk) might resist in resisting thinking of
the unconscious. It is really not anti ps-a, but anti-"Jungian" one
might say. "Ancient Wisdom" thinking (running with wolves kind of
stuff) is a kind of thought inadequately situational, inadequately skeptical,
not understanding the various forces of history like fights between groups that
deep-six certain texts, and not understanding the force of accident, chance,
time. That is, considering the unconscious as a source of wisdom informed by
(or throwing up for our education) ancient archetypes etc etc is very
animating, amusing, enriching, etc UNTIL it hits something like the Poundean
limit</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kulchur</i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">"We
think because we do not know" (portentious drum rolls around KNOW), or
what HD said in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trilogy</i>, in a rather
Xtian moment: "In resurrection, there is confusion/ if we start to
argue..." (116). So no discussion, just believe and affirm. This kind of
unskeptical, neo-archetypalism is a great problem for me intellectually and
poetically. When thinking about the un-c goes there, I usually resist. I am
secular and a skeptic; I am more or less a materialist, or at least, to quote
someone named Madonna, believe I live in the material world even if I am a
spiritual "girl" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">d)
However, one of the most interesting contemporary uses of the religious and
mythic and political information that might come through the meditation of
dreams is Alice Notley's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Descent of
Alette</i>, a major long poem. Another (and of course far more Jungian etc) is
the work in general of Clayton Eshleman. I hope in listing these first
responses, I did not misread you or mis-remember what you said. As for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drafts</i>, it is true that I try really
hard to have no mark unaccounted for</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">to say it flatly, I try to know why everything gets
down on the page. This may be deluded (esp in light of ps-a logic, where one
does not ever fully know one's motives!) but it is the paradox of art. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">warmly,
Rachel<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
responding to Rachel, asking if I could use her email here, I also mentioned
that Rae Armantrout struck me as the writer of my cohort who most completely
made use of psychology. I then received an additional email, as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Actually</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">I'd
thought of Rae too, but it was hard for me to put how she does what she does
into words, so I didn't, lazily. I think she gets a sense of the waywardness
and odd glissades of association that run up and down (I mean round and round)
the scale from the social to the inner</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211;
</span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">the unconscious, because all, in her
world, is quirky. Her ways of putting work together draws on a logic of the
unconc. leaps. BUT/AND it wasn't a question of your editing OUT what you said
about Ashcroft, but about seeing it as a place of wound, hurt, loss by virtue
of the typo. I mean this was an example of The unconsc. speaking. In that case,
not to make a bad pun, the "political unconscious." As for my "slips"
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lapsus linguae</i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">try (what
I admitted once in an essay)</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">my constantly typing "Canots" for
"Cantos" while I was writing a diss. on Pound (and Williams). I guess
in that case "Drafts" now answers "Can, too." I don't have
a lot of objection to a raw piece of response of mine being absorbed
bloggishly, as long as its provisional-ness is noted; maybe this here
second-thought, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">treppworter***</i> thing
could be included as well. BUT FINALLY, I don't yet know whether we have a
sense of what "getting psychology in" or working thru the unconscious
is, exactly, in poetry; it seems more mysterious than we've made it so far,
more evocative. It has implications for form, for imagery, for the structure of
meaning, intention, and understanding presented in a work. (Here I think of
Dante.) As if one wanted the poem to explore the deeper rhythms and allegories
of knowing that our sense of the Unconc. offers.(Here I think of some Ashbery.)
And in terms of a double line of word associations, a parallel world, there's
always Charles' <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">With Strings</i>. This
(implications for form, imagery, narrative, allegory) is why I think The
Descent of Alette is a terrific and moving work. It occurred to me to note an
essay of Alice Notley's, in addition to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alette
</i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">the "What Can Be Learned From Dreams?" which appeared in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scarlet</i> in 1991 and argues eloquently
for the information that the unconscious can offer</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">this
being (in part) a very present, palpable sense of temporality, an enriched
narrative possibility, strange imagery and event in kinds of disproportionate
relationships to the expected, and</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">this is key for Notley</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">"moral
knowledge"</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">all this can come from dreams. Of course</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; </span><span style="font-family: Verdana;">and you
know this, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Alice</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> would be writing in part from an explicitly
anti-LP position. So edit this in too, our bit of exchange.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">* Perhaps I should have said
that DuPlessis &#8220;invokes &amp; addresses&#8221; the unconscious. I was not, I hope,
suggesting that her work was written unconsciously!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">** The Potemkin Village of
my syntax has subsequently been realigned. DuPlessis is absolutely correct in
her presumption that thinking about Ashcroft drives me into fits of sputtering
rage. &#8211; RS <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*** Yiddish for "stairwords" &#8211; the words
you wish you'd said at the party, but only think of what you could have said on
the stairs, going home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, February 07, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There is never a word nor
syllable nor the slightest scratch upon the paper in any of Rachel Blau
DuPlessis&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upne/0-8195-6485-0.html">Drafts</a></i> that
has not been thoroughly vetted through the mind &amp;imagination of the poet.
