Articles - December 2011

I am always one volume behind in Rachel DuPlessis’s Drafts. Yet, I have been a loyal reader and realize to my surprise that she has been writing them/I have been reading them for the best part of twenty-five years now. We, author and reader, have been “strained companions” in the creation of this work.[1] Often, throughout this essay, I refer to the “writer/reader” of the work to demonstrate the shared enterprise that is an intrinsic part of being in Drafts. Drafts will not yield to you without attention, not just to the individual piece, but to a kind of active, physical juggling, the moving of the finger along the lines of the grid of poems, the reading back and forth within the folds of at least three books. Drafts are a pleasure and a weighty pain as they roll on remorselessly, demanding that you keep up, keep faith and care, that you follow through, follow back and forth, forth and back, reading notes, seeking intertexts, being in the process. We are as battered and elated as DuPlessis herself must be, by the end of each Draft, each volume, each enfolded reading. The poet is aware of this as she challenges, berates and encourages us in the journey. “Are you Ready? are you composed? / Can you go a third Vertiginous road?” she asks with a mocking rather jaunty half-rhyme at the beginning of “Draft 73: Vertigo”[2] (and of course the capitalization of “Ready” makes us see “read,” asks if we are read-worthy of the journey). The whole project is vertiginous in its refusal to cease or fix. I think that my surprise at how long it has all been going on is due not just to the natural human amazement at how time passes, but also to how these pieces still feel so fresh and innovative, so contemporaneous, in their individuality and their structure as a long, ever-changing poem.

This then, is a (rather late) review-essay on DuPlessis’s Torques: Drafts 58–76 and a tribute too from a companion-reader on the other side of the Atlantic. It is also a gathering in and an updating of my own earlier work on DuPlessis, in particular a review-essay of Drafts 1–38, Toll written for How2 in 2002 and an ill-fated unpublished piece from even further back in the mists of time. I also revisit more general essays on which DuPlessis has been influential, one on gender and pronouns written in 2000 and one on “the eco-ethical poetics of found text in contemporary poetry” written in 2009.[3] This then is a revisiting of her words and my words on her words, both of which are interspersed in snippets throughout. As such this essay is written in the spirit of circling and layering through time that DuPlessis’s enfolded Drafts enact and encourage. But I want also to look at what is different, as well as what is continuous, in these Drafts of the early 2000s, at the specificity of Torques in terms of practice, mood, language, and technique. In particular, I identify a growing darkness to the work, the concomitant growing influence of the Objectivist poets, and an increasing tension and richness between complex and simple uses of language in conjunction with each other.[4]

this tensing buzz of poetry (75)

The Drafts project, this “small epic,” is a work of chutzpah, a self-confessed challenge to Ezra Pound’s Cantos (a “counter-Cantos”) as well as a simultaneous, spectacular refusal of the slim volume and the monumental volume at the same time.[5] We are always in the “middle muddle” of the fold and the grid. DuPlessis’s Drafts refer back to themselves along the same numerical line in groupings of nineteen (i.e., 1/20/39/58 or 7/26/45/64). She plans to keep on until 114. Each individual piece of writing however also has its own structure. In Torques DuPlessis continues the Olsonian open form project which is important to her own and subsequent generations. Her fellow poet Kathleen Fraser has noted the “immense permission-giving moment of Charles Olson’s “PROJECTIVE VERSE” manifesto” for her generation of women poets.[6] Fraser was founding editor of How(ever), now online as How2, the journal which, virtually singlehandedly, revived the study and publication of modernist and contemporary innovative poetry by women. DuPlessis was “contributing editor” from its foundation in 1983. For Fraser, her Olsonian practice has evolved into a dynamic four-sided page:

the location where an entirely “inappropriate” or “inessential” content might be approached or seized, by fact of the poet’s very redefining of margin as edge: four margins, four edges — PAGE in place of the dictated rigor and predictable pull of the straight, the dominant Flush Left.[7]

In her subsequent book of Drafts, Pitch: Drafts 77–95, DuPlessis does explore the four-sided page in a series of collage poems.[8] In Torques, the left-hand margin remains as precisely an edge, a point of tension against which to push and pull the Draft text to varying degrees of distance, to enact the process of rebellion in text, the inclusion of “unclean … jots and tittles … traces of the Hebraic … debris, rot, fragment.”[9] All this being defined by DuPlessis as precisely counter to Pound’s totalizing and anti-Semitic, anti-feminine systems. Above all, innovation happens in context — form and content enfolded as in the old marriage described by Creeley and amended by Levertov: “form is never more than an extension (revelation, said DL) of content.”[10] Often pieces fold into their construction references to literary and linguistic genres, subgenres and structures as they have been created within the cultural sphere. So, “Draft 67: Spirit Ditties” adopts mock-lyric structures and language; “Draft LXX: Lexicon” is an alphabet-based poem; “Draft 72: Nanifesto” plays with the structure of the manifesto so beloved of the Modernists; “Draft 74: Wanderer” echoes the “books,” the long poem-paragraphs and the complex enjambed sentences of Wordsworth’s Prelude (cited throughout) and “Draft 75: Doggerel” is an anti-doggerel poem written in excruciating rhyme.

Very often homage and ironic critique are embedded in these pieces. However, the Draft structures are not just literary in-jokes. As is fitting for a poet with such a strong social commitment, they bear at least as much relationship to how we should live as to how we should write. “Draft 72: Nanifesto” is particularly notable for this, being largely devoted to social, political, and cultural instructions rather than literary ones (“Critique monoculture”; “Destroy the merely consumable”; “Link the emergencies”; ”Live in empathy”; et al). Whilst there is an affectionate mockery of the manifesto (and of the modern self-help book I can’t help feel) in the “nanifesto,” the advice is sincere as the emphatic and definitive full stop at the end of a line demonstrates.

The poet’s own life is conduit for all this, not too much more. She is pulled from side to side in the torque of her own created structures, as in “Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul,” which follows a dialectical structure of blocks moving from side to side of the page. There is so much to say and so much that cannot be said, that strong sense of the “unsaid,” that is present throughout Drafts (see the early piece “Draft 11: Schwa”). Here in “Draft 69: Sentences”:

There is so much never to say
filled with gists and drifts.
There was never so much to say

in this tensing buzz of poetry. (75)

There is a sense that DuPlessis is always restlessly seeking structures that reach for the unsayable in ever more challenging ways, ways that might even provoke us to action. “Draft 66: Scroll” has long scroll-like and/or newspaper-like columns — these two textual relations act as a way of trying to pull in the simultaneous rush of mental and emotional material (the “so much”) that DuPlessis wishes to transmit to her readers:

Not a text and gloss but        structured as gloss next to gloss  no center, no side, just  swerving and looping        querying what aspect is marginal  how to travel it, how to re-think —

So much wells up at once, thus a lava-ribbon of text emerged instabilities of liquid rock with fracture, overleafs and turns to what; how ask why this is so: one lives here, now in riddled exposure — (49)

This section of the unravelled scroll both reflects on its own form (a gloss next to a gloss, speaking or “swerving” back and forth the page across to each other) and considers the possibility of poetic models that might fight or fold their way out of hierarchical structures. Here is the possibility of writing/reading in multiple ways, literally up-and-down and side-to-side here, but also within the larger structure of the enfolded Drafts and the smaller structure of how we might interpret each word and phrase — another set of “strained companionships.”

These forms are not always optimistic in their innovations; the blacked-out sections of “Draft 68: Threshold” carry connotations of (self?-) censorship and decline and take us to a darker place. This is a technique DuPlessis has used before, but more minimally, for example in “Draft 5: Gap.” Here the phrase gleaned from John Cage, “No words for this and these are them,” is made actual in the sustained blackened present/absent words of the poem. The notes confirm that behind the black is “real” lost text. This, to a writer-reader, is a chilling thought, almost reminiscent of book burning. If we read the Michael Davidson glosses down the right-hand side of the page, this effacing of language appears to be a result of the historical conditions “[a]s the war returns.” Davidson is made to critique DuPlessis’s language, or at least to analyze its “Glut and revulsion / truckle the body, / twist discourse” (67). This is a poem of political and linguistic despair, personal in its analysis of the sleeplessness and dreams of the haunted protagonist, of powerlessness and loss. Whereas earlier thresholds or limens have carried elements of hope in DuPlessis’s work, here there is a deathly feel (“Plunge haunted water”), for the whole society and the individual (69). Here is a darkening page for a darkening world.

Darkly, I listen. (22)

Always haunted, DuPlessis’s “langdscape” becomes bleaker, slower, and sadder in this volume.[11] In a short piece about being “Inside the Middle of a Long Poem” written just before embarking on this phase of Drafts, DuPlessis repeatedly describes herself as “haunted” by America’s “compromises, failures and mistakes” as well as by past horrors such as the Holocaust and the fate of outsider artists past and present.[12] Here she locates herself as being “halfway through” Drafts, in which case Torques is the beginning of the second half of the project. Things have not improved. In her “Working Notes” for the “Women and Ecopoetics” special feature I put together for How2 in 2007, she writes that many of the poems in Torques “have had enough”:

Many are written in revulsion towards the Bush regime or coup in US politics and towards the fundamentalist turn in the world at large. Many of them implicitly or explicitly ask what good is it to write poetry. Torques says I am twisted, bent, pulled, under tension, by the political and social reality of Now.[13]

There is a very real sense of crisis here. In the middle of “Draft 69: Sentences,” a Draft which plays out and around with the idea of being “sentenced” to write, DuPlessis asks:

And it isn’t as if this “I” has gotten nowhere,
                          is it? (71)

It strikes me as an unusual question for DuPlessis to ask. In so many ways, she is a public poet for whom personal angst, haunted by the specter of all those ’60s confessional women’s poems, is undesirable. Even here, the “I” is hedged about with quotation marks. She knows it has no center, but nonetheless there is an “I” who is “twisted, bent, pulled, under tension.” In Torques, DuPlessis allows herself, her “selvedge” as defined against socially constructed contexts, to begin looking back, assessing her career in writing.[14] To any observer, she is a well-published, highly regarded success story, but it is the political failure that she refers to when she asks, “is it?” As such, this is not a particularly self-indulgent question, but a simple statement in line with the Objectivist commitment to “sincerity.” It articulates her “absolute frustration” with the difficulty in fulfilling her ultimate “deeply felt” (another uncharacteristic phrase) desires (14, 70). As she goes on to say in the How2 “Working Note”:

I have been asking myself for years how to communicate my deep social and political questions in aesthetic forms that give pleasure but which also disconcert and destabilize one’s complacency. But I don’t have a lot of answers to that question. I just keep asking it.

I speculate that at the beginning of her writing career this relentless and restless questioning (to which I shall return below), this disturbing of complacency, this disruptive play, was more fun for the poet, a part of her rebellious feminism. It was perhaps more communal too, held in common with the extraordinary community of women poets in the modernist tradition, people such as Kathleen Fraser, Beverly Dahlen, and Alice Notley. Now, as the global political and ecological story darkens, the page is darkening too. Now doubled language is not so joyous:

It is
impossible not to write.                  Not to; Or to.
Double judgments frozen within
                       paralysis, which neutralizes its own stasis
                                          into even further stasis. Into minoritized acts.
                                          Sentenced to reject the sentence. (73)

Now, at times, we find ourselves becoming impatient with DuPlessis as she becomes impatient with herself (“boredom with melodrama”), as we become impatient with ourselves (74). In “Sentences,” she berates the reader/writer, both, about the condition of torque:

Luminous distaste.
Don’t make me laugh!
So what? So you are being jerked around
and knotted; so you are roped
and pulled aground.
This is news?
Well, it stays news.
Their masterful escapades
and plundering moves
and thuggish scaffolding
become “your life.”
The title was written with a knife.
The trick is, Watch It.
The trick is, Watch Out. (73)

Torques is full of thwarted intentions and desires, of deep frustrations, of lines which articulate an attempt at simplicity, a simple sense of failure, such as “I wanted to show you things”(19). Torque and thwart are sonically close, and have appeared together before, for instance in the “transverse torque” of “Draft 27: Athwart,” a poem where nature and art fail: an old oak falls in the “tilted force” of strong wind, the hands of the musician “fall athwart,” the work of the photographer Aaron Siskind fails to please the New York Times reviewer who writes “the social world drained from his work.”[15] This is a phrase that haunts the earlier poems, encapsulating perhaps one of DuPlessis’s greatest fears.[16] The word “athwart” suggests an oblique or perverse direction, which, for both reader and writer, once started, “can’t stop / going along.”[17]

Even starting to speak seems impossible now. The very first page of Torques opens, wistfully, poignantly, with the words:

This was to be a beginning,
      a beginning, in situ,
              that is, in the middle, here. (1)

And of course that is exactly what it is in one way. DuPlessis begins with a relatively small scale personal crisis and links it to the global, drawing a stark simple analogy:

a student jumped from a window
       of my workplace
             a few tense days before the newest war. (2)

So the book commences with a suicide; the tone is set. Yet these words also lead everywhere, that is, into the twisted public context, and nowhere, since they pose no answers, only questions. The poem ends, “How account for it; how call it to account,” an extraordinary ambition. And of course, DuPlessis has started and over and over again, she must start again, remaining “incipit,” the title of the twentieth Draft and a word that lingers in Torques, chosen for instance from “Draft 9: Page” to form the first “i” section of “Draft LXX Lexicon” (79). She says to herself, to us, we say to ourselves, “Just start” (36). This is an encouragement to others, yet at the same time an aw(e)ful effort. The impatience, the edge of desperation, in “Just start” contrasts with the more hopeful “Begin anywhere” of earlier Drafts.[18] Even in the very last Draft of the book, “Draft 76: Work Table with Scale Models,” this thwarted feel, this sense of the insurmountable “so much,” still has not departed:

I had wanted to write just small, though hungry, sentences,
small.
But so much wells up at once it is like
externalizing a gigantic wall. (133)

The whole archive is an argument. (52)

As the phrase “I just keep asking it” suggests, restless questioning is key to Draft work. From the very beginning, this element of the battering and battered series of more-than-rhetorical questions has always been present. It all began with gender and genre (“who is ‘I’ who is ‘you’ / who is ‘he’ is ‘she’”) and this line of questioning continues in poems such as “Draft 67: Spirit Ditties” which revisits the feminine lyric and narrative structures. [19] In this more recent work however, the restless questioning is most frequently applied to the question of who is responsible for the current “world-system.” In “Draft 71: Headlines, with Spoils” a poem stuffed with references to injustice and “superabundance,” DuPlessis hurls questions at the page:

