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 Dona 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.

Looking at Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 1: It again this morning, I realize that what I’d previously taken for a more abstract drawing that comes later in the text is, like the pair of drawn Ns at the front, letters, in this instance Ys. In each case, one letter is much larger than the other, with the smaller inscribed in a wedge of the larger. It’s funny how you can look at something off & on for 15 years, before a detail this basic jumps out at you, but there you have it.

The Ys occur at the end of one of the more curious passages in Draft 1:

The struggle from whiteness

into whiteness

via black wit-

ness

I

ching.

Nothing in my prior experience of DuPlessis gives me reason to believe that she has an interest in what I’ve called the alternative wisdom traditions, so the appearance of the old Chinese system of chance divination gets my attention because it is unexpected. Further, the idea of “black witness” – a phrase I can easily imagine DuPlessis speaking – refers on a very different level to the civil rights movement of the 1950s & ‘60s. But from whiteness into whiteness suggests that other meanings have to be given precedence here. There is a discourse of color in Draft 1 that is worth cataloging: “sunlight / silver backed,” “it / lettered on green up hillside’s social lining,”  “Black // coding inside         A / white fold open,” “A white house seems / to be a further / coagulation of mist / Lucite see-thru overlay,” “CANO*, can o,       yes     no,” “’sea-blazed gold’,” “clouds       for fat and white,” “space white and open a flat / spot a lite on / it,” “Object (pronoun) / squeaks its little song its bright white / dear dead dark,” “theater of the / / page    cream    space    peaks,” “where in the placement of saffron / . . . and black tuft of heide,” “one point is to achieve a social momentum of switched / referents and (merry coral        white clover / ding ding ding) commentary,” & then this remarkable passage:

a kind of orange it happens

a kind of orange

IT HAPPENS

rose rinse, vertical green

Away anyway has shadow

“a typical Rachel shadow”

blue starts limb long and torso struggles

its window when all around there’s not a single

wall, NO blockages

hardly stopped at all except by the pleasures

of color are you getting the picture

it hppns BLUEW one from the sequences of looming

comes            longing

White & black are of course unique hues, white figuring as the undifferentiated presence of all color in light, but as the absence of color in pigmentation. Light/pigment, white/black, yes/no (Y/N), sound/silence – a string of threshold points appear to surround & pass through that simplest, most self-effacing of pronouns. It’s in this sense that I begin to understand the allusion to the I ching. Of all pronouns, it most completely functions as a lens, directing sight, refracting color, offering nothing (or very little) of itself as object.

In a way, DuPlessis is playing with the idea of language’s ostensible transparency, but only to point up all the problematic catches, the moments where the signifier itself happens (or, for that matter, “hppns”) – meaning, sound, sight, desire, the whole of the world trying to come through – “a plot,” as she notes, bracketing the phrase in quotation marks, “a plot / against the reader.”

* Spanish for “white”

Commenting upon George Stanley’s excerpt from Vancouver in The Poker turned out to bring goodies in time for the holiday season. Kevin Davies sent me a copy of another excerpt from Book One and I was directed to yet another shining example in the new issue of Shampoo  by editor Del Ray Cross. This last piece has two different descriptions of the late Angela Bowering that make me envious of those who knew her, as well as further confirmation of my theory of Vancouver & the poetry of transit. The poem also has  a wonderful dictum that I suspect Stanley would like to believe – write carelessly – tho in fact he is one of the great careful writers of our time. 

All of which made me think of how we begin the longpoem, those of us who do write them, and that one of my New Years Resolutions for 2003 is to read Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts 1-38, Toll with the kind of long, slow, luxuriating attention that I believe it deserves. So I got a jump on the new year and sat down & read (reread, really) Draft 1: It, first in the large Wesleyan University Press edition, then in the even larger (at least in terms of page size) Temblor 5 where I first encountered this poem back in 1987. Way back when, I don’t think it struck me how one of the keys to Drafts was (or, really, back then, would be) how each section always links to a title, most often (but not always) a single word. “Links to a title” may seem a funny way of phrasing this, yet I sense that these are not titles in the same way that, say, “The Multiversity” is the title for Passages 23 for Robert Duncan or Paradise is the title of one section of my own Alphabet. As I think becomes clear when reads DuPlessis, every word for her is always provisional. The monumental aspect of poetry titles seems something very different – and yet, these aren’t “captions” either, at least not in the way that Benjamin distinguishes between those two categories, one name the work, the other pulling out a highlight or foregrounding some element within. My own sense here at least at this point, is that DuPlessis uses these words & phrases to identify territories in the vicinity of which the poems then work.

In 1987, I knew DuPlessis as one of several poets whom I might characterize as post-Objectivist, a grouping as diverse as John Taggart, Michael Heller & Armand Schwerner. DuPlessis was notable also for being the one woman who seemed actively drawn to this literary tradition. But nothing in her (first?) book Wells (Montemora Supplement, 1980) prepared me for this suddenly expansive use of the page. Perhaps if I had read Gypsy / Moth (Coincidence Press, 1984) more attentively, I would have realized that its title page, assigning the two poems of that volume to a longer project, the “History of Poetry” (and with the word Keats both printed and X’d out right in the center of the page), was in fact announcing DuPlessis’ taking on of something of greater scale, not just in size but also in intellectual ambition.

