October 21, 2011 - 10 am to 5 pm -
1810 Liacouras Walk -
Temple University, Main Campus

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.
(From "Précis")

10 am - Welcome from Dean Teresa Soufas, College of Liberal Arts

10:15 am - Bob Perelman, University of Pennsylvania, "The Mothers of Us All, and Their Fathers: Drafts and the Epic Tradition"

11:15 am - Libbie Rifkin, Georgetown University, "Deixis, Midrash, Footnote:  Experiencing Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Present."

11:40 am - Eric Keenaghan, SUNY Albany, "re:''Openings' and RBD's Étude: A Footnote on Politics and Vision."

Lunch Break

1 pm - Ron Silliman, "Un-scene, Ur-new: Time, History & Ambition in The Collage Poems of Drafts"

2 pm - Reading by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

3 pm - Reading by Jena Osman, Temple University

3:30 pm - Reading by Brian Teare, Temple University

4 pm - Readings by alumni and members of the Philadelphia poetry community: Emily Abendroth, Holly Bittner, C.A. Conrad, Thomas Devaney, Sarah Dowling, Ryan Eckes, Lucia Gbaya-Kanga, Pattie McCarthy, Michelle Taransky, Heather Thomas, Kevin Varrone

4:50 pm - Closing remarks by Eli Goldblatt, Temple University

5 pm - Reception, Women's Studies Lounge in Anderson Hall, Room 821

Please RSVP by Oct. 14 at CLAevent@temple.edu. Seating is limited. Lunch will be provided.

For questions about the conference, please call 215-204-1756.

Photo by Melody Holmes

Photo by Tom Orange

Rachel Blau DuPlessis:

Recent Work

 

Recent Drafts

“Draft 78: Buzz Track.” Interval(le)s II.2-III.3 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009)

“Draft 81: Gap.” BlackBox Manifold (Summer 2009).¹

“Draft 84: Juncture” Salt Magazine 2 (March 2009).

“Draft 91: Proverbs.” 17 seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (Fall 2008).

“Draft 92: Translocation.” EOAGH 5 (July 2009).

“Draft 94: Mail Art.” Jacket Magazine 37 (March 2009).

“Draft 97: Rubrics.” BlackBox Manifold (Summer 2009).¹

A Periodicity of 19

The “Line of 15” from Drafts. All poems to date (2009) from this thread, which is “the little.” Other Voices Anthology, ed. Roger Humes. (Journal sponsored by UNESCO)

Six Vispo Works

Drunken Boat 10 (July 2009).

 

 

¹ Drafts 81 &97 appear on the same web page.

My instantaneous reaction on first seeing Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 68: Threshold was that it looked very much like my own FBI file. Here are the second and third stanzas:

It does not take much to figure out where the initiating theme of the “unsaid,” the effaced, the “roar of the missing,” which runs consistently through what DuPlessis calls the “line of eleven” of her life poem Drafts, happens to be.

In fact, even before the first redacted line “goes black” in the eighth line of the first stanza, there has been a more subtle erasure:

This what you wanted
      When you said you wanted “more”?

The absent term is, whether present or past tense, and which could appear either before or after the initial This is so slight, so apt to be skipped over in our own daily speech, that it’s omission here might not even be felt. It might be below the threshold of recognition.

Plus, the key term in this first sentence, literally the subject, This is not defined, at least not yet. Are we alluding to the text here at hand? A key literary journal of the 1970s? The project that is Drafts? The whole idea of poetry after not just Auschwitz, but also after Cambodia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Rwanda or Darfur? DuPlessis offers something toward a definition in the second sentence, a complex noun phrase that is short of a complete sentence: This being the other side of amusement. The third sentence is even shorter: Damage. And the fourth a quotation, “Boiling gurge of pulse.” The moment in Keats when he comes closest to foretelling directly the work of Clark Coolidge over a century later. It is not until the fifth sentence that we get one that actually has its master verb, which as it happens is all it has: Listen.