Who controls these junctures?
who prices these conjunctions?
who mines the evisceration? (92)

A little later, following some found text about “Smart Dust,” a tracking device which may already being used in Iraq, she asks:

Who strews, who reaps?
What is it to be tracked? What catch
to it, what caught? what purpose to deploy?
What haunt imprinted? Who
at stake? Why
tracked? why fought? (94)

This questioning relates to the Jewish tradition of argument and debate present in the midrash of sacred texts such as the Talmud and through the glossing process mentioned above. This cultural tradition also has a bearing on the sense of broken promises or covenants in DuPlessis’s Drafts. These broken social, religious, political, legal, or economic covenants litter our long human history and provoke yet more questions:

What’s the covenant?
who is propitiated
who assuaged? who profited?
The judge fell off his perch
and broke his neck.
He heard the news and lost his balance.
That was the end of valid judges.
Now we are led and judged by monsters.
Where is my place? (38)

By the time of Torques, the disillusionment is stronger than ever, hence the latter part of this citation, the portrait of the crooked judge. Perhaps we are in fact “Covenant-less” (91). Late in the book, in “Draft 74: Wanderer,” she asks:

Should we assume there can be no real covenant,
not given, not imposed, not crazed, but struggled
for and wide? Or should that hope be
given out as gone? (108)

Context is important here — “Draft 74,” a long philosophical wondering/wandering poem, is both intimately bound up with Wordsworth’s Prelude and with the “Wondering Jews” (the title of DuPlessis’s chapter on Jewish culture and religion in her 2001 book Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934). In an intriguing example of strange bedfellows, the question might well have been asked by both wonderers/wanderers. Indeed Wordsworth might have asked it as he moved away from early socialism into a more conservative old age, not a process we see occurring in DuPlessis’s later years. Rather, DuPlessis’s question, “Where is my place?,” steers us away from the blaming of “them” to the questioning of ourselves as writer/reader-companions. Throughout her work, we have always been asked to “Credit your own complicity” (“Draft 72: Nanifesto,” 96).

Truly World War III or IV is one or two too many (121)

In a 2002 statement written for Pores, DuPlessis draws on Adorno to argue that the political has “migrated into” poetry which should not be “a form of propaganda, but a … part of ideological and discursive practices.”[20] It is not that the Drafts complexify life, as avant-garde work is often accused of doing; it is life that complexifies the Drafts, however much they try to be a “straight-line list.” Yet, as I show throughout this piece, there are moments when DuPlessis consolidates everything into moments of simplicity throughout this text. Torques is not just a speaking, then, but also a response, a “[l]isting and listening” to the historical and apocalyptic moment in which Torques was written, between December 2002 and September 2005 (12). As such, it covers the period in which the US and the UK began to justify their invasion of Iraq, the actual invasion (March 2003) and the first couple of years of the Iraq War or Second Gulf War. It is no coincidence that one of the bleakest poems is “Draft 64: Forward Slash,” which is dated “December 2003–May 2004,” precisely that period when the arguments for invasion were marshaled and then acted upon by Bush and Blair.

But it is war in the bigger sense, the justification and endless condition of war, that concerns DuPlessis in this “little epic” (134), just as it was for her important predecessor H.D. in her long poems engaged with the arguably masculine epic form, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. “Draft 61: Pyx” asks:

What war?
You think you thought you know.
One in which you were born
or borne or bored
or bode
embodied (28).

“Draft 62: Gap” is written “November 2002–January 2003 / Before the U.S. Invasion of Iraq” and looks back to the Second World War as well as forward to the Iraq War (34). And it continues the

Listing and listening
— a great swath of names and citations
and the question what were they
what had happened
these suffering bodies
riddled and scarified, bandied, branded (12)

Reading DuPlessis writing, the sense of the absence/presence of the dead has always been powerful. It may be her predecessors, women and modernist poets, whom she is calling on: “alas, they cannot hear / although we talk to them” (7). More often though it is the hordes of tragic dead, the war dead, the massacred dead, the starved dead to whom she has a duty and also a longing which can’t be fulfilled. DuPlessis’s Jewish heritage is surely influential here, the Holocaust having always been present in her work, particularly in the Gap poems along the line of five. She has this memorializing in common with Objectivists such as Charles Reznikoff and more recent poets such as Jerome Rothenberg.[21]

This then is a journeying into the past, an act of mourning, both of which are intrinsic to the Demeter/Persephone or Kore (the name of DuPlessis’s daughter) myth, a touchstone throughout her work. “Draft 61: Pyx” is a particularly ghostly piece. Here, in a reversal of the myth, the underworld surfaces into the “real” world: “and when the page turned back / an underneath came up” (22). Yes, it is “back” here, but the shadow word, the aptly invisible word is of course, “black.” Again, a darkening page for a darkening world. The unsaid, the silenced in DuPlessis’s work, is most often associated with the words the dead cannot speak:

How is it? I said: that the ghosts are so gathered?

Because they are palpable and present
buried wounds
the names that cannot rise and so they turn
and come as darkness thickened without sound

These shadows make antiphonal claims

as words that fail. (“Draft 61: Pyx,” 29)

In “Draft 64: Forward Slash” the writer/reader becomes a ghostly figure (“Blank Rachel … / I too am a stranger … [among] other shivering walkers”) and there is a sense of hopelessness by the end of the poem:

Ghost. Yes ghost. This one not complex.
Just the shadow isle of sunken hope and text. (43)

Here, at the end of this piece shadowed by the Iraq War, we find another of these simple moments, where the end of hope, depression is deathly but, “not complex.” Where the wanderer includes the poet/speaker herself, we begin to see a blurring of the worlds of the living and the dead:

As for R, like a revenant, I wandered
far and wide
reversing, and revering
the streets and cemeteries
of the dead
and I saw the Monuments
to the Deported
stark inside me
as in a city … (24)

The reference here to “Deported” is also of course to the departed, but it brings in another realm of the deathly: the deported, displaced, exiled, homeless people who exist in other lands from their home(land) or whose land never feels like home, in particular of course the Jewish immigrants to America whose cultural depiction in early twentieth-century poetry was largely one of disgust and pollution, as DuPlessis has charted.[22] These wandering/wondering souls, strangers and revenants, neither wholly dead nor alive, frequent the Draft poems of Torques: “Revenant, tell me if you know / what land am I? and you?” (92). Perhaps, again, the Objectivists were also in DuPlessis’s mind, many of them being Jewish outsiders, exiles or immigrants in America. In “Draft 66: Scroll” the revenants keep vigil together, recovering their own memories or “epiphanies of mourning” through the music of Shostakovich (49). This is a reference to an actual incident, but is broadened here, woven into a wider picture of reasons to mourn as it looks back to the war and forward to our future mourning in the face of environmental disaster.

roam the groundwork of resistance (84)

Arguably DuPlessis’s Drafts have always been ecological in the broadest sense, their strong sense of “Out there / connected / to the over-here” being an essential element of environmental thinking, in particular the environmental justice movement (93). Her disgust at consumerism (“malls a homey homeless home / ahung with things”) has been consistent, and she traces these “signs” back to the origins and conditions of cheap labor.[23] Her practice, too, the use of intertexts and scrupulous notes from a wide range of sources, literary and cultural, has, as I have argued elsewhere, the humility of recycling, about it, the poet replacing the great romantic myth of originality, the poet as genius, with the poet as reuser, recycler of words.[24]

Inevitably, as our knowledge of the environmental crisis grows, that sense of “out there […] over-here” has led DuPlessis to reference environmental issues more in her work. “Draft 53: Ecologue” (written in 2001 and published in the previous volume of Drafts) foreshadows many of the ecological concerns of Torques. Here, the factual inclusions, the material that cannot be assimilated, is often that which reflects on the deterioration of the ecological situation, as in this left-hand side column of “Draft 66: Scroll”:

“If this ain’t yours, it’s no one’s”
trans-generic bacteria, plus us
need 4 more planet Earth’s
to all consume like U.S. citizens
So yell “Trigger Treat”
without fraying, or unravelling
Folded inside these intricacies
it’s collateral wreckage
Is this the Tentieth Century? (48)

DuPlessis references E. O. Wilson’s The Future of Life here in a passage that projects into the future a sense of where an American-influenced future may lead us if we do not shift the trajectory of progress. I read “the Tentieth Century” as a reference to the tented communities of climate refugees we already see and which are more likely to grow than diminish.[25] This cannot be dissociated from our fundamentally capitalist and consumerist “world-system”:

Patchy roads and fast foods  educational outlets in strip malls pinguid gluts, unknowable nauseas  Shopping binge     Read the signs as you walk read them, trying to figure how   branches suggest     the menace of marks

Failed development paradigm arousal to justice deferred given box stores filled with stuff Cheap as blood, vigil memory error theater plastics choking both ruthless failure and unspeakable forgotten hopes (49)

America is grotesque here in its adherence to “stuff” and the real cost appears in the words “blood” and “choking” which reference the attendant human and environmental disasters behind the “Forlorn shoppers’” endless deathly quests (51).[26]

“Draft 72: Nanifesto,” which has “Ecologue” as one of its donor Drafts, is immediately and recognizably ecological in approach from the very first lines:

Insist on smallness.
Scale down clutter.
Critique monoculture. (95)

The political work of DuPlessis’s Drafts has become a call to “groundwork” also.

The counterbalance to consumerism, that is the “natural” world, however hedged about that term must be, has not had much of a presence in DuPlessis’s work to date. As a predominantly landscape writer myself I find it exciting to see nature creeping in, as if DuPlessis has been led back to “nature” through environmental politics. In “Nanifesto” we have “compare the properties of reeds”; “Respect honey and, even more, the bees”; “Investigate wild asparagus, for it grows oddly”; “Hike in strong boots to wherever a good there is” (95–97). In her Wordsworth poem “Draft 74: Wanderer,” the emblematic nature poet is referenced throughout. Here she creeps beneath Wordsworth’s breathless big scapes to create the nano-image of two fucking butterflies (109). As with the bees of course, it is the threat of loss of nature that makes us consider its “worth,” Hence, the litany of apple names DuPlessis cites in “Draft 53: Ecologue” and her reference in “Wanderer” to “as many kinds as still can grow despite industrial agriculture (119).[27] Although he is not included in her notes to either poem, this recalls for me Thoreau’s 1850 essay on “Wild Apples,” which mourns the loss of native fruit and dwells on apple names and histories real and created.[28] Here DuPlessis adds the actual apple to the cultural apples (the apple in alphabetical primers; the mythological “apple of discord”) which appear throughout Drafts (see 65, 77). In keeping with the twist and thwart of Torques the apple’s last appearance in the book is as “A for apple” for “anger” and for “anguish” … “This being what it is.” (119).

Place, from planet to locality, is referenced throughout Torques. In “Draft LXX: Lexicon” “P” reveals a cluster of words around “place”:

      This pulsing present
                   cowers
watching current performance of Powers —
      This place, this place. Poor planet I pray,
 
perhaps preaching
 
quote unquote
only to the quire
 
     but Ready to be ready.
Reaching, wretched, returning
     to roam the groundwork of resistance. (84)

The fear of preaching or being perceived (“quote unquote”) as preaching is common to environmental campaigners, as is the need to refute the idea of environmentalism as a form of replacement religion with “holier than thou” elements. DuPlessis explores this here, not least through the reference to “quire” a word we can read as a musical church choir or as a quire of paper, her particular materials. A little later in the poem, she identifies another problem of eco-action which is the emphasis on “saving” a particular locality (usually a space enjoyed by middle class people on recreational activities):

      Are these trees here
more sacred trees
      than any other trees? (85)

In the face of the threat to our planet, our feelings about it have changed radically and this is reflected in DuPlessis’s recent poems. Although there is presence of abyss in early Drafts, there are also joyously choric wide poetic cosmological spaces/pages for thinking/performing: “Here is the space for action, a theatre, a page, a white space in which voices, marks, words and letters will move, sound and think in a dynamical performance.”[29] “Draft 26: M-m-ry,” for instance, begins:

                        That the airy opening hung somber, / that the moon
trapezoid / on the floor be thus, be / here,
                                                that musical/ logic in
          the hypnogogic space / come waves rush/
                                                                   crosswise, athwart ….[30]

Contrast this to the remorselessly bleak references to space and the planet in Torques:

             a planet
desiccated, decimated.
with what ? empires? profiteering?
sheer misuse? (31)

Tonight the planet earth, one total thing,
will cast a brownish stain
over our intimate, the big-faced moon. (37)

Picking up on the references to pollution and poisoning present in the enfolded “Draft 47: Printed Matter,” “Scroll” is scattered with little words and phrases that heighten our sense of a present and progressive global crisis (“extinct orioles,” “thinking beyond / our air rights), all of which culminates in a final image of the “half bleak, and half-pending / Tainted Spot,” our fundamentally polluted planet (51).[31] There is an awareness too of the comedy and hubris of human expectations of nature in this work. In the second part of “Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul,” the poet awaits an eclipse, but will it meet her expectations:

It looks to be going
into deeper umbra
                                              What is darker; what is lighter
Will these clouds move?
                                              Was this the hope, or that
Am I seeing it? (39)

Possible, word by letter, letter by word (75)

In “Draft 69: Sentences,” just before the drastic cutoff (“But this poem has to exit. / This is enough to mourn. / Impossible to stand it.”), a tiny hopefulness seeps into the poem in the form of more spacious lines which say:

Possible, word by letter, letter by word,
trying to true, again to enter and
engage the saturated task. (75–76)

The hope in DuPlessis’s Torques is only through the micro-tools of the work, the little individual letters and words. I’ve always loved this element of her work, the bringing together of the micro and the macro, the single letter in the big-scale poem. I ended with this idea in my last essay on DuPlessis’s Drafts and toyed with the idea of starting with it here, except that I wanted to foreground, first, the idea of an ever-darkening page against which those letters still dance. In “Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul,” DuPlessis refers to her own project:

19 columns of impacted writing
are indexed under 26 letters.
why zero in on one?
I’d hardly say that letters
do not matter, their brilliant serif-im as fire,
but thinking only of design, of mystical nets,
will not absorb the imprint of our time. (36)

And yet, right through Torques, she does precisely “zero in on one,” or different single letters and pairs of letters, additions and omissions of letters from words. In this, she is consistent with earlier work, although the individual letters’ peculiar significances are often specific to this book. There is a primer element to this that is not new. From “Draft X: Letters” onwards, “A” is “Always apples / are (r) / first /… A / premier symbol / on the table.”[32] However, in Torques, although apples feature as we have seen, the “premier symbol” of the primer here is surely “N,” the principle of negativity all too alive in the world:

noman, nomad, nogirl, no good
        just the sheer N of no. (5)

These lines come near the bleak close of the very first poem, “Draft 58: In Situ.” Add one letter and “Not is as good a mark as now,” a sad picture of the present from “Draft 61: Pyx” (31). The lyrical “poetic O of moon” of poetry is subsumed by “N” in “Draft 63”:

one letter beyond N
and completing the NO
perfectly?
Or perhaps the P of Paralysis? (36)

So in a cluster of oppressive associations, “N” is no, “P” is paralysis, “C” is complicity or collusion (77), and “V” is vertigo, void, and a sinking raft of other Vs in “Draft 73: Vertigo,” a poem infused with a sense of loss, flooding, and abyss (98). Here too we see the saved letters of DuPlessis’s daughter as an infant, less endearing than “stark” and “formless” in their suggestion of “another other trace, or mark, or sign” that is “beyond one single alphabet’s entanglement.”

