Rachel Blau DuPlessis has
told me, on more than one occasion, that no writer of
long poems before me apparently commented in any particular detail on the
process of starting or constructing such a work. But DuPlessis has herself done
so, at least partly (& to some degree indirectly), in an essay entitled
“Haibun: ‘Draw Your Draft,’” in H.D. and Poets After,
edited by Don a Krolik Hollenberg. It’s an interesting volume overall with poets
Alicia Ostriker, Robert Kelly , Sharon Doubiago, Frances Jaffer, Kathleen Fraser, Brenda Hillman, Leslie Scalapino, Nate Mackey & Carolyn Forché
in addition to DuPlessis writing on their relationship to Hilda Doolittle, each
in turn followed by a second essay by a scholar on the same topic – Burt Hatlen contributes the companion to DuPlessis’ essay.
A sample passage:
No
plan, no design, no schemata. Just a few procedures: placing works on the big
stage of the page, making each be itself intact and
autonomous but connected to themselves as they emerged. No continuous
narrative. No myth as explanation. Here Drafts
are very different from H.D.’s long poems and quite related to Objectivist
ethos and poetics. The works are influenced by Objectivist argument and
propositions about reality. That the image is encountered, not found, as Oppen
proposed. That the
and a (said Zukofsky testily)
are words worth investigating, as suggestive and as staggering in their
implications as any epic or myth.
Even though DuPlessis ranges
far beyond just her relationship to H.D., there is no single summation here –
indeed, DuPlessis warns in an end note, that this account is far from
comprehensive, citing a wide range of other sources & influences as diverse
as Rae Armantrout & Clayton Eshleman.* In an unnumbered note, DuPlessis
comments that “I also follow the ‘hermetic’ encoding in H.D. that involves
having an H and a D in titles that consider her.” Thus, “Draft 12: Haibun.”
The conjunction of these
factors – the charged, but non-exclusive discourse with modernism, the concern
with the letter, brought up something very different to mind, a poem,
specifically this:
There is more here than memory.
*
Reading
Paterson on the bus, back & forth. Across the city. The 210. A man & a city.
I am not a man & this is
not my city.
Williams
though as a guide. His universals as particulars,
ideas in things. His rhythms. Every rhythmic
shaking (like a belly dancer), splashing (like the Falls)
lines. Insistences. Insistence on persisting. . . .
Stuck stuck
stuck the W – a poem in the new Sulfur began with a quote from Bréton that the surrealists opposed
the W to the V of the visible –
The W atop Woodward’s – the
big, brick, block-long (almost – next building west was Woolworth’s – another W
(west a W, was a W)
These excerpts come from the
very first section of George Stanley’s Vancouver,
which I found at the very end of his most recent book, At Andy’s,
an echo of how the first of DuPlessis’ Drafts
appeared at the back of Tabula Rosa
(Potes & Poets, 1987). I’ve compared Vancouver & Drafts before,
but these additional layers of correspondence amaze me.
DuPlessis, in “Haibun,”
speaks also of memory:
At a
certain point in this exploration of the rhetorics of
“drafting” I realized that I was constructing a texture of déjà vu, a set of
works that mimicked the productions and losses of memory. And that the works
were my own response both to the memorializing function of poetry and to my own
bad memory. “An exploration of the chaos of memory (obscured, alienated, or
reduced to a range of natural references) cannot be done in the ‘clarity’ of a
linear narrative”** . . . . Bad memory. Bad dog. Bad bad
memory. The poem replicates (but neither reconstructs nor represents) a
space of memory.
Part of what amazes me in
these convergences is that if I were to construct a scale of the poets who had
some relation to the journals Caterpillar
& Sulfur, edited by Clayton
Eshleman, according to the degree of Jack Spicer’s influence perceptible in their
poetry, Stanley & DuPlessis would almost be the
opposite extremes. Yet here are two projects that are, if not parallel, at
least so filled with resonances back & forth, that each poem works in part
to illuminate the other.
* Caveat
lector: my name appears in that list.
** Caribbean
Discourse: Selected Essays, by Edouard Glissant, p. 107.