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 dam¹: You have stumbled across terrain and / Still could not escape this twisted langdscape. That last neologism is, however, a huge (and deliberate) stumbling block. No wonder sentence 7 asks What words? And the eighth, tho it has a final period, feels cut short (again deliberately): Eroded, choked, and stun.

It is here where we get our first black block of redacted text – an entire line’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 & 6, which have all had an indent equivalent to a tab bar: 5 spaces.) The question here is obvious – it’s the same one that I had when I first saw my FBI files some 30 years ago: What’s behind the block?

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’s Finnegans Wake notebook up in the archives at SUNY Buffalo or the Archimedes Codex in Baltimore, you can’t x-ray or use spectral imaging to figure out what’s behind the surface. In printing, a black block is exactly that. WYSIWYG.

Which is a detail that has kept me awake at night. 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 – there is no real “missing” text. Making it something of a game: is it or isn’t it. And if it is, if there is truly “hidden” writing here, is it something we will confront later, perhaps in Drafts 87 or possibly 106?

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: You wanted to torque. 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 & the psychological. But you ended up here – that may be the most frightening line in all of DuPlessis’ work. I don’t see how it can be read as anything other than an accusation, recalling as it does the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno. What follows is yet another incomplete sentence: Impotent rages locked in these mazes. Five syllables on each side of the caesura – we’re intended to hear the near-rhyme. The next line says what was evident the instant we confronted the look of this page: The page is slowly turning black. Note, however, that here there is no terminal period, because what follows – the last line of the first stanza – is our second moment with these redacted blocks:

My mind immediately wants to plug in the word as into that first block, but frankly I don’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’s note) as a truculent syntax threshold. Although, it is worth reminding myself, that’s not what that later phrase says either, exactly.

My point is not to close-read Threshold (tho ultimately I don’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 “line of eleven” within the sequence that is Drafts, to suggest just a little what this second direction of reading will get you to. You can see why, in one sense, reading Drafts is an athletic event. There are very few poets who build so much in to an extended text, to write with concision & 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 – Drafts is 622 pages long, just through number 76. And, as I suggested on Monday, the potential feels limitless. If Drafts is exhausting, it is in the same sense that, say, viewing all of The Godfather is similarly draining, because it engages all of the reader, all of the author, and all of the world.

 

¹ Recall the six-lined stanzas of the “failed” sestina in Drafts 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation.

Photo by Ben Friedlander

It’s taken me years, decades in fact, to figure this out – in retrospect it seems obvious – but there are at least two ways to read through Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts. One might read, for example Drafts 68: Threshold between Drafts 67 & 69, the way it appears in Torques, the latest collection from this project. But one should also read it along what DuPlessis refers to as “the line of eleven,” following Draft 11: Schwa, Draft XXX: Fosse & Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation, a reading that entails having at least three separate books out on the table more or less all at once. And, oh yes, Draft 87, which is not yet written tho the two that come immediately after are already “in print.”¹ This recognizes the underlying cycle of 19 poems that is reiterated as Drafts stretches out. 19 because, as DuPlessis once informed me, it just “felt right.” It’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 “triadic” line, the way haiku resolves into the numbers 3, 5, 7 and 17. So Drafts, because it is cyclical, growing richer & deeper with each sweep, is becoming not unlike Julio Cortázar’s great Oulipo-inflected novel, Hopscotch, a text that must be read in different directions.

I have an idea – maybe even a theory – that reading Drafts straight through accentuates the autonomous nature of the poems, to harken back to DuPlessis’ characterization of them as a “series of autonomous, but interdependent canto-like poems.” 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 Draft 11:Schwa and read this:

The “unsaid” is a shifting boundary
resisting even itself.
Something, the half-sayable,
goes speechless. Or it can’t

and Inbetween

what is, and
that it is

is ə Inside

……an offhand
sound, a howe or swallowed
shallow. Sayable Sign
of the un-.

This is followed by a line of twenty-five periods. As I type this, I’m not even certain that HTML will let me get away with a “ə” or that readers will see that the capital I in Inbetween and Inside is boldfaced. I know that I missed that the first time through.