But then, just as we feel our alphabet to be “in the void” (129), there is “H,” the great Hope of Torques:

I wanted a whirling list of hopes
hopes hopes hopes whole alphabets of H’s

to evaporate and leave the sweet encrust,
a deep powder; a power inside the poetry … (17)

The fantastical idea of an alphabet of one letter is alluring, funny, magical: all elements which come into play in DuPlessis’s letters. The hope is not achieved in this poem of signs, “Draft 60: Rebus”; it is dissolved into M for (quoting out of line sequence) “moaning … muttering … misery … merciless management … Malarial muck for drinking water” (19).

However, “hope,” almost secretly, in spite of itself, is a powerful force in Torques, as it flickers in and out of the poems and pages. Look above. In the darkest pages, we have already seen it (quoted in the order cited in this essay):

Or should that hope be
given out as gone? (108)

This one not complex.
Just the shadow isle of sunken hope and text. (43)

the menace of marks                                and unspeakable forgotten hopes (50)

Was this the hope, or that
Am I seeing it? (39)

Ultimately, in another moment of simplicity, DuPlessis writes:

Not to see hope
is damaging
To see it, but deluded, could be worse. (112)

So “H” is the only counter to “N.”

In “Draft 66: Scroll,” opposite a compressed “field guide” to ecological disaster (“urgency,” “Post-consumer waste”) appears the “gloss” on the human side of the equation:

both ruthless failure
and unspeakable, forgotten hopes
that alphabets nonetheless pleat and
gather.
Political autism and Rage
in tempore belli
with burning and dodging techniques
so where is our N to stand? No where?
need clarity of Letter exfoliated … (49–50)

Here, in our zone of perpetual war, the H of Hope and the N of No are in dialogue throughout Torques. Like Persephone/Kore, we feel the “undertow or undertone” of the “U” of Underworld pulling us down, only to find touches of “H,” of Spring, again (85). The scroll goes on to note how these scrolls of letters “hardly suffice / for a smallest local hope” but yet hope always starts “again and then again” in a process of albeit haunted “arousal” and re-arousal:

                         To start
Again. Not again! In the imperfect moment
again to unroll the scroll
like this. In Yet and Yes. Id est:
all the letters, N and Y, J and A,
X, and explore intricacy along the way
e.g. inside necessity (51)

If we can find hope in these dark pages, then:

Why rip the books?
The books, the books contain our hopes.
To rip them
is to concede
to grope. (73)

“H” and thus hope is often linked to home, as these extracts from the alphabetical “Lexicon” poem illustrate:

              sight of that home, or hone, shimmering
among bristled haulm of
 
the Irretrievable; the Inchoate; the Impenetrable …. (78)
 
Hard to tell which hungers hinge to home. (83)

Hope and home then may together provide a mental homeland for the tragic wanderer/wonderer revenants figures who haunt the pages of Torques, as well as the reader/writer herself.

injustice, rage, despair (12)

The word “hope” from DuPlessis’s individualized primer draws our attention to the place of abstract nouns in Torques. “Go in fear of abstractions” was Ezra Pound’s advice for would-be Imagists, but DuPlessis, lover of modernists as she is, has many reservations about Pound and his prescriptions. Her abstractions are not frequent, but they are all the more simple, strong, and purposeful for that. They stand, amidst the varied and various vocabularies of this poetry, for what they are, for inassimilable human emotions and concepts. They are self-conscious, always edged with irony, as in this citation of perhaps the biggest abstraction, “truth,” mockingly arranged to raspingly half-rhyme with “laugh”:

The truth? It’s true.
Although I also laugh. (12)

In “Draft 59: Flash Back” it comes down to:

Where is justice?
How to get it? (13)

In the Lexicon poem discussed further below, “J” is once again unequivocally:

Justice,
Just that. (87)[33]

DuPlessis must be one of a very few contemporary poets who have set out in the public sphere a clear set of political values adding up to “Justice”:

What are my political values? social justice. gender justice. equality of access to reasonable living goods. economic justice, which means an equalization of society. … Access to education, to health care, to social goods: genuinely and liberally available. No despoiling of the earth, and the living creatures on it (including us) for profit. The call for an end of global crimes: of exploitation of child labor, of capturing people inside prison-model factories, of the destruction of water, animals, plant life; of the poisoning of people at work by their work. Development without despoiling. Justice. justice. justice for all … All this means post-capitalist, and post-nationalist values.[34]

Whilst DuPlessis’s enfolded Drafts have always embodied a ceaseless quest for an unobtainable, this has become more generically associated with social justice and less with a specifically feminine quest.[35]

Nonetheless, as always, DuPlessis is confronting gender expectations, and this very use of abstract nouns is one of them. This reclamation of emotion flies in the face of the snide, dismissive approach to female emotionalism in critical thinking. Conversely, in her essay “Corpses of Poesy” DuPlessis finds Pound’s praise of his fellow modernists Marianne Moore and Mina Loy for their lack of emotionalism just as problematic. He fails to recognize, she notes, their “passion, sarcasm, anger.” [36] In DuPlessis’s own work, she openly and confrontationally claims these very feelings. More often than not, what we find in the quest for “J” is “R,” a series of variations on the theme of rage: “impotence, rage, solemnity, paralysis” (4); “injustice, rage, despair” (12); “rage and grief” (50). In DuPlessis’s “Draft 72: Nanifesto” she upholds the dark or negative virtues: “Do not fail sadness”; “Persist in negative care”; “Work in anxious panic”; “Keep the rage complex”; “Credit your own complicity” (95–96). Rage is the keynote dark virtue here, right through the volume: “Enraged by our time. That simple” (14). Many of the poems are written in rage, committed to rage. “Draft 71: Headlines, with Spoils” asserts:

To keep track of grievances means living in fury. Forget
recollection in tranquility. Try collection today. Any day will do. (93)

To sum up, R=N+H=R.

Since every word is three (11)

Letters make words. The consciousness of every letter’s place within a word allows each word to multiply into a host of words, a plethora of portmanteaux, of homonyms and homophones, of newly created words, of words within words within words, just as in H.D.’s Trilogy :

… I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;

they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned

to hatch butterflies …[37]

Often every word is three, DuPlessis’s much-quoted (by me, at least) “both and and.”[38] This allows “bountries” to be “bounty-boundary” but also the unspoken countries (13). Invariably the word not said is the one we might have expected: for example, we hear “coincides” when DuPlessis writes “co-insides” (13). Equally, the split words “BEG IN” and “IN STILL” create richer meanings in context (22, 30). Sometimes, both pairs of a homonym are set side by side: “one rancid day of mist or missed” (42). The slippery process also occurs between languages: “COMME SI” and “COME, SEE” (104). This is sonic too, of course, adding to the caressive quality of DuPlessis’s touching and tasting, the “play-splice” of language, as in “parling, parting” (107). It has also always been “a punning metonymic chain of connections (absolute poison to her detractors) to ‘get over’ dominant language,” a process of decoding and rejuvenation giving “access to the language ‘inside’ the language, suggestively occult, suggestively female.” This description comes from DuPlessis’s analysis of Trilogy in her 1986 monograph, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle.[39] We can see how H.D.’s technique must have influenced the early DuPlessis who spends several pages of this densely packed book on this passage. For H.D., the spiritual dimension of the process was at the fore as she shifted her way through Greek and Egyptian mythologies:

For example:
Osiris equates O-sir-is or O-Sire-is;

Osiris,
the star Sirius,
…
recover the secret of Isis[40]

For DuPlessis, as a “realist and materialist poet” in the “Objectivist continuum,” spiritual consolation is scant.[41] She does not oppose female spirituality with “masculinist-nihilist / materialist positions,” as she describes H.D. doing.[42] Materialism is no longer masculinist in DuPlessis’s world. Yet, describing herself as a secular Jew with grave doubts about religion, she nonetheless writes in Pores: “I have a debate with modes of transcendence; I live in materiality which is nonetheless filled with sparks of awe (Niedecker).”[43]

DuPlessis rejects the “female figure of power at the center of the poem” that she finds in other women writers’ work, including H.D. For her the redemptive comes through the eroticized “repetition and crumpled touching” of both the enfolded grid of poems and of language within the poems — this is the sustaining force in her work, even if in Torques it must fight against the sense that even poesis as polluted.[44] In the final poem of the volume, “Draft 76: Work Table with Scale Models,” there is a redemptive return to the erotics of fold and language “with its ferocious flood of desire and demands” (132):

The talismans of this or that are handed round.
Their “folds come to contain the flow of time.”
Fold to flow, come to con-, tain to time.
Beautiful.       Really.
And this is also a theory of debris.
Not ironic, but saturated in irony. (133)

Here the “Beautiful” refers not only to the Charles Altieri quotation (“folds come to contain the flow of time”), but to the slippage of language in “Fold to flow, come to con-, tain to time.” DuPlessis is revealing the poetry in the original quotation and also creating a new line whilst revealing the beauty of the whole slippery process. The “Really” and the emphatic full stops after each word of “Beautiful.      Really.” acknowledge the shock that this emphatically positive abstraction is to us after the abstract nouns offered previously. Before this point, the only instance of the word has been the cutting:

They say: it’s so beautiful
couldn’t you do better? (16)

Real beauty is often found in the change of one letter in two consecutive words, “a deep powder; a power inside the poetry” (17). The lyricism, eroticism, and significance of poems increases with this multiplicity. Wander and wonder recur in Drafts and in particular throughout “Draft 74: Wanderer.” This allows for the conflation of mental and spatial journeying which characterize the whole collection. I have a weakness for DuPlessis’s alliterative or more complex sonic pairings, often in lines of four, such as “knit and knot and gloam and glare” (1) and “pinch and poke; poppit, prime and pry” (115). Not surprisingly, we find them too in the mock-lyric poem “Draft 67: Spirit Ditties”:

Bite and bark
trunk and leaf
rune and turn (53)

This can also act as a lightening influence through quickfire humor, such as the witty reversal “fast drivers in fat cars” (40). “Draft 61: Pyx” is a darkly comic take on male authority in academia, featuring lines such as:

He tapped his cane, surrounded
by other men
showing the faculty or facility … (21)

Here we also have the wonderful “avant garden” (23). On the very next page, though, the word slippage is much edgier as the woman poet sends her lines out into the world through “a process of greeting / of gritting” (22).

Something that sort of ends, but sort of not (8)

There are bigger structures for letters than words. Individual letters are commonly perceived as part of a collective, of course, the alphabet with which DuPlessis has always had a love-hate, playful relationship. Structures are always under question in her work. In “Draft X: Letters,” referencing William Carlos Williams, she constructs a letter poem ordered on the typewriter/keyboard sequence, left to right. Yet, although this is a QWERTY poem, many of the letter sections seek X, the mystery letter of the title and under X, the whole alphabet returns plays out again. No structure is singular.

“Draft LXX: Lexicon” in Torques is another letter poem, this time based on an individualized alphabet made into a fold/grid experiment. Here DuPlessis draws letters and words from Draft 1 in the A section, 2 in the B, and so forth. This then is a numerical as well as alphanumeric experiment which produces not one single whole alphabet as in a primer, but two and two-thirds of an alphabet, finishing at “r.” It is also a fold within a fold, since it divides the previous Drafts into groups of twenty-six, rather than nineteen, thus becoming “amusingly complicated” (140). The words and letters of the enfolded Drafts, the full “langdscape,” return — they become themselves revenants, ghost words, and yet, used again, are of course also new in context. The procedure of the poem is to join up letter sections rather than to separate them, so “Lexicon” becomes a flowing, self-referential piece on writing past and present as can be seen in the example of p, q, r cited in the discussion of place above. As I have demonstrated above, we can also read out from “Lexicon” into the rest of Torques itself in order to identify important word clusters around letters, just as the “P” reading as place links into the environmental thread of the volume (84, 90).

