I received multiple emails concerning my recent blog on the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the issue of the subconscious, one of which wanted to know how I could insist that

There is never a word nor syllable nor the slightest scratch upon the paper in any of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts that has not been thoroughly vetted through the mind & imagination of the poet

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:

Dear Ron –

Needless to say the baby narcissist in me (something the size of a barn) has been delighted to see your repeated interesting mentions of Drafts, the latest on the issue of subconscious. My thoughts on this are all one sentence before getting inchoate.

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 My Life is so against "depth-psychology" that it is almost a hidden topos.

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 –

whatever it means – 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.

c) H.D. and others like Duncan 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 – 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 – Duncan, Blaser. (Blaser puts all the info on the same level – a wonderful horizontality; Duncan 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 – from Kulchur – "We think because we do not know" (portentious drum rolls around KNOW), or what HD said in Trilogy, 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"

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 Descent of Alette, 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 Drafts, it is true that I try really hard to have no mark unaccounted for – 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.

warmly, Rachel

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:

Actually – 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 – 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 lapsus linguae – try (what I admitted once in an essay) – 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, treppworter*** 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' With Strings. 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 Alette – the "What Can Be Learned From Dreams?" which appeared in Scarlet in 1991 and argues eloquently for the information that the unconscious can offer – 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 – this is key for Notley – "moral knowledge" – all this can come from dreams. Of course – and you know this, Alice would be writing in part from an explicitly anti-LP position. So edit this in too, our bit of exchange.

* Perhaps I should have said that DuPlessis “invokes & addresses” the unconscious. I was not, I hope, suggesting that her work was written unconsciously!

** 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. – RS

*** Yiddish for "stairwords" – the words you wish you'd said at the party, but only think of what you could have said on the stairs, going home.