Now remember this same passage as you read the opening words of Draft XXX: Fosse:

Imagine a book, a little book
        whose words are covered
                  one by one
with the smallest pebbles –
                  fossils imprinted, shale splinters,
slag and gnarls from fossick,
                  cheep sweepings arrayed,
a road of morse lines
        step by step
                  down the page.

It looks like poetry, runs along depths
        on the surface, slugs
                  of a text that is lost;
the instruction it offers
        is delicate,
                  may be misplaced.

The words and their syntax
        come
                  not to nothing
                  (for the lover of pebbles)
but to an irradiating splayed out
        Something
                  so large
it can only be
        marked thus:

+ It could say erosion of the book.

This as it happens is a description of an actual book by conceptual artist Ann Hamilton. Where in Schwa DuPlessis offers us the unsayable, the unmarked vowel that could be any vowel, or the silent “e” appended to a word (turning “how” itself into an allusion of poets Fanny & Susan), here we find language eroded, “a text that is lost.”

Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation covers this same terrain, but in entirely different ways. The poem is itself two poems, not unlike Zukofsky’s “Mantis” and “’Mantis,” an Interpretation,” a work that at one point the “interpretation” discusses. While this is perhaps the closest DuPlessis gets an actual homage in any of the Drafts 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 –

Here is something!   women propelled   with analytic rages every day
”Adventurous for him”   turns “careless for me.”   “Prolific for him” comes
to “facile for me.”   He is opinionated   but I am hectoring;   he passionate,   I strident.
We see, we see, we see!   “We are demanding   an end   to hypocrisy!”

The long lines broken with visible (but not necessarily audible) caesurae is intended to remind some readers of Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette. In this third round of the “unsaid,” what is effaced is nothing less than the role & contribution of women. “The roar of the missing,” DuPlessis calls it in the 25th of the poem’s 28 six-lined stanzas.

It is worth noting not only that “Turns, an Interpretation” begins with an epigram, but that the epigram itself is preceded by simple, but vital word:

or “To write history is so difficult that most historians
are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.”

Thus Erich Auderbach in Mimesis. I might have said that narrative has its own demands. What follows is the closest moment to direct address thus far in all of Drafts, beginning by examining images from the dream & the ways in which her six-line model never successfully resolves into a sestina:²

Besides I don’t have the skill.
It is difficult enough even claiming
a “political poem” given I am hardly
writing “to program,”
with any correct itinerary or conclusion.
Could only propose
gender justice in the context of social justice
enacted in particular struggle or location.
Those six words (gender, justice, social, struggle, location, enacted)
might trace through the poem, and be repeated there,
but to use them as such was too positive, positivist.
I did not use them.

What I wanted was an openly “negative” poem turning on
contradictory feelings, the ungainliness
of those edgy feelings, the fullness
of what happened, but symbolized distantly.
Not one “side,” but the “technique of legend.”
For “the historical comprises
a great number of contradictory motives in each individual,
a hesitation and ambiguous groping
on the part of groups.”
Ongoing urgency, choice and act.
Unintended consequence, debates about fact.
Besides, “the woman’s side,”
the “other-side of everything” –
emerged with full force,
yet before that binary, there was
another kind of start --
a sense of juncted tracks,
woven intersections, knotted lines
with all their merges, switches, turns.

The contrast between the two sections, or poems, within this poem could not be more pronounced. Against the worked & tightly compact passages of the opening section, this free verse is meant to feel almost artless – at least until DuPlessis sticks in that end-rhyme of act & fact. “Turns, an Interpretation” continues for five more pages.³ Turning not only figures thoughts & 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.

More tomorrow.

 

¹ Drafts 88 & 89 appear in Jacket 35 and can be found here & here. DuPlessis tells me that Draft 86 is approximately 99 percent done.

² Tho we note what DuPlessis does not, that the 28 stanzas carry within them the echo of a double-sonnet.