So when I find indeterminacy &amp; surplus in her texts, I know that they
haven&#8217;t gotten there by accident, that even when it appears &#8220;meaningless,&#8221; it
means something.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I was reading &#8220;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Draft</i> 2: She&#8221;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>this morning, which is replete with such effects. A case in point:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Dabbles the <span class="SpellE">blankie</span>
down<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">din</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">do</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> throw <span class="SpellE">foo</span> <span class="SpellE">foo</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">noo</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">dles</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> the <span class="SpellE">arror</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> eros
the error of arrows<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">each</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> little
spoil and spill<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">all</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> during
pieces fly apart</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="SpellE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Splatting</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> crumb bits
there and there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Feed &#8216;n&#8217; wipe. Woo <span class="SpellE">woo</span> petunia<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">pie</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Hard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">to</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> get
the fail of it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">large</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> small
specks each naming<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">yellow</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
surface<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">green</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> bites<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Red elbow kicks an </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">oran</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ge
tangerine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If my HTML skills were up to
it &#8211; they aren&#8217;t &#8211; I might offer some even more extreme examples: there are <span class="SpellE">are</span> <span class="SpellE">twelves</span> places in this
eight-page poem in which DuPlessis offers alternative word choices typed almost
literally atop one another, as in &#8220;the mother/the monster&#8221; or &#8220;hurl/hole/hurt.&#8221;
<span class="GramE">But, as DuPlessis herself notes in the passage quoted above,
&#8220;large small specks each naming.&#8221;</span> Just because these uses of
alternatives &amp; of baby talk don&#8217;t resolve to traditional denotations does
not make them <span class="SpellE">unmeaningful</span>. Woo <span class="SpellE">woo</span>
petunia!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The question here is what.
At one level, &#8220;She&#8221; is about gendering the family &amp; the intricacies of
mother-daughter roles. At another, it&#8217;s about the acculturation of the child
into the world of adult roles &amp; values &amp; systems, language foremost
among them. It&#8217;s precisely in the use of language that cannot be resolved into
normative concepts of meaning that I most hear the world as it was viewed by <a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/">Louis <span class="SpellE">Althusser</span></a>, the late French political philosopher, at
least in his saner moments. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="SpellE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Althusser&#8217;s</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> observation was the world replicated itself through
two systems &#8211; <span class="SpellE">repressessive</span> state apparatuses (<span class="SpellE">RSAs</span>) and ideological state apparatuses (<span class="SpellE">ISAs</span>). We are, all of us, only too familiar with <span class="SpellE">RSAs</span>, which include everything from stop signs to the
Justice <span class="SpellE">Deparment</span> (even <span class="SpellE">when</span>
it&#8217;s not in the hands of a maniacal neo-fascist like John Ashcroft) to the
version our government is about to visit on the people of Iraq. <span class="SpellE">ISAs</span> are more numerous, more complex, more subtle &amp;
ultimately more powerful. The church, family, popular media, even poetry,
generally fall in the <span class="SpellE">Althusserian</span> scheme onto the
side of <span class="SpellE">ISAs</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I should say something about
ideology here, which in the <span class="SpellE">Althusserian</span> model is
only incidentally about being a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian or a
Green, or even about being &#8220;for&#8221; or &#8220;against&#8221; capitalism. Rather, as <span class="SpellE">Althusser</span> saw it, ideology is that which calls your name
&amp; by which &amp; through which you recognize yourself. As such, it is
precisely a subconscious process, exactly the level on which the material
signifiers of language operate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For all of the
unquestionable pleasures of the Lacanian &amp; for the ways in which, say, a </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Carla Harryman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> might make use of a <span class="SpellE">Kristeva</span>,
my sense has been that with the notable (&amp; almost sole) exception of </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Nick Piombino</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, the unconscious in writing has been given short
shrift at best by my own generation of poets. Most of the effects of a text
such as Clark Coolidge&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maintains </i>or
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Polaroid</i> occur at the subconscious
level or else can be described in the matter-of-fact language of feature
analysis, a close reading of surface devices that never actually gets to what
occurs <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">elsewhere</i> when one reads. At one
level, I think one could much the same about Lee Ann Brown or Quincy Troupe or even
Billy Collins. But, at another, the absence of such critique seems especially galling
in the case of poets whose work actively eschews normative expository,
figurative or narrative frames. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When I think of the poets of
the New American generation, three in particular seem to have made active
reference to, or use of, psychoanalysis in any form: Charles Olson, Robert