DuPlessis is more explicit in Tabula Rosa (Potes & Poets, 1987), which includes 17 pieces from the “History of Poetry,” including the two David Sheidlower had published in the earlier book. The section – it forms the first half of the book – has an epigram that is telling: “She cannot forget the history of poetry / because it is not hers.” That was the clearest statement yet of DuPlessis’ own sense of herself as writing as an outsider, a position that will very much inform Drafts. The second half of Tabula Rosa is, in fact, entitled “Drafts,” & reprints the first two from Temblor. But it also contains a serial poem, “Writing,” that, with commentary, runs 30 pages, longer than the two sections of DuPlessis’ new longpoem.

“Writing’s” ultimate relation to Drafts isn’t self-evident – it’s not included here in the Wesleyan edition. Reading it, it feels (very much as the “History of Poets” does for me also) as a necessary step for DuPlessis to clear the ground on which she could begin the true longpoem. Already in “Writing,” DuPlessis is moving away from standard type-driven forms. Handwritten in one section are these sentiments: “wanting to have her book virtually nameless / what is the most transparent name?” Tabula Rosa, in spite of its pun, “Writing” and Drafts all seem possible responses to that question.

Between Tabula Rosa and the Wesleyan edition, DuPlessis will publish three more collections of Drafts:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>A volume from Potes & Poets entitled Drafts, containing numbers 3 through 14

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>A large & wonderfully designed Singing Horse Press edition of Draft X: Letters

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Another volume from Potes & Poets entitled Drafts 1-XXX, The Fold.

“It” is as contra-auspicious a title one might propose for the opening of a longpoem, which is the point. The poem itself begins with an initial “N.” that is then repeated, followed by two hand drawn Ns, large & asymmetrical, giving the page as much a sketch of a mountaintop (my immediate thought, seeing them, was Wordsworth’s alps – Bunting’s version of same also – although to a later reader the use of the hand here would no doubt call up Bob Grenier’s own “scrawl” texts*), followed by a section divider, which in this piece is a pair of equal signs. Thus signs & sounds are all that we are given in the very first section. There is not even one vowel. & the consonant chosen (no accident here) comes more than halfway through the alphabet itself. There’s no way to make a word out of this, the way one could stretch “m” into “mmmmmm.” The use of the period with each “N” reinforces its “vocal but subverbal” qualities, just as the mountain tops carry us back to a time when language is as much picture as conventional representation of sound.

Think of every longpoem you have ever read – none has an opening passage even remotely like this. No jewels & diamonds, no round of fiddles, no going down to the ships. The closest I can imagine is Duncan’s reference to a cat’s purr, but that is at the start of the second Passages, not the first. So, even if we buy the scrawled Ns as mountain tops, any allusion to The Prelude is at best an echo that tugs ever so faintly in the work.

The second passage is everything the first one is not:

and something spinning in the bushes                               the past

                                    dismembered                                         sweetest

            dizzy chunk of song

Here suddenly we have miracles, memory, history, fragmentation, qualities, the whole idea that song, for example, might be characterized as a “dizzy chunk.” When I get to this moment, I do in fact hear an echo from the start of a longpoem, but on a very different order:

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer way.

                 clean-washed sea

The flowers were.

John Ashbery’s “The New Spirit,” the start of Three Poems (which I will always read as one), presents a very similar opposed pair – but note that DuPlessis has reversed the order, or at the very least suggested that possibility.

One image or theme that runs through this passage is light: “all the sugar is reconstituted: / sunlight” or “light this / governed being:    it?        that?” This question of embodiment leads to the section’s last stanza, which transforms a Zukofskian moment of closure that is almost stunning in how directly DuPlessis gets to it”

plunges into every object

a word and then some                      chuck and

pwhee wee

half

tones

have tune’s

heft.

There are no half measures in these two passages – DuPlessis takes you right smack into the heart of writing with all of its epistemological & ontological questions in what amounts to a “take no prisoners” directness. The ambition of the moment is both sweeping and breath-taking. We are indeed at the cusp of a great adventure.

* I’m not sure whether any of Grenier’s scrawl works, which I believe existed by the mid 1980s, had appeared anywhere that DuPlessis might have seen them at this point in history. My guess is not.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis gave a reading Tuesday night at Kelly Writers House at Penn & it was wonderful. It was wonderful because Drafts, the long poem that DuPlessis has been writing for the past dozen or so years is a rich, intelligent, multi-faceted project that offers a deep vision of what poetry at its very best can be. It was wonderful because DuPlessis has the experience to know what works in a reading & how best to deliver her work – to hear her read is to be in the presence of a master. And it was wonderful because DuPlessis gave herself a full 45 minutes to read. It was a remarkably short & intense 45 minutes & could have gone easily for another 30 without seeming the least bit long.

I recall Bruce Andrews years ago telling me, only half in jest, that you could tell a West Coat language poet by the fact that they read forever whenever they gave readings in New York. The underlying reality, I think, was that readings in San Francisco, at least in the late 1970s through the mid-80s, often ran 40 minutes or more per reader. On the East Coast, two-person readings were (and still are) often completed within an hour, even with a break between readers.