³ One of the interesting elements of Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, as this volume is subtitled, is the length of its poems. DuPlessis has been quite consistent. The works in Drafts 1-38, Toll as well as Torques: Drafts 58-76 have averaged just a hair over seven pages each. Yet during this third run through the set of 19, the average swells up to 11, even factoring in the curious free-floating “unnumbered” poem. The obvious question is why – what is going on in this run that did not apply either before or, at least thus far, after?

The only thing I’ve ever been able to find “wrong” with Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ marvelous life poem Drafts is the idea that some day it’s going to end, and that day is drawing increasingly near. Torques: Drafts 58-76 incorporates DuPlessis’ fourth pass of 19 poems – there is one “unnumbered” 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, Drafts has made me understand the difference between the longpoem and the life poem, and I read Drafts, like “A,” like The Cantos, like Bev Dahlen’s A Reading, like my own project, as an instance of the latter.

DuPlessis started Drafts in 1985 & the first two numbers first appeared in Leland Hickman’s great journal, Temblor, two years hence before being collected into a volume entitled Tabula Rosa, published by Peter Ganick’s Potes & Poets Press. I listened to Rachel read from Torques a week or so ago, then sat down with all my DuPlessis books going all the way back to Wells, published as a Montemora Supplement in 1980¹, and Gypsy / Moth, a chapbook that contains two poems from the sequence that makes up the first half or so of Tabula Rosa, “from ‘The ‘History of Poetry.’”

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 much later. For example, Ezra Pound – a poet DuPlessis has characterized as “haunting” her work – sets up The Cantos 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 Mauberly. You can see Pound actively worrying about this connection right at the start. He ends the first canto with a colon – “So that:” – and ends the second with “And” followed by an ellipsis. It’s a curious step back from the abrupt shifts of Mauberly or those he gave to Eliot’s The Waste Land, and by the time we’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 & Pound’s capture by the U.S. Army to finally shake him loose from this, which explains in part why the Pisan Cantos 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 II’s version of Gitmo, awaiting trial for treason.

Happily, DuPlessis has had her own wits about her since Day One. Following Louis Zukofsky’s sense of the part:whole relation in the life poem more than Pound’s, she has characterized Drafts as a “series of autonomous, but interdependent canto-like poems.” But this process of cumulative poetry and of writing through, even writing over other texts – exactly what she refers to here as torquing – is what one finds in both “Writing” and the excerpts from ‘The “History of Poetry.”. Even in Wells, 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, “Oil,” alternate endings, even as they confront the present & the world (“Oil” is an extended metaphor for menstruation, a topic still not found all that often even in today’s post-feminist verse).

“The ‘History of Poetry’” – note exactly how those quotation marks fall – and “Writing” both read, twenty years later, like rehearsals for Drafts. “’History’” has never been published in its entirety & “Writing,” though it is included in the section of Tabular Rosa entitled “Drafts,” and is mentioned² in the acknowledgements to Drafts 1-38, Toll, has never again been published with it. Personally, I still want to see “The ‘History of Poetry’” complete in its own volume – I have no idea if the missing parts constitute 2 pages or 200 – with perhaps Wells and “Writing” 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’t want to wait forty years for the Library of America to figure this out.

It was Robert Duncan & Charles Olson who first recognized that one practical lesson of Ezra Pound’s Cantos 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 & literary passions. Not that one needs to get the footnotes – that is almost always the wrong way to read anything – but insofar as these voices whisper to & through us. Both “Writing” & “The ‘History of Poetry’” show DuPlessis wading right into this issue, trying to sort & shake things out. In Drafts she takes what she has learned there & turns with it to confront the world. Which may be why Drafts feels social, even political, overtly so at moments – tho not in the narrow sense of that term – rather than literary. In one way, I’ve always thought that Rachel Blau DuPlessis actually writes the work that Amiri Baraka always talks about writing, but never really does.