In “Draft 59: Flash Back” DuPlessis returns to that suspicion of preordained structures for thinking, including the alphabet. This “question” inaugurates a series of speculations on alternatives:

Question:
Why use the alphabet to organize,
       and why not? Discuss.
       Suggest another mechanism of order.
       One form and then another.
Something that sort of ends, but sort of not. (8)

The alphabet was used by Brian Kim Stefans to create an animated text response to DuPlessis’s statement on gender and sexuality written for the Buffalo Poetics List in 2000.[45]

In his note to the piece, “The Dreamlife of Letters,” Stefans describes DuPlessis’s original text as a “texturally detailed, nearly opaque response” to the questions posed by Dodie Bellamy for the online roundtable. Another word Stefans uses about it is “loaded.” One could read DuPlessis’s critique of the alphabet as a critique of Stefans’s certainly frolicsome but rather lightweight transfiguration of DuPlessis’s work. In her note to “Draft 59: Flash Back,” she remarks that Darren Wershler-Henry asked Stefans in interview whether the work “did not compromise the feminist speculation in my statement” (137). Certainly to me “The Dreamlife of Letters” seems to articulate an attempt to avoid the difficulty that DuPlessis’s original text poses, to lighten the dense “load,” if you like. DuPlessis’s life and texts are not light (one is tempted to cite Dickinson’s “my life had stood a loaded gun” here), and the alphabet, like all other systems, is under question. The deceptively simple statement “It is not one Anything,” the more one dwells on it, is deeply radical in its resistance to preordained structures of any kind (9). They always lead to loss, as more restless questions suggest:

Who has designs on us? and Why?
What is the force of our conviction?
Something has gotten away from us:
urgency for justice, intensities of ire,
lime-green as the after-image
in the eye-teeth of unrhymable orange. (9)

Here again, DuPlessis references “The Dreamlife of Letters” which Stefans described as a “flash animation poem with a twist of avant-feminist lime” and which is set against a bright orange background (137). Note the abstract absolute, Justice, again. By the end of this Draft, after considering the various effects of her animated words, DuPlessis feels perhaps, as I tend to, that contemporary web poetry has a long way to go. She returns to:

A page: where every line stands up affright
              porcupines that run ahead
              in sudden light. (10)

Dry tears over blood-type headlines? (12)

We have seen in the discussion above that DuPlessis moves between her usual shifting language-play associated with poetries associated with poststructuralist practice and a more urgent direct language “(This one not complex”), including manifesto dictates, philosophical statements, and abstract nouns. There is a continuing struggle to work out what language will rise to the challenge of the times, which is heightened in the torque or twist of this volume. In “Draft 69: Sentences” (which follows the blacked-out “Threshold” poem), language is “corrupted, corrupting/ corruptible” (70). In the face of the temptations, risks and slipperiness of poetic language, at times all we can do is collect textual evidence:

Impossible to write a poem.
No sentences can be made.
Social founders, kitschy gabble.
No collection mechanisms seem engaged.
except razoring facts from the newspaper page
to which I am sentenced. (70)

Of course, the poem moves on, as it always does, to speaking of multiple though often agonizing ways of writing, but I want to stay with the newspaper facts here, with DuPlessis’s habit of “razoring facts” from the papers in order to pull the work into focus or clarity (another Objectivist word), in order, perhaps, to give reasons for all that rage:

“12 hours per day for a pittance, living
             “12 to a room, working
                          “in fenced-in factory complexes,” (92)

We can read “razoring” here as a verb (as in cutting from the paper) and as an adjective (facts which are painful for us read). This is part of the “listing and listening” to the “great swath of names and citations” and the accompanying restless questions: “what were they / what had happened / these suffering bodies” (12). Right through the Drafts project, to tell has always been to toll, and this title was chosen for the gathering together of the first books of Drafts into one volume, Toll.[46] In “Draft 73: Vertigo,” “NOTHING IS EVER ENOUGH / even into extended telling, even unto toll” (103).

This collection of testimony, of evidence, is reminiscent of the Objectivists’ enterprise, the attempt to remain true to what Louis Zukofsky called “inextricably the direction of historical and contemporary particulars,” found text being one example of how this was achieved.[47] The most extreme example of the incorporation of factual found text into poetry is in the work of the Objectivist Zukofsky saw as working at the height of “sincerity”: Charles Reznikoff. His poems Testimony and Holocaust are based entirely on found text selections from courtroom records.[48] The British poet Anne Stevenson wrote of Holocaust that “No poet has ever written a book so nakedly shocking, so blatantly calculated to make us feel that the Nazi persecution of the Jews can never be fictionalized or abstracted into “literature.”[49] DuPlessis asserts, regarding Reznikoff, that “there is a political agenda in simply confronting readers with a record of hurt and wounding.”[50] In other words, no fictionalized or poetic words could break through our defenses as effectively (“NOTHING IS EVER ENOUGH”).

So, as these lines from “Draft 74: Wanderer” illustrate, the poet turns documenter and witness:

who want to speak to sigh, to sigh and
rage, not for that hour, not for that place
yet nowhere
unembellished by some trace:
documentary (that and more) witnessing (that
many more) and witless, hurtful “jesting air” — en-
joined, frozen in motion but not to crumble, rather
stand. (106)

The singular “want” both asserts this desire and, through the shadow word “wants,” asks who could want do this work, a doubleness or ambivalence we see throughout the volume.

At the heart of “Draft 69: Sentences” and the heart of Torques itself, DuPlessis muses on not being a journalist with an official role and place to speak:

I have no press pass. No credentials. Not embedded.
That stands at the margin of edge
without particular brands of “I”
to greet you with.
Only you alone are listening,
perhaps; and thanks.
Or maybe not, can’t count on that. (71–72)

Yet that edge-position allows of course for the ability to recontextualize the facts of journalism, to present them to us so that we see them again, more clearly. I have written elsewhere about the sense of anger and powerlessness that often characterizes how we feel about the world, particularly environmental, issues that face us now.[51] As our knowledge and concerns grow ever less national, more global, we are increasingly dependent on news media. When we turn there, we are bombarded by narratives of disaster and apocalypse. Particularly in relation to climate change, there is a danger of not just helplessness and despair, but also, most dangerously, desensitization. In his essay “Climate Change and Contemporary Modernist Poetry,” Richard Kerridge, via Slavoj Zizek, has noted how our response can never be adequate since we are dealing with material beyond “our most unquestionable presuppositions,” such as “our everyday understanding of ‘nature’ as a regular, rhythmic process.”[52]

DuPlessis considers how we might remain sensitized to the world and the possibility of action with it in her working notes for How2. She picks up on “will anything teach us?,” her own phrase from Torques (85):

Will anything teach us? A poem with both affect and information has as much chance as anything to give rise to understanding, via an incantation of words that turns the mind, deturns our thinking, makes us face our world, and, perhaps even motivates us to political action.

She refers here to the Situationist practice of detournement, a practice of “appropriating” and “turning” of public language. For Raoul Vaneigem, the Belgian Situationist, detournement involved “acts … against power” requiring tactics “taking into account the strength of the enemy.”[53] For Guy Debord, this included the “negation and subversion of ‘official public language’ that “conceals and protects” the public world. Through her use of found text, found poetry and poetics, DuPlessis practices this “turning back” of public language against itself, a process that should “inform” as well as satirize or emotionally affect. Perhaps she is thinking here of Debord’s statement that “Information is power’s poetry (the counterpoetry of the maintenance of law and order)” (102). Arguably, DuPlessis determines to recapture information for poetry. Within “the vast plethora of news that washes over us” is the news that we need to hear and digest. That plethora of “dark news” is a continual presence in Torques, darkening the page in forms (especially the scroll draft), uses of language, and numerous explicit references (130):

IN STILL
              Sovegna vos,
              rem-Ember
              and thereupon open
              today’s
              newspaper
 
A rush of people across a bridge:
grift, happenstance, war, drought, need
mortal life washes us up on its shores
somber and singing
cracked hordes, cracked lips (30–31)

A few pages later, as she often does, DuPlessis condenses this as “grief the news and rage,” surrounding “the news” with “grief,” echoing the “grift” above, and the all-important motivating “rage.” This is the “checkered Now” (108) we have to meet, the “historical moment,” but the beginning of this extract emphasizes again how these present crises originate out of the past, hence the necessity of memory implied by the vocative “Sovegna vos”: you should remember. Interestingly, DuPlessis removes the other half of this Dante quote as cited by Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Here, “Sovegna vos al temps de mon dolor” is a far more self-indulgent expression of woe, of “mon dolor,” not everyone else’s.

“Draft 71: Headlines, with Spoils” is a striking example of the use of news headlines, cast in a “larger, darker font size [to] underline our condition” and to resist the “washing over” effect, to produce poetry which combines “information with feeling.” The phrase is important. DuPlessis does not hold back from exploring emotion or psychological affect, as Reznikoff does in his testimonial work. In many ways DuPlessis is closer to what herself describes as the “psychosocial” cultural poetics of the only female objectivist, Lorine Niedecker.[54] She speculates that Niedecker’s interest in the psychological and emotional resonances of language and politics might relate to her gender and social difference from the other Objectivist poets. I speculate that DuPlessis herself might identify with this, in particular what Niedecker describes as an “awareness of everything influencing everything” which, near the end of her life, she no longer fears might just be “goofing off.” Perhaps too DuPlessis finds inspiration for her developing environmentalism from Niedecker’s own.[55]

In the following lines from “Draft 71: Headlines, with Spoils,” the factual headlines stand out and the lines in quotation marks acquire an irony in context:

Night sky, wet roads; headlines thick,
               big-font lines, the whole shtick
                            in I Ching throws.
Auto and plant emissions linked to fetal harm
               bling bling — “linked to”
               but, as stated, “no cause for alarm.”
 
…

There is a garish palette of superabundance at an undisclosed location.
Shopping binge compensates for a low industrial sector
Buy enlarge.
Freedom of Choice! (“linked to,” as stated, “no cause for alarm”)
And then the prototype robot-soldier
“readied, aimed and fired at a Pepsi can,
performing the basic tasks of hunting and killing.”
 
               So That:
               This work will never hit
               the post-production stage,
                      because
 
Tanker Sinks Off Spain, Threatening Eco-disaster (91–92)

DuPlessis’s headlines are attributed to sources such as The Philadelphia Inquirer and International Herald Tribune. Without sacrificing subtlety and context, DuPlessis makes us feel that our response is demanded and should even be translated into some kind of action.

We have come full circle here to my first point about Torques: that form and content remain closely engaged in DuPlessis’s work and that she succeeds in evolving both her structure and language to meet the needs she sees around her, drawing as she has always done on the work of the previous generation of modernists and making it speak again, afresh for the here and now. Although the Draft project reflects back to us a darkening social condition which sometimes we would rather not confront, it also demonstrates the ability to respond. At the end of “Draft 61: Pyx,” there is a casting asunder of all the barriers to speech, one of those moments when words coalesce into one last incipit, simple statement:

Forget “other.”
Forget “marginal.”
It is this very site.
It says “Sit down in it.
It’s time now.”
Now it’s time. (31)

 

---

 

1. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Writing on ‘Writing,’” in Tabula Rosa (Elmwood, CT: Potes and Poets Press, 1987), 84. I have always read this piece as a prologue to the Draft body of work, almost a declaration of intent.

2.  DuPlessis, Torques: Drafts 58–76 (Cambridge: Salt, 2007), 70. All subsequent page references within the text are to this volume. References to other volumes will appear in endnotes.

3. Harriet Tarlo, “‘Origami Foldits’: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts 1–38, Toll,” How2 1, no. 8 (Fall 2002); “‘A she even smaller than a me’: Gender Dramas of the Contemporary Avant-Garde,” in Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice, ed. Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000); “Recycles: The Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poetry,” Journal of Ecocriticism 1, no. 2 (2009), special issue on “Poetic Ecologies.”

4. The growing Objectivist influence must also of course be related to DuPlessis’s work in the late nineties (shortly before writing these poems) in coediting The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), the most important contribution to date to the understanding of this neglected group of modernists.

5. DuPlessis, “Inside the Middle of a Long Poem,” in Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 250.

6. Kathleen Fraser, “Translating the Unspeakable: Visual Poetics as Projected Through Olson’s ‘Field’ into Current Female Writing Practice,” in Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 175.

7. Ibid., 177.

8. DuPlessis, Pitch: Drafts 77–95 (Cambridge: Salt, 2010).

9. DuPlessis, “Inside the Middle of a Long Poem,” 250.

10. Denise Levertov, “An Admonition,” in Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 310.

11. “Langdscape” is used throughout the oeuvre, see especially the opening to “Draft 68: Threshold” (66).

12. DuPlessis, “Inside the Middle of a Long Poem,” 237.

13. DuPlessis, “Working Notes for ‘Draft 71: Headlines with Spoils,’” How2 3, no. 2 (2007).

14. I wrote about “selvedge” in “Origami Foldits”; it is first used in Tabula Rosa as a poem title and picked up again throughout the oeuvre. See, for example, “Draft 21: Cardinals.”

15. DuPlessis, Drafts 1–38, Toll (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 170–72.

16. “Conjunctions” and “Draft 27: Athwart,” in Drafts 3–14 (Elmwood, CT: Potes and Poets Press, 1991), 86 and Drafts 15–XXX, The Fold (Elmwood, CT: Potes and Poets Press, 1997), 68.

17. DuPlessis, Drafts 1–38, Toll, 170.

18. Ibid., 168.

19. DuPlessis, “Otherhow,” in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (London: Routledge, 1990), 149.

20. DuPlessis, “A Statement for Pores,” Pores: An Avant-Gardist Journal of Poetics Research (July 2002): 2.

21. See Jerome Rothenberg, Khurbn and Other Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983).

22. DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 6.

23. DuPlessis, “Draft 11: Schwa,” in Drafts 1–38, Toll, 79.

24. Tarlo, “Recycles: The Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poetry,” 120–21.

25. Perhaps it is also a reference to the tenth house in astrology, which is referred to in “Draft 67: Spirit Ditties” as a “darkened house, / memory house” (55). It is the house of the public sphere and of parental influence, hence perhaps the house of inheritance from our forbears.

26. See also the blood presented as “sweetened, crinkle-packaged, / bright-named something else” in “Draft 74: Wanderer,” 117.

27. DuPlessis, Drafts 39–57, Pledge (Cambridge: Salt, 2004), 168.

28. Henry David Thoreau, Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays, University of Georgia Press, 2002.

29. Tarlo, “‘Origami Foldits’: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts 1–38, Toll.”

30. DuPlessis, Drafts 1–38, Toll, 166.

31. DuPlessis, “Draft 47: Printed Matter,” in Drafts 39–57, Pledge, 77–87.

32. DuPlessis, “Draft X: Letters,” Drafts 1–38, Toll, 64.

33. See also “Justice demanded no more” in “Draft 74: Wanderer,” 120.

34. This is but an extract from a pretty comprehensive list to be found at DuPlessis, “A Statement for Pores.”

35. Again, as with the Objectivists, there is a critical counterpart here in her contemporaneous 2001 book, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934. Here DuPlessis broadens her poetry criticism of the early Twentieth Century to consider wider issues of race and culture, in addition to gender. Having said that, I am conscious that I have marginalized discussion of gender in Torques in this piece somewhat. It remains a concern of course, but one most commonly discussed with reference to DuPlessis.

36. “‘Corpses of Poesy’: Some Modern Poets and Some Gender Ideologies of Lyric,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 85.

