Rachel Blau DuPlessis reads at Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, February 5, 2008.
It is among these three epigraphs on Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s ongoing (since 1986) serial poem Drafts, what she calls a “series of interdependent, related, canto-length poems,”[2] that this essay positions itself. “Drafts and Fragments,” of course, both is and is not Poundian, invoking — to state the obvious — the title of Pound’s late book of Cantos, Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII. But my title also marks DuPlessis’s Drafts and its relation both to Pound and to fragments.
“To say this project [Drafts] was involved with and against Pound from the start is almost tautological”
“I wanted to make an alternate Cantos, a counter-Cantos.”
“Drafts explicitly positions itself as not-Cantos”
Rachel Blau DuPlessis's “Drafts 1–38, Toll” (2001); DuPlessis reads at Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, March 3, 2011.
This is a rewriting of my talk at the Temple symposium on Rachel DuPlessis’s career and writing.[1] Though my announced title, “The Mothers of Us All, and Their Fathers: Drafts and the Epic Tradition,” pointed toward Stein, that was just a placeholder I’d provided months before. Stein is a plausible figure to bring to bear on Drafts: hers is the first proper name to appear in the poem,[2] and no modernist is more specifically anti-patriarchal.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Jean-Paul Auxeméry at work in 1992 at the Library at Royaumont. Photo by Kathy Imbert.
In an interview from 2008, Rachel Blau DuPlessis discusses her serial poem Drafts and in particular “Draft 52: Midrash,” which takes up the ethical dilemmas the contemporary poet faces in writing about the Shoah.[1] The poem attempts a sustained response to the challenge of Theodor W.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis in Umbria at Il Palombaro, Italy, in 2005. Photo by Robert S. DuPlessis.
In his hermetic essay from 1933, “Agesilaus Santander,” Walter Benjamin writes: “The Kabblalah relates that, at every moment, God creates a whole host of new angels, whose only task before they return to the void is to appear before His throne for a moment and sing His praises.”[1] But in an earlier essay on Karl Kraus, he describes the angelic as a kind of monster — part child, part cannibal — a creature who, before passing into nothingness, is either “lamenting, chastising or rejoicing.”[2] Inspired by Paul Klee’s painting, the figure of the angel takes o
Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Barbara Guest in the 1990s; DuPlessis and Robin Blaser in the 1990s, photo by David Farwell; 'Torques: Drafts 58–76' (2007).
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.