So it is no surprise that Torques is a masterpiece. DuPlessis is completely on top of her game & 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’m willing to go onto the next – that’s an effect I associate with very few poems – a few sections of “A,” individual sections of The Pisan Cantos, Barrett Watten’s Progress – & more akin to how I feel after a truly major motion picture (Children of Paradise, Weekend, Blow-Up, Pierrot le fou, The Red Desert, Ran). If you read a section of Drafts & it doesn’t completely drain you – and haunt you – you’re just skimming.

More tomorrow.

 

¹ Available here in PDF format from Duration Press.

² Where it is referred to as the “pre-Drafts work.”

When I read the sexist language in Olson’s “Projective Verse,” my instinct is to see Olson as a not-too-atypical male of his generation, chronologically positioned midway between my grandfather’s generation born in the late 1890s & my father who was born in 1927. He sounds like a case of testosterone poisoning & is no doubt the person intended by the rubric given to the macho side of the New American Poetics as the Wounded Buffalo School. Yet dismissing that language as a sign of generational ignorance – Zukofsky & Pound & Eliot all had their visibly patriarchal sides – and keeping in mind that the Allen anthology has just four women among its 44 contributors – is not too unlike dismissing the equally unmistakable anti-Semitism in Pound, Cummings, Stevens or Eliot. You do it at some risk.

You could also take exactly the other tack, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis did about ten years back in an issue of Diacritics, in an essay called “Manifests” that likewise close reads “Projective Verse,” but as a sexual text rather than merely one on poetics whose arteries are clogged with the prejudices of the time. It’s a fascinating alternate path into the work, informed externally by the discovery of Tom Clark’s – the real literary coup of his Olson bio – that Olson’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 Motz Boldereff, with whom he had an intense & 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 Boldereff correspondence, now quite thoroughly in print, reminds one of nothing so much as Olson’s own way of reading Shakespeare into Melville, the informing thesis of Call Me Ishmael. The cover of the Wesleyan University Press edition shows photos of Olson & Boldereff from the 1940s – his (from the same shoot as the photo I used on May 23, wearing dark shirt & tie) above the title, hers below. So far as I know, no photo of the two together was ever taken.

In that wonderful way she has in her poetry as well as her criticism of looking at an issue from all perspectives, DuPlessis doesn’t just dismiss the replete sexism with a sigh, nor throw Olson overboard for it, but uses it to interrogate Allen Grossman’s critical work, Summa Lyrica, which, in DuPlessis’ words “announces the force of poetics as ideology.” Nor does she stop there, but rather proceeds to read the text through the works of other recent theorists, including Deleuze and Guattari (there is that question of incest to deal with, after all, and, following Grossman, the whole oedipal ball o’ wax), Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous. But then DuPlessis does this both ways, reading them through Olson & Grossman. It’s a process that eventually will lead you to understand what DuPlessis means when she claims that “I don’t write ‘poetry,’” a tricky position to hold if you’re one of the best poets going, which she is.

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’t simple, and they may not even be answers, certainly not in the “settled argument” sense of that term.

You can get DuPlessis’ essay from Diacritics if your library belongs to the appropriately named (for this discussion at least) Project Muse, 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 (or more) system of authorities by which the tenured speak only to the tenured & tenured-to-be (they hope). Or you can wait until Blue Studios comes forth as a book, which I am told it shall, very soon, from the University of Alabama

A curious fact that I’ve known now for nearly 40 years – I am constitutionally incapable of taking in more than one longpoem at a time. Right now, for Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, a project that I find as rapturous in execution as it is awesome in its concept, this is just fine. I’ve been working my way through it very slowly now for two years at least, and at the rate I’m going it will be another two years before I complete Drafts 39-57 Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis. In fact, I’m still in the final stages of Drafts 1-38, Toll. Perhaps by the time I get through the later volume, the next stage of Drafts, 55-77, will be ready for press.

While this works just about perfectly for my experience of Drafts – a poem I frankly never want to end – this is not such good news for Anne Waldman’s Iovis or Robert Fitterman’s Metropolis, both of which will have to wait their turn. I’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’s as if there were a particular segment of my brain set aside just for such projects, and it doesn’t allow multi-tasking, even tho it seems to permit me to read an almost infinite number of shorter books & poems, even somewhat large ones.

