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.

Between the poem & the longpoem come several intermediate modes. One that interests me greatly, because it’s one with which I have a lot of personal affinity, is the booklength poem that might not (yet) be a longpoem in the true sense of taking a decade or more to compose. It can be – although not always is – really the poem as book (which, conversely, almost always means the book as poem also), calling up that curious zone in which the transpersonal elements of a text become deeply immersed with the qualities of embodiment that bookmaking represents.

Jack Spicer was a master at this level. After Lorca, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, Language & Book of Magazine Verse were all composed as much as books as they were poems. Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Orangery is another volume that comes immediately to mind as an exemplar of this mode – as are Charles Alexander’s arc of light / dark matter, Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, John Ashbery’s Three Poems, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Robert Creeley’s Pieces, Barrett Watten’s Progress, David Melnick’s Pcoet, Tom Mandel’s Prospect of Release, & more than a few books each by both Bernadette Mayer & Clark Coolidge.

At the heart of the poem as book is not just having a project that is sufficiently large enough to warrant capturing as a whole between two covers, but rather one that understands itself in precisely such terms, that takes its own free-standing nature as a given. Book design, of course, allows for a lot of fudging – the 64-page volume that was my own Paradise was a 35-page manuscript. Whatever its integrity as a poem or project might be, it was Rosmarie Waldrop who had the formal sense to see that work as book. Thus, not every poem (or poetic series) of size carries this sense of itself as a condition of the writing. Of the volumes listed in the previous paragraph, the one I sometimes wonder about in these terms is Berrigan’s Sonnets. As wonderful as they are – and they hold up to rereading after rereading over the decades, as rich & glittering as ever – Berrigan was such a young writer when he composed that sequence that it’s not clear to me that he was yet even thinking in terms of books at all.

What calls this to mind is a volume entitled bk of (h)rs by Pattie McCarthy. It’s a dense, rich, sometimes dark (& sometimes playful) volume clearly conceived & written precisely as a book. For a relatively young poet – I believe this is only her second volume – it’s a project of stunning ambition & self confidence. And, as readers of this blog will have figured out by now, these are qualities in poetry that I completely endorse. The title alone announces that this will not be an “easy” read – although, because this work is so well written, there are constant & continuing pleasures in doing so, making bk, if not an “easy” read, at the very least a delightful one.

McCarthy’s model of course is the medieval book of hours, which between the 13^th & 15^th centuries was the most popular of all book forms, but which today is remembered principally for the detailed illustrations that decorated these favored objects of the rich. As her use of abbreviations makes evident (& the Apogee Press design reinforces, especially in the dense prose of the third section), McCarthy is interested primarily in the intellectual / social / spiritual elements of the form, not its role in a history of design. The first section of the book does indeed follow the “hours” of medieval practice – matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers & compline – actually set times of day for traditional sets of prayer. The second section is, as one would expect in this form, is called “(p)salter,” & while the psalms or songs that follow are less polyvocalic that either the first or third sections of this book, one would be hard put to characterize them as lyrical.

I suspect that a reader who was more of a Christian than I would see more levels & depths of reference here than do I. It’s one thing for me to recognize the use of Julian dating in “(p)salter,” but quite another for me to understand quite what to do with it. At that level, I have to ask myself just how much I trust where the author is going, particularly one who, like McCarthy, actively invokes a broad a range of reference, especially in the 21 prose paragraphs of the volume’s third & final section, where the sense of density is accentuated by McCarthy’s resistance to upper case. Since at no point where I can follow does she ever once misstep, my gut feel is to trust completely the places where I simply have to acknowledge my own limits as a reader. A passage like the following demonstrates absolute ability in total control:

the second letters of the original seven

antiphons read backwards yield the acrostic :

I shall be with you tomorrow.

divinations to undertake – times

& purposes to be determined regionally.

I’m not one for a public shrove.

a green winter makes for a fat churchyard.

a long winter makes for a full ear. poke

            holes in eggshells to keep

            witches from going to sea. we look down into it.

bk of (h)rs will probably look like early work one day to McCarthy, precisely because she demonstrates herself taking on such a range & such steep challenges that you can almost palpably feel her growth as an artist in these pages – the literary equivalent of, say, a Beatles album like Rubber Soul, where the Fab Four just start to make the move from best-in-class of the genre they’ve inherited toward working on some whole other level that will transform not merely their own work, but that of everyone else around them. I don’t want to overstate the case here, but bk of (h)rs is a fascinating view of an artist right at the inflection point of her career.

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.