37. H.D., Trilogy (Manchester: Carcanet, 1973), 53.

38. DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986), 113.

38. DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle, 91–92.

40. H.D., Trilogy, 54.

41. DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, introduction to The Objectivist Nexus, 3.

42. DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle, 88.

43. DuPlessis, “A Statement for Pores.”

44. DuPlessis, “Inside the Middle of a Long Poem,” 241–42.

45. This piece can be found at UbuWeb.

46. See also “And work until it tolls” in “Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow,” Drafts 1–38, Toll, 267.

47. DuPlessis and Quartermain, introduction to The Objectivist Nexus, 3.

48. Charles Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915), vols. 1–2, and Holocaust (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1978, 1975).

49. Anne Stevenson, “Charles Reznikoff in His Tradition,” in Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, ed. Milton Hindus (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984).

50. DuPlessis and Quartermain, introduction to The Objectivist Nexus, 16.

51. Part of the next few paragraphs is drawn from “Recycles: the eco-ethical poetics of found text in contemporary poetry,” 123–25.

52. Richard Kerridge, “Climate Change and Contemporary Modernist Poetry,” in Poetry and Public Language, ed. Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2007), 132.

53. In Robert Hampson, “’Replace the Mindset’: Tony Lopez and the Turning of Public Language,” in Lopez and Caleshu, Poetry and Public Language, 102.

54. DuPlessis and Quartermain, introduction to The Objectivist Nexus, 11. This is not a new term in her work, having been used in “For the Etruscans,” in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, 2. In her later essay “Manifests” she writes of the danger that psychoanalysis should become a “near-mythic system of explanation” instead of a ‘social theory of interaction.” See Blue Studios, 206.

55. Lorine Niedecker, letter to Gail Roub, June 20, 1967, quoted in DuPlessis and Quartermain, introduction to The Objectivist Nexus, 12. See also Richard Caddel, “LN and Environment,” Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (National Poetry Foundation, Orono, Maine: University of Maine, 1996), 281-286.

Each draft in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s long poem Drafts can be read as the opening draft, the first one through which you can enter the work. Each draft in the work is autonomous and capable of standing alone but only through a collective reading of Drafts will a reader attain the enormously rich, unquestionably challenging, but inevitably satisfying experience it offers. Drafts is not a linear work, but a spherical one. Think of it as an endlessly unrolling scroll that begins to fold upon itself on a desk. The circularity is made up of the recurrence of its themes, its interrogations, glosses, and commentary; its borrowings, appropriations, and writing through old drafts. Rewriting in the project does not supersede what was written before but enriches it by creating deep layers of sound and imagery that foster a sustained resonance. Begin reading Drafts anywhere then continue forward or back. The continuation only takes you deeper underground to make contact with its many reverberant strands.

Through a detailed reading of two drafts (“82: Hinge” and “15: Little”) this essay attempts to demonstrate that entry into Drafts can occur anywhere and initiate the beginning of a sustained and rewarding engagement with this landmark of contemporary poetry. Every poem in Drafts both leaves and anticipates traces of others. In reading these two drafts I recognize and trace recurrent words and themes. The keywords mark layers of concern as the poem grapples with articulations of the present and its continued struggle with loss and recovery, memory and time. The words include “hinge,” “rubble,” “pebble,” “enormous,” and “it.” The themes include the work site, the pinhole, the book, the worm (as collagist), the mite (as scholar), and trace elements. The methods include (but are by no means limited to) collage, midrash,[1] and nekuia (questioning of the dead).

1.

“The book is a mine / of intersections” opens “Draft 82: Hinge.” “The book” is made up of “margins”; “statements” “spurt and overlap, / link and lack, / subject and answer, / declaration and perversity.”[2] A book of weblike intersections and associations is a likely outcome of work made largely in the mode of collage.[3] “Hinge” is in part a meditation on the act of writing and the dissemination of that writing into the world. It is aware of writing’s potential permanence and also the inevitable threat of its disappearance. From the bound book to sprayed graffiti, writing in many formats is tracked through each of the ten sections of “Hinge.” As a physical object “the book” has a connection to mining that is both metaphor and not metaphor. Mines are underground work sites: inside the earth, under ground surface, under the text or the world as it can be read. “Intersections” imply a complex of passages. “The book” as avatar for Drafts makes “Hinge” into a kind of general statement for Drafts itself. As “Hinge” echoes and parlays earlier images and motifs of the project, as it modifies them in new contexts, it also anticipates later ones by continuing to build upon the groundwork against which those will be read.

The five numbered sections of “Hinge” split into halves (like a hinge) with the first line, sometimes the first two, repeating. In its structure the sections mimic a mechanical hinge made of two wings and a pivot (pin). The wings and any objects mounted to them can be moved and the repeated line(s) serves as pin. The hinge of a bound book allows the cover to swing open. Without it, like a door off its hinges, pages fall from the book. The hinge of a book may also be literal as books were once held together by metal hinges attached across the covers and spines. Hinge is a term of rhetoric that marks the critical point of a debate or marks the turn of a discussion; specific to poetry, particularly as DuPlessis uses it as a literary term in her prose, “hinge” operates on a syntactic level (“syntactic hinge or pivot words”) and influences meaning.[4] The hinging of the sections then suggests a bifurcation of meaning in which starting points, the pin lines, offer an alternative reading in rewritten sections. They are restatements, modified comments; they supplement and complement rather than negate the other half. The wings in effect provide mutual support. The seedling format comes from “Draft 6: Midrush” (the first donor draft “in the line of 6” to “82: Hinge”). Certain stanzas of “Midrush” divide in two parallel stanzas that open to the left and right margins. This occurs four times and each time returns to a single centered stanza.[5]

The pin lines of “Hinge” contain the keywords “book,” “page,” “rubble,” “train,” “carving.” Each section contains acts of reading: book, page, train schedule, covenant, rubble, stories, graffiti, maps, Italian and Greek letters, newspaper, sentences. But there are obstacles. The book is scorched or falling apart, the page is tangled or falling loose from the book, the covenant is broken, the maps half-effaced, the newspaper closed. Commentary to be made on texts like these may be impossible. Indeed, simple reading is impossible. It’s the situation itself that requires comment and the situation seems tenuous. The first identifiable voice (“I”) appears in section 2, distressed: “I don’t know what to do, how to articulate it. / My stepping stippled feet feel cold. / There are clots in my ear from ashen coals” (Pitch, 28). The passage by “a strange train” provides a feeling of growing terror: “The present is dismembered. Undecipherable. The future is paralyzing.” The train ride suggests a dream state, one of terror, and one common to Drafts. The figure seems to be in constant existential despair: “… my life … / was it important? Did it matter? / Who broke these hinges? Who profits / from such resistance to turning” (29).

The pun of a claim progresses from mining (metals, minerals, etc.) to textual inquiry: “Here’s a single page that stakes a claim.” Digging as an intellectual endeavor. Drafts is primarily collage even as little narratives seem to burst from every overlap. The desire to untangle the claims and interplays of pages is strong: “the exposition / Being so complex. / Are you that surprised?” (28). Whose frustration is this: are we witnessing acts of reading in other texts, equally demanding, or does the question mirror our own reaction to the “hole and hold, dead and dread”? Patterns begin to emerge as they do when looking at (or reading) any collage of visual (non-word exclusive) materials. “Hole” and “hold” are repetitions from early drafts: “Draft 12: Diasporas” and also “Draft 14: Conjunctions” (“the hole, again I said hold, / I have in my head”) (Toll, 86, 93). In “Diasporas” they are drawn from a Walter Benjamin text (Toll, 270). The repetitions create an intensely complicated context in which to read this new placement. Intersections on the sides of each hinge (half of each section) recall earlier lines and earlier themes within this draft and as well as across the preceding eighty-two (counting “Draft Unnumbered: Précis”). We recognize trains, work sites, rubble, biblical allusions, and alphabetic characters as significant components of Drafts that have recurring roles, sometimes brief and sometimes extended. They will stretch to the end of the project when it concludes with Draft 114.

Sequentially, “Hinge” follows a draft (“81: Gap”) that chronicles a visit to a concentration camp, possibly Auschwitz. No location name is used in the poem and no note to the draft is offered. A sign in Polish is recorded: “Zakaz Wchadzenia Na Ruiny. / Keep Off the Ruins” (Pitch, 25). Other bits of language (part of the “undecipherable” of the present in “Hinge”) are considered: “This language uses many letters that are underused / In the Anglophone context. / Z and J and W and K. Plus Y. And C.” Where the figure in “82: Hinge” is disoriented and uncertain, the speaker in “81: Gap,” standing among other visitors who “take pictures with digital cameras” experiences anxiety but not despair.

Multiple readings are possible, and different impacts registered when considering “Hinge” and “81: Gap” back to back. Though each poem in Drafts is absolutely autonomous, materials and descriptive episodes easily migrate among one another. Materials for collage are cut up and divided among multiple drafts. It seems to be one of Drafts’ basic principles. Is the “spur-line train stop” (30) a locale used when visiting the historical Auschwitz site or when imagining the arrival of one of its victims? The inclusion of “sgraffito” on the wall says Italy, as does the “ostinato” and the “Acca acca acca” written on the right hand (31). So much context is needed to process “tacit greetings from soldiers” (30) or no context at all is necessary: we hear the soldier’s tacit greeting with what we’ve processed so far.

We may be reading across Drafts 81 and 82 a modified ritual of nekuia where the journey is made by train and hell is the concentration camp. Nekuia is the ancient Greek ritual of questioning the dead. Its best known literary episode is in The Odyssey. In “Hinge” the scorched book itself may be the sacrifice. The questioned is anonymous: a victim, a survivor, a scholar. Someone in despair whose life crisis is recalled in a meditative frame of mind: was my life “important? Did it matter? / Who broke these hinges?” (29). Or, who cared and will care for the work I’ve done? This is not, this doesn’t need to be, the poet save in giving voice to an unnamed person, actual or composite.

In the final section of “Hinge” the sensation of something being finished, an episode coming to its conclusion is palpable. The engraved hands open like books (like hinges). A newspaper page blown about in the wind becomes stuck to a pole, closed, but could be opened “like the palm and psalm of the written” and “be regarded” (32). It becomes a fable of loss that pivots on the word “hope” found in its closing lines, “the open hope of hinge.” There is a plea in “Hinge,” a call for a revaluing of literacy in cultural and textual domains. “The book” is a talisman that can serve as a safeguard against loss, many kinds of loss. By the activation of read sentences a transportive act occurs in which “you arrive nowhere, in order to explore what that ‘nothing’ will generate.” There is — there can be — “hope” but it’s not guaranteed (“sometimes there is not”) and then the effort, the work of poetry, scholarship, or anything transmitted through text is lost.

In part, this gloss on “the book” calls for the abolition of books. The end of the first section calls for doing away with poems, books, honors and “rhetorics dibbling in frill [and] decor” (27). Instead of books there would be “only acts of writing,” “austere and demanding” and “infinitely interpretable.” “Hinge” closes with a demand to read, a demand that these “work sites” be more deftly attended to, and the attentions demanded by them be given more rigor. This is the utopian polemic of a poet and scholar, made from hope. But it’s a hope well versed in the history of its pitfalls. The quote preceding this gloss, DuPlessis notes, is from American composer George Rochberg, himself providing a gloss on a letter by Rilke who despairs that art and theater didn’t prevent the First World War (174). The notion — Rilke’s — is reminiscent of Pound, whose sleep was troubled (satirically) by “The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation.”[6] But the words — Rochberg’s — “we stand bewildered …” seem somehow to echo Oppen, whose collective “we” in “Of Being Numerous” has a similar portentous sweep: “if it is true we must do these things” and “bewildered / By the shipwreck.”[7] The echo is intensified by appearing in “Draft 85: Hard Copy,” DuPlessis’s writing through “Of Being Numerous” from which she takes the word in “Bewildering what happened” (Pitch, 46).

DuPlessis’s hope for a new kind of book is an indeterminate hope. “The book, the books contain our hopes.”[8] In no way do I read her as saying this or that would be better if people would just read more.[9] Instead a footnote to “Draft 57: Workplace: Nekuia” constructively redirects our attention. DuPlessis’s lines “For the book is never whole / no matter how it fills or why it makes those claims” is a gloss on the footnote, a quote from Zukofsky, to which it is tethered. Zukofsky proposes, perhaps following Mallarmé, that a single but defining book might be an adequate text for world culture, instead of a plethora of many books.[10] As in “Hinge” the perfect-enough book turns out not to be so: “If the full page folds / if another page comes loose as loss, / if corners of things rip.”[11] And in “Draft 76: Work Table with Scale Models” the book, perfect or no, is finally an object for further work:

found paper & thread
undid the book
low hum and rustle, voiceless
out of the fallen leaves of text.
 
Re-bound the folds with sweet reeds and whiplash
 

tied polylingual billets, doux ding-a-ling,
 

And punched andare-ritornare
 

tickets, there and back,
 

one for entering the book
 

one for escaping the book. (Torques, 131)

In its insistence of hope as an element of the written “Hinge” echoes lines from “Draft 60: Rebus”: “I wanted a whirling list of hopes / hopes hopes hopes whole alphabets of H’s” (Torques, 17) and answers it in Italian: “acca acca acca” the Italian letter “H” seen, or read, in the “flesh lines of my palm … read as letters” (Pitch, 31). Other pertinent echoes from all previous drafts become prominent in the din: “The book, the books contain our hopes” (Torques, 73); “The blood comes thru the book” (120). And with increasing volume, the long o sound of “hope” as in “type O blood dotted on the page. / Of openings. Over and over, and of an older hope” (84).

The images and words recalled, echoed, and repeated throughout Drafts have the effect of making multiple readings. A new reading yields a new pattern, an old one modified. The resulting patterns become ever sharper, however provisionally. Why is it important to trace them? As standalone poems the drafts in Drafts can be highly evocative. In its totality this evocative quality is unbelievably rich, creating meanings for the individual reader I am sure not even the author can fully anticipate. Tracing the words and themes illustrate a richness in composition by which layered materials reverberate in each passage. Possibilities for meanings accrue.