There is a difference between a longpoem and a large one, I’ve learned. Kenny Goldsmith’s various “uncreative writing” projects are large, as is Vernon Frazer’s Improvisations, 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 Ganick’s 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 & over during a two-month period whilst hiding out from the Nazis in 1940, recorded in The Notebook of the Pine Woods (available in English, I believe, only in Cid Corman’s out-of-print volume of Ponge translations, Things). Imagine this same process now carried out over 20 or 60 years. It’s certainly an imaginable project, at least in the same sense that the glass bead game in Magister Ludi is an imaginable game.

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’s fabulous 1-800-Flowers, the text of a talk given at the centennial celebration of the work of Louis Zukofsky last fall at Columbia. Subtitled “Inventory as Poetry in Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers,” Fitterman’s critical poem has just been released as a chapbook by porci con le ali, with offices in Bangor, Maine, & Catania, Italy (the press’ title translates into Pigs with Wings, sort of a stockier Pegasus).

Fitterman’s interest here is not so much in close-reading 80 Flowers, tho he does so at one point, persuasively & with great élan, as it is in understanding the why of Zukofsky’s strategies, ultimately to the idea that

one composes with what one
finds already there

which leads to an art that may appear depictive when it is really constructive. Fitterman’s reading & presentation are brilliant, tho finally LZ brings him to the point one so often comes to in Zukofsky’s work, that instant when the surfeit of meaning simply boils over into a cornucopia of possibility. Fitterman’s garden ends up, literally, in deep weeds.

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 “Constraints”:

Because this catalogue of strategies
drives 80 Flowers this piece
1-800-Flowers is a critical discussion
sod in the same constructive
verse 8-line 5-words-per-line structure updating
several of Zukofsky’s sources 1-800
corporate histories how-to gardening relying
on Zukofsky’s own books indexes

I love it that Fitterman chooses to replicate Zukofsky’s own favorite formal cheat: letting a complex construction such as “5-words-per-line” count as a single term. To this, Fitterman adds one of his own (tho, in fact, we’ve seen it before, even just this past week in Aaron Kunin’s Floating Ruler Star) 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 & 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’s ability to stay within his own set constraints.

By means of no accident, Fitterman traces 80 Flower’s origins as verbal collage back to many other Zukofsky works & books, right back to the dedication to “Poem beginning ‘The.’” 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 Complete Short Poetry. This is a 43-page stapled edition from 1964 entitled Found Objects: 1962-1926, published a dozen years ahead of the composition of Flowers. I have actually never seen a copy of Found Objects, which Fitterman calls “this miniature / manifesto reflecting backwards an art / in found objects language predicting / the later 80 Flowers dioramas.” Published by Blue Grass Books, we find Fitterman still alluding to it in his essays second portion, called “Through,” a demonstration more of method than the argument of the first half, “About”:

Vanity Numbers

I dreamed I saw St.
Augustine Decline (SAD) arise arise
as you are or aries
Kentucky blue flux ablaze flog
a new flushing meadow’s no
private reality is and is
all in the station-to-station directory
Europe newsreels markets across being

This, to my mind, is the most active reading of another’s work I’ve confronted in a very long time. It’s even great poetry, by no means a requirement for it also to be a superb essay, which it is. Fitterman’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’s garden.

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.

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. So when I find indeterminacy & surplus in her texts, I know that they haven’t gotten there by accident, that even when it appears “meaningless,” it means something.

I was reading “Draft 2: She” this morning, which is replete with such effects. A case in point:

Dabbles the blankie down

din

do throw foo foo

noo

dles the arror

of eros the error of arrows

each little spoil and spill

all during pieces fly apart.

Splatting crumb bits there and there.

Feed ‘n’ wipe. Woo woo petunia

pie.

Hard

to get the fail of it

large small specks each naming

yellow surface

green bites

Red elbow kicks an orange tangerine.