Duncan &amp; Robert Bly. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
in good part because of H.D.&#8217;s influence, made active &amp;, I think,
relatively effective use of Freud, although now that I put those words to
screen, I realize that I cannot fully articulate what I mean by that. Olson
poured Jungian analysis into his vast grab-bag of intellectual discourses that
he might call upon, but, while the <span class="SpellE">spectre</span> of Jung
has sometimes been raised to suggest a reason &amp; underlying cohesion for the
great &amp; wonderful mess that is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maximus</i>,
Olson&#8217;s own approach has always struck me as remarkably unsystematic, forever
opportunistic, &amp; as indebted as much to Mao as to the Vienna gang. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bly? Well, it rhymes with
sigh. Invoking Jung in a very different light &amp; yoking it first to bad
translations of the especially narrow swath he cut through the surrealists
&amp; later to the Iron John one-man comic philosopher shtick, Bly went a long
way toward making <span class="SpellE">psychoanlysis</span>, Jungian or Freudian,
off-limits to a younger generation of poets unable to suppress their
snickering. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bly was one of a generation
of poets who was raised initially within the framework of the old </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New England</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> formalist tradition, but who in the 1950s rebelled
against its even then moribund dynamics. Including W.S. <span class="SpellE">Merwin</span>,
James Wright &amp; Adrienne Rich in addition to Bly, these poets did not turn
automatically to the growing alternative of the New Americans*, but rather
struck off in a new direction, which for the male poets among them meant a
version of surrealism and, at least for Bly &amp; <span class="SpellE">Merwin</span>,
a turn toward European influences. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For a brief moment in the
early 1960s, Bly in particular made an attempt to forge a synthesis with some
of the next generation of New Americans, most notably </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert Kelly</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, whose interest in all matters occult took him
through Jung, and Jerome Rothenberg, whose interest in ethnopoetics took him
far closer to native roots than the <span class="SpellE">pancho</span> that was <span class="SpellE">Bly&#8217;s</span> omnipresent clothing accessory during that decade. The
&#8220;deep image&#8221; movement didn&#8217;t last long. I&#8217;ve written <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html">before</a>
of how Kelly&#8217;s interest in the alternative wisdom traditions helped to cut him
off from some of the younger &amp; more secular poets who would come up around langpo.
The figuration given to the unconscious in the work of some of the poets around
first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caterpillar</i> &amp; later <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sulfur,</i> especially that offered by
Clayton Eshleman, only furthered to steer the next generation of poets, already
deeply suspicious of figuration itself, in the opposite direction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the great ironies in
this is that the unconscious is to analysis what birds are to ornithology, and
it&#8217;s the unconscious processing of poetry that&#8217;s of interest here more than the
extrapolation of intellectual systems. It has long seemed to me that the New
American who most directly raised the issue of the unconscious in his poetry
was not Olson or Duncan, who tended more to talk about it, but Jack Spicer.
Spicer&#8217;s use of contradiction &amp; <span class="SpellE">overdetermination</span>
is unparalleled in his generation &amp; tugs continually at the ways in which
we utilize &amp; experience just such phenomena, not merely mentally but in
day-to-day life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s interesting in this
regard that there really was no such thing as a second generation </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> renaissance. Spicer&#8217;s early death in 1965, preceded
by the decline of his health due to drinking, set his own circle adrift, with
significant portions ending up in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Vancouver</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; even, in the presence of Larry Fagin, in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">. The poets who most deeply reflected </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s influence &#8211; David Bromige, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Michael Palmer</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Aaron Shurin</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, <span class="GramE">David</span> Melnick &#8211; seem to have worked with him serially. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s imperiousness &amp; his public battles with Spicer
in their later years made it even less likely that anything cohesive might arise
out of such a problematic context. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So when Rachel Blau
DuPlessis roars out &#8220;Woo <span class="SpellE">woo</span> petunia,&#8221; I sense her
taking up something that has lain untouched for some time in writing &#8211; not that
it isn&#8217;t present, say, in the work of Frank O&#8217;Hara or any of another 100 poets
you could name, but rather that it exists there unaddressed, not unlike the
alcoholic uncle at the end of the couch nobody quite mentions. And I wonder if
poets such as Coolidge (or even, for that matter, myself) have felt safer
precisely because a discussion of the unconscious has been off the table for so
many decades, as if we could venture into this territory knowing that no
critical frames existed that could be usefully employed, precisely because they
had been blocked by the use of the discourses (Freud, Jung, but as read by Bly
or Duncan) that had been there previously. Like Grenier&#8217;s use of the literally
subliminal in his scrawl works, DuPlessis gives us <span class="GramE">a writing</span>
in places &#8211; it&#8217;s not the only thing she&#8217;s up to here, just the one that I&#8217;m
intrigued with today &#8211; that can only be forever <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beyond</i> the rational. At one level, it&#8217;s a demand, a demand that we
come to understand exactly what it means.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Woo <span class="SpellE">woo</span>
petunia<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">pie</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Although
Rich&#8217;s pivotal poem &#8220;Diving into the Wreck,&#8221; made its first appearance in
Clayton Eshleman&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caterpillar.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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