The idea of “donor drafts,” of folding the Drafts upon one another after each set of nineteen, means that “Hinge” unfolds “along the line of 6.” The predecessors of “Hinge” are “6: Midrush” (the originator of the line), “25: Segno,” “44: Stretto,” and “63: Dialogue of self and soul.” Drafts 101 and 120 will round it out. Drafts in a certain line will appropriate and recycle words, images, forms, and themes from previous drafts with many variations and modifications. Donor drafts are objects of conscious meditation in beginning a new one. Yet sometimes there is scant resemblance among drafts of a line. The method and extent of loans is not formalized. It is instructive to see what is borrowed as these themes inevitably develop into the strongest patterns and remain the most resilient poetic fibers of the work. From the line of 6 “Hinge” takes biblical allusions. The paired stanzas of “Midrush” and the bifurcated stanzas of “Hinge” are tethered to the story of the Ark and its animals, “cowering / pairs / in a tarred ark” and, again, writing: “pairing the letters / underneath / siting     citing / the writing under writing.” (Toll, 33). “Ark” is echoed as pun in both “Stretto” (“to arc the wine,” Pledge, 61) and “Dialogue of self and soul” (“inside some arc,” Torques, 38). No phoneme is too small to register.

Scripture returns in “63: Dialogue of self and soul” with the death of Eli upon learning the ark of covenant has been captured from Israel. “Draft 25: Segno” continues the theme of pairing — “Memory makes twins / from single rocks” — and further encounters, through dreams, with the dead: “The dream-speech of the dead / reverberates, a tunnel of echos” (Toll, 162, 163). Tunnels are found in “44: Stretto”: “the ear opens tunnels / behind itself” (Pledge, 56); they appear again in “63: Dialogue of self and soul”: “We’re caught inside our time, / a tunnel in a cave” (Torques, 38). The questions asked in this draft will be echoed in “Hinge”: “What’s the covenant? / who is propitiated? / who assuaged? who profited?” If we are not reading a gloss on the biblical ark of the covenant, the chest containing the written law as given by God, then the secular covenant of Drafts remains elusive beyond a symbol for the power of the written word. The “covenant of breaking” (Toll, 34) and “scattered tabernacle” (36) are glimpsed again in “Hinge” on the passing train: “The covenant? I understand that it is broken. Look — we have just passed the scattered tabernacle!” (Pitch, 28). Hints of what was desired in a covenant and what now stands as a loss, perhaps permanently, is found in “Draft 74: Wanderer”:

For few have found just covenants that hold.
For here and there are both displayed and crushed.
…
Should we assume there can be real covenant,
not given, not imposed, not crazed, but struggled
for and wide? Or should that hope be
given out as gone? (Torques, 108)

Covenant in section 24 of “Draft 85: Hard Copy,” whose corresponding section in Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” reads in part “The covenant is / There shall be peoples,”[12] is pluralized and completely removed from sacred texts:

To resuscitate
The covenants that are
Available
To fabricate them as
Humane and secular
 
And thereby to address
Wrongs of the world, ruthlessness,
Despoiling and injustices:
 
Is the agenda in front of us. (Pitch, 59)

Whether all previous occurrences of “covenant” in Drafts also respond in part to Oppen’s usage is impossible to determine.

“Draft 44: Stretto” provides phrases that will appear in “Hinge” — “spurt and overlap” and “subject and answer” (Pledge, 55) — and takes others from “25: Segno” —“Similars that materialize / maybe a little / behind the other” (Toll, 162). In “Stretto” the phrases are part of a descriptive passage of paintings, perfectly suitable for reuse in describing “the book,” which will give to “Hinge” its variations of “tangled in the long veil of the page.” For letters the “O” in “Midrush” (handwritten on the page, Toll, 34) is echoed in the “poetic O of moon” in “Dialogue of self and soul” (Torques, 36). In “Hinge” it is subtly employed again as traditional poetic interjection: “O, it would be austere and demanding; o, it would be infinitely interpretable!” (Pitch, 27). The long o in both “open” and “hope” (making it a hinge sound) is also strung throughout this line. With “Was this the hope, or that” (Torques, 39) coming after “paralysis” (meaning inaction or indecision, in both “Dialogue” and “Hinge”), hope gets the final say: the “open hope of hinge” (Pitch, 32).

I have made no mention of those most romantic of poetic images, as repeated and multilayered as the words discussed here: “heart” or “clouds” or “moon.” They each play heavy roles in Drafts. The examples cited here are by no means exhaustive and lie in plain sight. The borrowings of “Hinge” are not limited to its donor drafts. It is not uncommon to see intermingling and appropriation of words and images well off the donor lines. The patterns in Drafts are formalized by a donation system that is outlined in a grid, published in the front matter of Pitch. Practically speaking, it seems likely that the many images and themes occur where they are needed at any particular moment.

To read through Drafts is to take on a heightened awareness of certain words. Each usage may register a shift in meaning or add new meaning. Lapsed attention may be a lost chance for redemption. The word “hinge” maintains a consistent presence throughout Drafts varying in syntactic usage. It first appears in the opening line of “Draft 3: Of”: “Hinge-loss door, lack latch” (Toll, 19). An editorial mark in the margin instructs that this line and 49 others be cut from the poem (19–20). It appears again as a verb “(rude grey nobs of street junk hinge the rough grey ice)” (22) and as a noun rooted with discarded things in a meditation of syntax: “a hinge from word to word a thingk / of what grammatical conjuncture can seem / adequate to ‘of’?” (21). When it appears again (not coincidentally along the “line of 3”) in “Draft 22: Philadelphia Wireman” its contextual uses are similar. It is stretched and adapted to new uses: “Juncted agendas that twine their hinge” and “Grunge things junk things, things singed by light. / HOW hung the hinge from void to word / from word to work” (141). The last line is employed in reiteration toward the end: “Can you tie up Spirit Writing the hinge from void to word to work / on the wadded page randomize the flow of paths” (143). It is also recycled (off the grid lines of official folds) in “Draft 55: Quiptych”: “we shine about, we hinge / … / caught in mid-tunnel … / … among the ark of random things” (Pledge, 183). “Quiptych” begins with a telling epigraph on beauty from the “random gathering of things / insignificant of themselves” by Herakleitos (181), unfolds as a commentary on the methods of collage and finishes as an elegy for “an era of shame.” The connections are as explicit as juxtaposition can make. The larger pattern to see here is the use and reuse of words and themes, and how certain words become tied to ideas, as “hinge” is with junk. Junk is (or can be, should be) reused for art, thereby being redeemed as a valued thing. Meanwhile, “thingk” undergoes a de-hinging or decoupling: “words / as virtual hinges / and how it / survives! foraging like that / thinking / and thinging / of OF” (“Draft 41: Of This,” Pledge, 25).

Other uses of hinge are varied and far spread. Note the proximity to “pivot” in some instances. A pivot is a point at which one may turn on a single spot and move in another direction. Note the language of aerial movement in others: “oscillations,” “swings,” “wing of air.” Sometimes the hinge is linked with sounds — “a visible silence,” “little sounds” — and the ability of hinge to act as a light-source — “light leaking,” “brilliant” “hinges of light.” As the repetition, and variants of it, pile up it’s useful to list them:

being a hinge, constructing oscillations
fracture and hinge
back / hinge pivot inside the space
the door swings on its double-jointed hinge
intricacies that cross our paths, / a hinge, turning outward and inward, like a page
Sound. Hinge. / Wing of air.
light leaking through rents and cracks / through hinges
I wanted lines turning, / in linked gasps, on hinges   as if from a visible silence
the obdurate and brilliant hinge
Hinges of light
prefixes all of this, / hinging, half-hung / half-off
which hungers hinge to home
The great hinge allowed only small openings
There are little sounds / swung hinged / in the woods.[13]

As echoes of many drafts are heard throughout “Hinge,” some from “Draft 15: Little” echo loudest. One is the stalled train of “Hinge” which in “Little” was very much in motion, occurring in a dream state or limnal state of consciousness. In “Little” a train is passing “nickname-painted train stops” which triggers a series of disjunctive images:

                            … jerry-built victrolas,
canoes pulling away sloppily from simple docks
dribble and bonk of paddle,
a particular grab of grasses,
hairy stems of weeds,
and the afikomen so well hidden
plus misunderstood. (Toll, 100)

“Little” shifts with the ease of work built on segmentivity (like a train) to a descriptive recollection of “photographs of the war, / stripes under wire, / shadows scummed or smudged on pavement, / and starved locked rows.” This kind of haunting historical (or not so) imagery is frequent in Drafts, and frequently vague. In “Hinge” a correlative image is not explicitly a photograph though the figures could be easily mistaken for one: “eyes set deep / as refugees / in exile from illusions of another world / as from illusions of transcendence” (Pitch, 28). The “illusions” delineate one group from a certain kind of horror yet the alternative horrors remain just as real. “Little” participates in the intellectual autobiography (the title of Draft 29) that makes up a major component of Drafts. The images early in the poem may be necessarily vague childhood memories. The vagueness underscores not-quite-old-enough to understand memories of the war and postwar era. Not the war but photographs of it and of its victims with whom you learn at some point you have something in common. But the afikomen represents a tradition that a child actually participates in, a totem of heritage, meaning there should be less confusion around it.

“Little” has a narrative structure (beginning, middle, and end) uncommon in Drafts. The first line of “Little” is ambiguous and may be read as a continuation of the title. Instead of beginning “More than that is hard to say” the text progresses directly from the title (or, what can be read following a colon, the subtitle): “Little / More than that is hard to say.” Whether there is more than that, or little more than that, is hard to say. I read “Little” as a testament to a kind of political and artistic awakening, one whose beginnings arise from a deep sense of being unable to speak to things and especially to it. The theme of not being able to say much, not being able to write poetry, or talk about poetry and other subjects runs deep in Drafts. (See below.) But here this blankness is either a device or the mere admission of blockage has effectively unblocked the writing. The list of images that follow evoke childhood, a kind of misty half-remembrance or before-the-war montage of memory fragments recalled without “mourning” or “pleasure.” As a talisman of the poet’s Judaism the afikomen of childhood holidays speaks to a complicated heritage by being well-hidden (so well-hidden it could not be found?) and misunderstood. Then an awareness of war through photographs showing concentrations camps (“stripes under wire” and “starved locked rows”) that cannot fail to affect those who see it, and feel complicated even further. The knowledge that one is safe from immediate terrors doesn’t help to ease those complications. Life goes on, life is good, but life is strange. In the midst of peace and plenty come orders to “Take cover!” under the desk as “cowering shapes” (101). The turn comes, the hinge of the narrative, in a new awareness, an awakening: “From that point, those points, on, / the trace or shard, the thing / come passing darkly cross me / in the tunnel dirt of time / was mine” (101–102). Tripping across the word “it” (“I was part of all that it”), not even capitalized, easy to underestimate its significance, waiting for a grammatical gap to be filled: “I was part of all that it, / a lucky nothing / not in the way of particular harm, / half witness half witless” (100). “It” is born or made manifest in the consciousness, something to live with and negotiate. Was it knowledge of the Holocaust? Was it the threat of annihilation courtesy of the Cold War? Yes, yes. “It” was these things and more.  “It” is the signifier of enormous things in Drafts, vast and wicked: “multiplied,” “engulfing,” “excessive.”

“Little” is about loss and recovery: lost memories, lost lore, lost history. It involves the anxiety of not recovering them, or not recovering them in a way that can be used, a resignation to having only fragments, a confrontation of being “part of all that it” and a resolve to no longer be “a lucky nothing” and break the pattern of anxiety or guilt of being “half witness half witless.” The experience of “it” needs to be made valuable somehow, and one needs to manufacture its own redemption. The layered self-description of this passage is particularly brutal considering the self is still a child: a nothing, half witless, a “dot — a little / yod or yid” (100). “Little” is heard again, superimposed as an individual person in the shadow of staggering world events. Yod: the tenth and smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet; yid: derogatory name for a Jew. What, in retrospect, was she expected to know? One suspects the idea of it is on the folded newspaper page trapped by wind against a pole in “Draft 82: Hinge.”

The word “little” appears again three more times before the poem closes, twice to modify “mite,” a parasite that inhabits books, and once to describe a new stance or path of action in the resistance of “it.” Against “it,” against all the terror and despair to be found in “Hinge” and all throughout Drafts there is hope.

“It” like X that marks the spot, that is, the spots,
an ever wily while, a wilderness of hope.
The spot of almost hopeless hope.
Can barely credit it.
 
Thus my voice is empty, but I speak and sing
only of this.
The undersentences
that rise, tides of sentiment, the little
stuff agglutinating in time, debris
             I sing. (102)

In “Hinge,” where attention shifts from book and page suddenly to “I’ve jumped on a strange train,” so in “Little” do rapid pivots occur. Trains (always the same train?) are visible at times in Drafts in many modes. They run as ordinary transportation for commuters who can write as they ride (Toll, 44). “Draft 4: In” depicts the train as a metaphor of composition sequence (segmentivity) and also, by way of a fine pun, dream sequence “the tension of making a strange train. The run thru the / bi-lingual. Now a very long tunnel totally unexpected” (27). Similarly in “Draft 34: “To push thru the deep dream station / and still miss the train, / to tear up the stairs for the dream el / running ever / never to catch it” because the train is gone (237). The spur-line stop in “Hinge” is seen also in “Draft 49: Turns and Turns, an Interpretation”: “Dark tunnel   of an unusual train of thought. / Deeper and deeper (so long ago)   into the neglected train station” (Pledge, 111). The train provides two sources of anxiety: when trying to make a train it is missed, or might be; when on the train the stop is missed, or might be. Also while on the train (in Drafts 4 and 49) an additional dilemma is repeated, “Have no idea what stop I am.” In their commingled dream states like those evoked in “Little” and “Hinge” it is tempting to read too much literariness (not to mention amateur psychology) into things. H.D. dreamed of trains too: “Last night, I had my old train-nightmare. I am going somewhere vaguely undefined; … [I am] lost somewhere, on some dangerous way, down some steps. … There are so many associations with trains.”[14]

The train fades from “Little” and the woods (“the exile woods”) appear. In “Hinge” the formulation is “carrying [my heart] carefully into the woods.” In “Little” the woods are where the mite appears, a small but powerful figure. The mite appears early in Drafts as a self-identified thing, an identity-vehicle for the work done inside of books. Its size and virtual invisibility speak to the identity of a “dot – a little / yod” as well as the importance of “little / stuff agglutinating.” While the scholar-mite will testify in “Little” it is busy being born in “Draft 4: In”: “I am inside, / am a mite in the letter / a traveller thru are. the senses of dark holes tunneling grainy paper” (Toll, 27). This is an image that will split into many sustained directions in Drafts. The poet working, literally, inside the book. The mite as scholar, the size of and digging at the level of, a single letter (r), tunneling into pages, or elsewhere entering a text through pinholes. Digging and planting: “I began writing into the poems / I put words deep into the poems / As into a tunnel” (Pitch, 62). The mite is the tiny mark on the page, a dot, except this dot is on the move. The mite tunnels within books (“a mine of intersections”), exists on the edges and margins, an intellectual delver retrieving words, a worker bringing things to and from the surface: “What I made, I want to see: / bits and mites, codes and clots, / darts of lacerated clarity” (Pledge, 185–186).