If my HTML skills were up to it – they aren’t – I might offer some even more extreme examples: there are are twelves places in this eight-page poem in which DuPlessis offers alternative word choices typed almost literally atop one another, as in “the mother/the monster” or “hurl/hole/hurt.” But, as DuPlessis herself notes in the passage quoted above, “large small specks each naming.” Just because these uses of alternatives & of baby talk don’t resolve to traditional denotations does not make them unmeaningful. Woo woo petunia!

The question here is what. At one level, “She” is about gendering the family & the intricacies of mother-daughter roles. At another, it’s about the acculturation of the child into the world of adult roles & values & systems, language foremost among them. It’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 Louis Althusser, the late French political philosopher, at least in his saner moments.

Althusser’s observation was the world replicated itself through two systems – repressessive state apparatuses (RSAs) and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). We are, all of us, only too familiar with RSAs, which include everything from stop signs to the Justice Deparment (even when it’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. ISAs are more numerous, more complex, more subtle & ultimately more powerful. The church, family, popular media, even poetry, generally fall in the Althusserian scheme onto the side of ISAs.

I should say something about ideology here, which in the Althusserian model is only incidentally about being a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian or a Green, or even about being “for” or “against” capitalism. Rather, as Althusser saw it, ideology is that which calls your name & by which & through which you recognize yourself. As such, it is precisely a subconscious process, exactly the level on which the material signifiers of language operate.

For all of the unquestionable pleasures of the Lacanian & for the ways in which, say, a Carla Harryman might make use of a Kristeva, my sense has been that with the notable (& almost sole) exception of Nick Piombino, 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’s The Maintains or Polaroid 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 elsewhere 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.

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 & Robert Bly. Duncan, in good part because of H.D.’s influence, made active &, 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 spectre of Jung has sometimes been raised to suggest a reason & underlying cohesion for the great & wonderful mess that is Maximus, Olson’s own approach has always struck me as remarkably unsystematic, forever opportunistic, & as indebted as much to Mao as to the Vienna gang.

Bly? Well, it rhymes with sigh. Invoking Jung in a very different light & yoking it first to bad translations of the especially narrow swath he cut through the surrealists & later to the Iron John one-man comic philosopher shtick, Bly went a long way toward making psychoanlysis, Jungian or Freudian, off-limits to a younger generation of poets unable to suppress their snickering.

Bly was one of a generation of poets who was raised initially within the framework of the old New England formalist tradition, but who in the 1950s rebelled against its even then moribund dynamics. Including W.S. Merwin, James Wright & 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 & Merwin, a turn toward European influences.

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 Robert Kelly, 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 pancho that was Bly’s omnipresent clothing accessory during that decade. The “deep image” movement didn’t last long. I’ve written before of how Kelly’s interest in the alternative wisdom traditions helped to cut him off from some of the younger & 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 Caterpillar & later Sulfur, 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.

One of the great ironies in this is that the unconscious is to analysis what birds are to ornithology, and it’s the unconscious processing of poetry that’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’s use of contradiction & overdetermination is unparalleled in his generation & tugs continually at the ways in which we utilize & experience just such phenomena, not merely mentally but in day-to-day life.

It’s interesting in this regard that there really was no such thing as a second generation San Francisco renaissance. Spicer’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 Vancouver & even, in the presence of Larry Fagin, in New York. The poets who most deeply reflected Duncan’s influence – David Bromige, Michael Palmer, Aaron Shurin, David Melnick – seem to have worked with him serially. Duncan’s imperiousness & 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.  

So when Rachel Blau DuPlessis roars out “Woo woo petunia,” I sense her taking up something that has lain untouched for some time in writing – not that it isn’t present, say, in the work of Frank O’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’s use of the literally subliminal in his scrawl works, DuPlessis gives us a writing in places – it’s not the only thing she’s up to here, just the one that I’m intrigued with today – that can only be forever beyond the rational. At one level, it’s a demand, a demand that we come to understand exactly what it means.

Woo woo petunia

pie.

* Although Rich’s pivotal poem “Diving into the Wreck,” made its first appearance in Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar.