Articles

'Something that stutters sincerely'

Contemporary poetry and the aesthetics of failure

[T]o be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail … all that is required now … is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. — Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues[1]

February 8, 2012

A world according to G.W.

On Grzegorz Wróblewski

Anna Kałuża

Translated from the Polish by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese.

January 9, 2012

The plural of us

Uses and abuses of an ambiguous pronoun

Bonnie Costello

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 brought with it a surge in the use of the first person plural. While most would agree that this tragic, history-changing event must be memorialized, I know I’m not the only one made uncomfortable by the ready invocation of this public We. It seems at once abstract and presumptuous, and it plays to a dangerous human desire: to become part of a crowd, and to define oneself against Them. Does this “we” have any real antecedent for an unbounded, diverse populace? Does it claim to speak for me? Whatever the founders may have meant by “we, the people,” it rings hollow in the arena of contemporary politics and popular journalism. With Tonto, I want to ask: “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?”

The first person plural is an indexical pronoun, dependent on context for meaning, but the boundaries are often unclear even to the speaker. And there’s something not only ambiguous but also incoherent in the pronoun.

January 6, 2012

On 'Pitch,' with special reference to 'Hard Copy'

C. J. Martin

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, September 2011; “Pitch: Drafts 77–95” (2010).

Reading Pitch: Drafts 77–95, I’ve begun to wonder if it’s really possible to traverse Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts project straight through.[1] The way each Draft activates so many inter-texts (within the project & without) seems to suggest that the linear sequence of these poems isn’t the overriding trajectory here, even if we have been reading that axis — those of us following the journal publications of Drafts — following along (if not systematically, at least historically, in roughly chronological order), witnessing the project

December 14, 2011

Ghost tracks

Reading the signs in 'Pitch: Drafts 77–95'

Chris Tysh

Rachel Blau DuPlessis reads at Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, March 3, 2011.

1. “We hope our heart-ribs do not burst.”

December 14, 2011