Where the mite is engaged in textual scholarship, her companion the worm is more of a collagist. That they collaborate is beyond doubt. The name bookworm is common but actual worms in books belong to antiquity (like the metal hinges that once bound them). The book mite is a pscocid, a contemporary found in all libraries and homes. Worms dig in the ground, are segmented things essential to the success of composting and the health of soil, but in Drafts they enjoy the same status of mites as a worker engaged (from “Hinge”) in “the intelligence of textual scholarship” (Pitch, 29). From “Draft 42: Epistles”: “I can worm it out / with specific engorgements of words / and my inventions do rupture” (Pledge, 38). In another context — the fosse — time is the worm, whose action “worms out / its readable shard” or what lies buried (Toll, 189). The worm in “Draft 35: Verso” sees text as a meal, a symbiotic relationship between the collagist and its material, and a worksite that is verbally dense and complex in its imagery as “verse” plays off “vers,” the French word for worm.

I woke

a half-worm, lucent pink in grey
stoppen in its track
                            sidling juice: vers
                            o worm towards verse

Turn the page.
A verso puts one page
upon the next
thickening the compost of the text. (243)

And another: “My words are here among the layered pages / inside quickly moving time / intricate knobs with ‘wormholes’” (Torques, 10). Wormhole also may suggest a topological feature of space-time, a shortcut through time and space that is a useful analogy in considering collage works.

Wormhole echoes pinhole, a “needle-thin penpoint pushed into the page / a hole” (Toll, 49). The pin or needle disfigures the text and scars it in the attempt to mend it. The needle of “Hinge” belongs to the bookbinder and surgeon. What cannot be repaired is lost and becomes a shard, a fragment. A pinhole as a portal for mites. Time (found in “Little” and “Hinge”), bits, the small, the broken, the buried (in tunnels, in books, in the garden), and the voices speak through objects catalogued in the latter half of “Draft 11: Schwa”: in which “I quiver in my pinhole time / where bits of voice are buried / in broken, unrecoverable objects” (80). Another compilation helps illustrate:

How any thing ever holds together / homing to the pinhole!
Opening the yod that goes with this space / the book is awake // enters a tiny point
the pinhole chance / generating just that wonder / of human shadow over the
               implacable
after years of poking along the long wall, / this declared that I had found the
               pinhole / and had entered it
The pinhole gleams
how to reach    the pinhole.[15]

A pinhole is a source of light in Drafts: “A pinhole / a limpid blur from the light / shimmering through it” (Toll, 49); “Pinhole Specks of light in labyrinthine misery” (Torques, 109); “a pinhole light blur” (Pledge, 188); “pinholes of the void. Like stars” (Pledge, 200); and “these pinholes, these spots of light” which in “Draft 85: Hard Copy” (Pitch, 50) borrows from Oppen’s “A spot of light on the curb.”[16] “Hard Copy” is a conversation with Oppen, making the pinhole a portal for light and for speaking to the dead. It occurs elsewhere in Drafts: “Person a pinhole through which / this death pound, opened, roars” (Torques, 54) as we see in examining the nekuia. 

2.

The idea of the worksite is preeminent in Drafts. “Draft 16: Title” begins with a description of an art installation, itself a worksite, where the artist has modified and mounted ledgers “pulled from the abandoned worksite” (Toll, 103). The phrase is echoed in “Draft 85: Hard Copy,” a lament for “so many abandoned worksites,” in a gloss on the vocation of poetry (Pitch, 61). Abandoned worksites from which working materials may be culled are the companion sites and companion works to Drafts. DuPlessis writes that she “think[s] of Schwitters perpetually” as a model (Blue Studios, 214). His collages and Merzbau share an affinity with her poems, as does Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project in Detroit. The Heidelberg Project is a collage of abandoned things arranged on the surfaces of abandoned houses. It appears in “Draft XXX: Fosse.” The raw, recycled materials of these works possess a strong bond with Drafts in that they create new perceptions by “imbedding shards and symbols onto one plane,” a reference to David Smith’s “Home of the Welder” in “Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow” (Toll, 265).

Part self-interview, “Draft 29: Intellectual Autobiography” lifts queries from the language of a grant application. It describes the author’s worksite. Asked about methods, the author replies: “Leaves torn from old notebooks / and mildewed subscription blanks    establishing / on the cut-off margins of newspapers” (Toll, 183). Shards and bits are a natural fit with collage and in a larger pattern also with endless commentary: “Propose a work, the work, a work of enormous dailiness, vagrant / responses inside the grief of a century” (Toll, 186).

From a collage worksite of shards and bits it is an easy step to the larger materials of worksite rubble and debris, equivocal as sources with any “odd books, [with] broken bindings” (46). We begin with the girder, what DuPlessis calls in a note to “Draft 24: Gap” the “objectivist talisman” (274). The word “debris” is specific to Drafts, while “girder” is an appropriation. “Rubble,” however, DuPlessis makes her own, despite its mite-extracted origins through the self-conscious quoting of Charles Reznikoff. “The girder amid, within, among, above / over, on     as if” suggests both a multi-directional twist of the original line, a play on the possibilities for misquoting it (as Oppen misquoted it), and new syntactic hinges for use in creating modified images from its unshakable self (159). But while the prepositions pivot along lines of possibility the girder, of course, remains itself.

The grafting of “rubble” onto “girder” is significant. Reznikoff’s original lines, part 69 of “Jerusalem the Golden,” reads “Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies / a girder, still itself among the rubbish.”[17] George Oppen quotes it often but inexactly, and consistently misremembers “rubble” for “rubbish.” Oppen cites the image many times as a kind life-saving talisman, a crucial poetic image that sustained him during a nightmarish time in a foxhole. In a 1958 letter to his daughter, speaking of Reznikoff, he writes: “And he noticed in one of those filthy vacant lots ‘a girder, still itself among the rubble.’”[18] In a 1959 letter to his half-sister, he quotes it without alteration or error.[19] In letters in 1965 and 1966 (one of them to the author of Drafts) it is firmly the formulation he has made his own: “the girder, still itself among the rubble.”[20] And in a 1981 interview George and Mary Oppen testify together to the importance of the image. Oppen says, “Quoting Rezy, too, ‘We wanted to be ourselves among the rubble’ which held us half in and half out of political doings. And that line to me is one of the most powerful lines in poetry.” Mary Oppen interjects, “The girder …” and George Oppen continues: “‘The girder still itself among the rubble’ and we recite that line over and over to ourselves — and we meant ourselves to be among the rubble — and it was rubble or it was very close to rubble.”[21] As a preface to the second volume of Reznikoff’s Collected Poems Oppen contributed this statement:

the girder, still itself / among the rubble

That line of Reznikoff’s and the poem of which it is a part, and line upon line of his perfect poems have been with me for the forty-eight years since I first came upon them. If we had no other poetry I think we could nevertheless live by virtue of these poems, these lives, these small precise these overwhelming gentle iron lines and images of all that is and our love and pride and our small life which is immeasurable as these lines which are still themselves among the rubble.[22]

Rubble in Drafts is the debris of culture, the data and material of cultural criticism. A standing girder post-demolition is a temporary trace of the structure it once supported, and no doubt it too will soon fall to the wrecking ball and be swept away with the rest of the rubble/rubbish. It may be found again as part of a landfill hundreds of miles away. But concrete is not carved marble, and so, who will care? Perhaps it ends as part of a jetty serving to keep the primordial waves from (further) erasing a beach. That last removal can be read as accomplished in the very next Draft: “one girder of smoke, / hovering, still, over rubble also of smoke” (Toll, 165). The concern with rubble, a preoccupation, is tied up with the critique and interrogation Drafts undertakes. Rubble is a name for remnants and traces of things once above that designation.

There is “rubble of failure” and the “rubble of loss” (Pledge, 197, 116). The rubble of Drafts is more than heaps of bricks and plaster. Are “rubble” and “debris” the same? There is the rubble of a worksite to be read, collected, and understood: “This is not simply the world as such / but a world stained with other times // the riddle of rubble” (Torques, 19) and there is “Rubble Unread” (85). What does it add up to? What can it amount to? “Is this // rubble accountable?” (Toll, 78). “Some things, broken down to rubble / need to be broken further” (Pledge, 140) and “translate compulsions of rubble / into the directness of rubble” (Pledge, 81). In “Hard Copy” there is “the directness / of rubble” (Pitch, 49), and in “Hinge” the rubble is (twice) “continually before me” (29).

DuPlessis seizes on the misquote when that objectivist talisman is directly referenced by using “rubble” not “rubbish” and so makes the work, if not the image, her own. Bricks and plaster are only a piece of the rubble that concerns Drafts. So when she makes use of it in “Draft 74: Wanderer” by quoting “So from the rubbish gathered up a stone” from Wordsworth the nod in that gesture, I feel, is toward Reznikoff. She modifies the quote in the next line: “Then from the rubble gathered up a stone” (Torques, 115). The poem continues with an exposition on collages and collage making: “began a rubble wall. / Random pieces placed in counter-poise” ending with “Voices of the dead give speeches on these principles of physics” (116). From Pitch:

the girder         amid, between, among, above
the rubble        under, on, from, next to, within (82).

Amid, between, among, etc., the rubble is an occasion of material survival found among the cycles of creation and destruction. The shards and bits are so much more than language. They are broken saucers, odd bits of pottery found parallel to the “hungry books / words / related to the torn debris” (Toll, 81). They are personal materials that once belonged to actual persons, economically recycled like the embroidered handkerchief (“random finds / some dead man’s debris”) picked up at a thrift shop (88). They are flowers pressed into dictionaries “long / ago by sentimental ladies” (69). They are the works of the Philadelphia Wireman, made from trash (rubbish) and left outside for trash pickup (after the artist’s presumed death) when they were discovered (273). They are the debris of the Heidelberg Project, and the debris of centuries past, worming out into the present, into our lives in a location as common as a backyard garden:

Always another little something —
a broken saucer flower fleck
unremarkable wedge, except its timing
working itself loose in the rain
thru the mum patch
and impatience
some glittery sharp a-flat the wet wide shade.
 
The house was built on a dump. (37)

Another illustrative instance is the nineteenth-century pottery works in a Philadelphia neighborhood unearthed (read: civic palimpsest) for new construction or a new park. The former industrial worksite becomes a temporary worksite of casual gleaners collecting souvenirs from the past before the machines return to continue their work. The bits and shards are now preserved through personal possession by the place of honor given them. These are things “you have made survive for now / by keeping it where you are, / and so the trace can cause happiness” (Pitch, 95). They become in a sense flowers pressed in a dictionary. Not everything can survive, even for a little while, despite the intentions of those doing the dropping. “Draft 17: Unnamed” cites the observer who does not pick up the “dozens of notes and addresses // tossed away / moments before their deaths” of Holocaust victims (Toll, 110). The act could have been critical somehow, and its omission remains a source of regret. The “trace elements” of Drafts delineated elegantly and thoughtfully in a draft of that title are crucial to the memory that “folds over itself / making residue when you least expect it to” (Pitch, 87). Part of the “theory of debris” of Drafts is that these traces “agglutinat[e] in time” and

function like poetry made
by standing where you are
patiently watching and listening,
patience for the layers
in things & words
in systems & syntaxes
waiting for the twist or quirk to coalesce
and signify and turn and disappear (97).

Another recurring worksite is the fosse, a word linked to Pound possibly even more than “draft” (see Blue Studios, 250, on the appropriation of “draft” from Pound). Pound opens The Cantos by rewriting the episode of Odysseus summoning shades that he might question Tiresias: “Dark blood flowed in the fosse.”[23] Nekuia is the ritual of speaking to the dead but no such dramatic scenes of sheep sacrifice are recreated in Drafts. The dead are present as early as “Midrush” (“Wraithes of poets …”) through acts of reading the work they left behind: “The poem is the fosse / in which to cower” (Torques, 40). (Another keyword operating slyly but powerfully within the work; cower: from animals on the ark to children under desks, a different context here which modifies the previous uses.) The nekuia of “Midrush” foreshadows later ones:

wreathing smoke-veils
my eyescreen tearing their insistent
opaque, startled
writing was speaking here was
saying words but,
befit a shady station,
sere swallowed up within the
mouths speaking
and all the words
dizzy with tears
passed away again. (Toll, 35)

What shade is summoned when DuPlessis writes, “Can visit him dead / bask in his anger and the dirty light / of poetry” (192)? “What rears and spurts and thickens / in the fosse?” asks “Draft 13: Haibun” (107). “[P]erson a pinhole through which / this death pound, opened, roars” echoes “Draft 67: Spirit Ditties” (Torques, 54). The encounters are focused on texts and memory, memory of people, and the words they wrote. The texts retain a power to speak directly to us as if the person who created it were actually in the room:

What visits us announcing where we are?
…
Who speaks; who writes?

The dead. (Torques, 15–16)

“This is the place I work” begins “Draft 57: Workplace: Nekuia,” “a pinhole light blur” (Pledge, 188). In the next numbered draft (skipping the unnumbered draft, “Précis”) “a student jumped from a window / of my workplace / a few tense days before the newest war” (Torques, 2). It is tempting to think of the student as Elpenor, the young comrade of Odysseus, who fell drunk to his death from Circe’s roof. The notes to “Draft 58: In Situ” dispel any such literary notion but when such things happen one is bound to hear the approaching “high-pitched twist / of sirens” (3).