It’s not that everyone on one coast was desperate to get to the bar after the reading in order to gossip, flirt, philosophize & schmooze. In the comparatively hard-drinking ‘70s & ‘80s, both coasts had that routine down to a fine art, whether the post-reading establishment of choice was the Ab Zum Zum Room on San Francisco’s Haight Street or the Ukrainian National Home (“Ukes”)  on Second Avenue in New York, or Spec’s or Tosca’s in North Beach.

No, I think that people in San Francisco had something of a different idea in those days about what you might get out of a reading, how you approached it as a listener as well as from a reader’s perspective. The real reading doesn’t begin until the reader can hear the audience audibly shifting in their chairs – it is literally a matter of body language – settling in. The audience isn’t completely engulfed in the reader’s voice or world until about twenty minutes into the reading, which – if the reader is any good – is when the event begins to take on a special quality, when the ear can hear as well as the eye can see, when a good poem genuinely can transport a listener not only into a different universe or world, but into the most minute points of the text, all those little features that are inaudible until then. For example, how often DuPlessis uses “so” as a connector between sentences – perhaps her one Poundian trait – and the relative elevation in rhetorical tone that one little word lends to a text. I’d never noticed that before & I’m not at all certain that I would have if DuPlessis had only read one section of Drafts & kept the reading to 15 or 20 minutes. Nor might I have noticed how she pronounces certain words differently than I do, such as “barbaric.” For her, those first two syllables rhyme, whereas I flatten the “a” in the second syllable almost to a nasal twang: “bar-bear-ic.” I’m not sure what that might be telling us about our relative histories and placement on a linguistic geography, but the reading made me realize that, intellectually at least, I prefer her version.

Any good reading brings so much new information to a listener who knows, at least in general terms, the work of the reader. In Draft 12: Diasporas (p. 85 of Drafts 1-38, Toll, Wesleyan, 2001), DuPlessis filled in the blanks of “X---xes” as ”Xeroxes,” subtly registering that company’s well-known allergy against the generic use of their corporate name. The word ties that line more completely to the discussion of photocopying and intellectual property &, frankly, it’s obvious on the page – I’d just been clueless previously. So the reading offered me new depths & twists, throughout. A good reading of familiar work is not like seeing a favorite movie the second, third, or fifth time nearly so much as it is seeing an entirely new production, say, of Lear that enables you to imagine the play from a whole new vantage point. Which isn’t the poet’s necessarily, although it is one very much informed by how the poet understands his or her work.

San Francisco in the very early 1970s was, in a curious way, virgin territory for poetry readings. There had been a lull in the scene for a few years – I might trace it back to the death of Jack Spicer & the diaspora of poets up to Vancouver, but since I wasn’t really old enough to see the “before,” I’m just guessing. In 1972, however, there were only two regular reading series in town: one out at San Francisco State, mostly held in the daytime mid-week, constrained by academic class schedules & inaccessible to people who worked; the second held at the Intersection, then on Union Street in North Beach, held on Tuesday evenings. The series at Intersection in those days was erratic & unfocused. They could have Michael Ondaatje or Jim Carroll one week and then go three months before anything interesting showed up again. The result was that there was no continuity of audience from Tuesday to Tuesday, the key to the sort of ongoing feedback that makes a reading series more than just a presentation forum. Short-run series, such as one held in the press offices of Empty Elevator Shaft books out in upper Noe Valley (where I first met Kathy Acker), were relatively rare. So when Michael Bono & Barrett Watten started up a reading series at the Grand Piano coffee house in the Haight, there really wasn’t any established reading protocol. Nobody told anybody that readings needed to be 20 minutes or less. So people gravitated naturally to what proved most valuable. Which in turn meant that the standard reading was two poets reading for 45 minutes each with a healthy break in between & everyone retiring to some common venue for discussion afterwards. A reading that took less than two hours was considered a rip-off of your $1 donation.

I think that some of what came out of San Francisco in the mid-1970s can be traced back to people giving more in-depth readings & the audience feedback that ensued. This wasn’t restricted to just four or five people – it was pretty much everybody, regardless of aesthetic. One ironic result of course is that when some out-of-towners came in & gave short readings, it made everybody in SF think that these auslanders weren’t really working very hard. Which no doubt was unfair & really ultimately inaccurate, but it reinforced the idea that everybody locally was trying their very hardest & that the result was turning out to be something special. That sense of something special going on also propelled people to strive to do both more & better.

So that in a nutshell is my secret sauce for how to make a scene a really happening one, just make the readings longer & get everyone to go out for a drink & a chat afterwards (Writers House often has a sumptuous spread, which is a perfectly acceptable alternative).

It was wonderful to hear DuPlessis the other evening give the kind of reading that brings out all these extra layers in her work, especially to an audience that included Eli Goldblatt, Al Filreis, Tom Devaney, Jena Osman, Samuel R. Delany, Bob Perelman & some 40 or so other very lucky people. & what made me happiest was that she gave herself – and us in the audience – the time to really hear that work.