Elpenor wants Odysseus to retrieve his body for burial and use his oar as a marker. Aside: oars and rowing have a curious role in Drafts: “skeletons that move their bony oars / and pump through the sky” (13); “Who was carrying oars? And why?” (Torques, 84); and the “dribble and bonk of paddle” in “Little.” Odysseus was compelled to find Tiresias in order to find his way back to Ithaca. Epics of loss and memory are undertaken in the same desire to find home. The fosse of Drafts is wherever the “wraithes of poets” and other interlocutors are found, in books, in words that one bores into, in trace elements or debris of whatever can be found, read, or heard. “Speak from the site / as if you were already dead” (Toll, 94). “Plan: a nekuia based on digression” (Pitch, 12). The nekuia undertaken with Oppen in “Draft 85: Hard Copy” is upended by the dialogue running against the traditional current. The ghost is being not interviewed but informed: it is saying this is what’s going on today. “Hard Copy” has forty numbered sections that match and correlate to the numbered sections of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous.” A gloss on the nekuia is directed at the encounter,

                           … the vagueness
from which the now vague dead imaginarily
“watch” this
from the outside.
From the other side.
We no longer encounter them
 
in good conscience. (Pitch, 44)

For all the interrogating of Adorno’s writing that “Draft 52: Midrash” does, and for all the commentary the poem makes on what is almost a cliché regarding postwar poetry — that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” — the many doubts and justifications of poetry in Drafts has much in common with Adorno but rejects his statement at face value. Why is poetry “barbaric” and not painting, sculpture, cinema, etc. (Pledge, 142)? “Midrash” may well be Drafts’ most rigorous and in-depth example of midrash (commentary and gloss) going far beyond bits, shards, and fragments. There is a connection, however oblique, among Oppen’s “Difficult now to speak of poetry” found in section 27 of “Of Being Numerous,” DuPlessis’s similar and numerous formulations throughout Drafts,[24] and a separate writing of Adorno’s. In lectures given in 1965–66, the same time “Of Being Numerous” was beginning to take shape,[25] Adorno provides a midrash on the aspects of difficulty and hesitancy found in the poetics of both Oppen and DuPlessis:

I do not have even the slightest intention of suggesting that reflections on freedom might provide any scope at all for evading a confrontation with such experiences, that is to say, with everything that Auschwitz represents. I believe that every thought that fails to measure itself against such experiences is simply worthless, irrelevant and utterly trivial. A human being who is not mindful at every moment of the potential for extreme horror at the present time must be so bemused by the veil of ideology that he might just as well stop thinking at all. However, this very situation and reflection upon the facts that are at issue forces us into a radical process of interrogation that leaves far behind us such naïve questions as ‘Are you responsible or not responsible?’ Freedom in the sense of moral responsibility can only exist in a free society.[26]

Nearly any excerpt from DuPlessis’s “Midrash” would appropriately complement Adorno’s text. The following, for comparison, is a little more than halfway in:

the visceral undertow
of enormous unstoppable
powerlessness, not to speak of humiliations
scarifications expropriations permanent marks
self-disgust, as if you had been declared guilty,
 
plus ‘‘murder locations’’ all across the nations
In ‘‘forests, streets and squares, synagogues, gravel pits’’
 
Where are the words that would say this?
They are gross and vague, literal and flat, condensed and imploded.
“Auschwitz” is both metonymy and metaphor—no? Nu?
Therefore—to write poetry thinking you had words for
anything at all, after these particular policies and practices
is ridiculous—hard to approach the right nuance,
is inadequate, a misapplication of understanding,
self-congratulatory, narcissistic, overweening,
prettifying, or could even say
“barbaric.” It was a word chosen for rage.
But it, like any word, is a one-penny gesture
thrown into firestorms
beyond the page. (Pledge, 149–50)

3.

Drafts invites an acute sensitivity to individual words. You keep an eye open for “mite” or its pun (might) in a usage or context that may offer a new sensibility or new meaning in the poem. A fresh articulation of “it,” perhaps in ways the author didn’t intend, presages a new register of hope. The repeated and varied use of words give a freshness to themes and also provide opportunities to deepen one’s own richly contextualized reading. The end of “Draft 81: Gap” leaves the reader with an image of so many pebbles on gravestones “it looked like the graves were piled with rubble” (Pitch, 26). In this cultural act of empathy with the dead the stones left behind give the appearance of unkemptness in what should be a sacred location. A multitude of images preceding this one in Drafts pulsate with the reading of it. Those pebbles say “we” remember and do so in the company of these similarly placed (and similarly anonymous) other pebbles, a de facto collective effort of memorializing. The pebble as marker debuts earlier in Drafts with a similar placement of “two midsized pebbles” in an unrelated location (Toll, 262).

Pebbles are a minor force in Drafts. Like tiny rubble, tiny traces, they appear everywhere if you have the attention to spot them and, as it were, pick them up. To be sure they surround the girder, busted free from all that plaster and brick. “Draft XXX: Fosse” is rife with pebbles, and a recollection of Hansel and Gretel. “The smallest pebbles” and “shiny pebbles” and “pebbled lines” lead back to “the book” covered in pebbles that precipitate its erosion (187–88). Disturbed pebbles are evidence on a path, a trace that someone (two children?) passed by, in “Draft 32: Renga” “Someone / Crossing thru this micro-space / Loosened the trail pebbles” (207), and later, differently, “pebbles fallen on a scree / or crumbs of bread upon a trail” (Pitch, 90). The foreshadowing in “81: Gap” and also in “Draft 69: Sentences” sees “the sentient / pebbles left on graves are hapless / markers of my in-strangement” (Torques, 72).

The seemingly inconsequential presence of something so small (yet considering the impact of the yod, dot, mite, smudge, blur, etc., nothing little can ever be inconsequential) makes for an interesting comparison with the strong presence of its gargantuan opposite. “Enormous” and “enormity” (adjective and noun) are the looming presences over all things “little” in the context of loss and lost things. They take sides with “it” throughout the work. A fine example of word ownership by a poet, “enormous” is found among the earliest drafts. Some contexts recall Pound, as in “the enormous tragedy of the dream” (Cantos, 439). One usage is a quote from Pound: “My mind stretched to the bursting point / with this enormity” (Torques, 23). Other instances recall Wordsworth, twice through quotation: “amid the depth / of those enormities” from The Prelude (Torques, 115, 142) and “a puff enormous, silver / edge of rain” (109).

They are present as shadows when “enormous” ideas occur. That is, when one’s attention is jarred by it not appearing where it might have. Two examples: “Thought is frightened / for it can’t think anywhere near the size of what has happened” (Pledge, 56) and “injustice, rage despair / large amid the subjects” (Torques, 12). How I wish she had said “enormous”! Used mostly to describe size, to say something is really big, the pervasiveness of “enormous” throughout Drafts led me to investigate other definitions, where I was reminded (if in fact I knew before) that its historical uses apply to divergences from standards. Enormous things are “unfettered by rules … mostly in the bad sense … monstrous, shocking.” Applied to people: “excessively wicked, flagitious, outrageous.” An enormity deviates from moral and legal codes; they are crimes, “gross and monstrous offence[s]” (Oxford English Dictionary). Out of awe then for the gravity of it, and realizing that some uses just mean “really big,” I offer this quotation collage:

enormities of / key-shaped air   enormous slant   enormous emptiness   an enormous amount of webbing   a rocking enormity   the enormities // of which one must, / if speaking, // speak   across enormous scrolls   his enormous X   a work of enormous dailiness   a point and an enormity // of nothing   Enormousness of universe, and enormity of what has happened   Given these enormities   énormément de langues qui s’oublient   the enormous periphrastic effort   a backdrop of enormous / emptiness   enormous curiosity   this / turned / enormous   those enormous encompassing Turns   enormous unstoppable / powerlessness   enormousness and enormity   enormous waves   constructed from enormous loss   Some who mean enormous will say enormity   enormous, chryselephantine   against an enormous emptiness   desire, enormity, care   enormous fastballs   the enormities / that they might suffer   enormous depths of daily anything   pipeline to the enormity of fact   enormous historical crimes   The implication of this gesture was enormous.[27]

The implication of “enormous” and “enormity” in Drafts, the manifestations of their wicked presences (for a good lot of them) is the dark and ever-present “it.” “It” is the title of the first Draft, and the underpinning force against which the poem pits its energetic resistance. In an interview with CAConrad, DuPlessis explains this pronoun that in “Little” she was unwittingly a part of: “I don’t write to express myself. I write to examine ‘it.’ There is a lot of ‘it’ out there.” Find “it” throughout and then attempt to read “it” anywhere in Drafts again without feeling oversensitized to its nuances? Hard to do. And best done by the Drafts themselves. “It lists, it tilts — The it of all of it” (Torques, 30). DuPlessis is eloquent on the subject — its roles and origins — in her prose,[28] but the poems emphasize the allusive, the traces of “it,” leaving a reader to think poetically about “it” and ultimately gain more by lingering in the evocative essence “it” distills. Multiplied, engulfing, excessive.

The words I chose to look at here are just a few choices among hundreds. There are many tangles and strands to follow. It is instructive to do, and it’s also fun. Time could be traced in Drafts — its relationship to astronomy, time as that “wristlet litmus π” (from “Little”) which gets lost over and over in Drafts. More words that have powerful capabilities of evoking complex responses could be looked at: “pitch” and “mist,” to name two. “Pitch” appears thirteen times with nearly as many usages in the book titled Pitch. “Mist” and its pun, “missed,” is another foundational word with many uses and meanings. What is the role of “apples” in Drafts? What is the role of clouds? And finally, curiously or maybe plain as day, the appearance of bread throughout, going backward: the bread recipe that “had got so stained with flour and oil // that the page looks edible” (Pitch, 37); “The letters are yeast / kneaded into an unregenerate bread” (Torques, 86); “to articulate the bread page” (Toll, 97); and “oil stains on the bread page” (Toll, 47).

 

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1. Midrash is defined by DuPlessis in one instance as “doubled and redoubled commentary, poetry with its own gloss built in.” See Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 210.

2. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Pitch: Drafts 77–95 (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2010), 27.

3. DuPlessis, Blue Studios, 214.

4. Ibid., 203, 209.

5. DuPlessis, Drafts 1–38, Toll (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 33–38.

6. Ezra Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, 1990), 182.

7. George Oppen, New Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 2002), 173, 166.

8. DuPlessis, Torques: Drafts 58–76 (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2007), 73.

9. “Let the mite live. Let the girl become literate” (Pitch, 135).

10. DuPlessis, Drafts 39–57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2004), 193.

11. Ibid.

12. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 176.

13. “Draft 21: Cardinals” (Toll, 139); “Draft 24: Gap” (Toll, 158); “Draft 28: Facing Pages” (Toll, 175); “Draft 33: Deixis” (Toll, 225); “Draft 33: Deixis” (Toll, 229); “Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow” (Toll, 266); “Draft 47: Printed Matter” (Pledge, 79); “Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation” (Pledge, 117); “Draft 56: Bildungsgedicht with Apple” (Pledge, 187); “Draft 60: Rebus” (Torques, 17); “Draft 61: Pyx” (Torques, 26); “Draft LXX: Lexicon” (Torques, 83); “Draft 71: Headlines, with Spoils” (Torques, 91); “Draft 78: Buzz Track” (Pitch, 5).

14. H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 176.

15. “Draft LXX: Lexicon” (Torques, 78); “Draft 32: Renga” (Toll, 199); “Draft 32: Renga” (Toll, 204); “Draft, unnumbered: Précis” (Pledge, 198); “Draft, unnumbered: Précis” (Pledge, 199); “Draft 39: Split” (Pledge, 8).

16. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 169.

17. Charles Reznikoff, Poems 1918–1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 107.

18. Oppen, Selected Letters, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 14.

19. Ibid., 24.

20. Ibid., 133, 389.

21. Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel, “Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,” in George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Hatlen (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), 29.

22. Oppen, preface to Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 3.

23. Ezra Pound, The Cantos ( New York: New Directions, 1970), 3.

24. See, for example, “Impossible to write a poem” (Torques, 70) which is an odd opening (like “Little” with its “hard to say”) for a powerfully lucid and forceful poem like “Draft 69: Sentences.” The impossibility is overcome. The difficulty and impossibility are gestures. Midway through “Sentences”: “Impossible not to write” and, similarly, “cannot not speak. O poetry / — again and again no more poetry” (Toll, 120). Section 27 of “Hard Copy” is a gloss on why it is difficult for her to speak of poetry, responding to Oppen’s opening of his section 27: “It is difficult now to speak of poetry —” (Oppen, New Collected Poems, 180).

25. Oppen, Selected Letters, xviii.

26. Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), 203.

27. “Draft 2: She” (Toll, 13); “Draft 3: Of” (Toll, 20); “Draft 8: The” (Toll, 46); “Draft 12: Diasporas” (Toll, 86); “Draft 15: Little” (Toll, 100); “Draft 19: Working Conditions” (Toll, 121); “Draft 23: Findings” (Toll, 147); “Draft 23: Findings” (Toll, 150); “Draft 29: Intellectual Autobiography” (Toll, 186); “Draft 32: Renga” (Toll, 208); “Draft 33: Deixis” (Toll, 235); “Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow” (Toll, 266); “Draft 42: Epistles” (Pledge, 40); “Draft 44: Stretto” (Pledge, 57); “Draft 46: Edge” (Pledge, 76); “Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation” (Pledge, 111); “Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation” (Pledge, 115); “Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation” (Pledge, 125); “Draft 52: Midrash” (Pledge, 149); “Draft, unnumbered: Précis” (Pledge, 210); “Draft LXX: Lexicon” (Torques, 78); “Draft 73: Vertigo” (Torques, 102); “Draft 75: Doggerel” (Torques, 122); “Draft 78: Buzz Track” (Pitch, 7); “Draft 84: Juncture” (Pitch, 37); “Draft 84: Juncture” (Pitch, 37); “Draft 85: Hard Copy” (Pitch, 52); “Draft 85: Hard Copy” (Pitch, 66); “Draft 86: Scarpbook” (Pitch, 73); “Draft 87: Trace Elements” (Pitch, 96); “Draft 87: Trace Elements” (Pitch, 101); “Draft 91: Proverbs” (Pitch, 137).

28. See the four essays making up the section “Migrated Into” in Blue Studios for starters. Also, see DuPlessis’s essay on Beverly Dahlen’s writing, “‘While These Letters Were A-Reading,’” in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York:  Routledge, 1990), 116–17.