Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Linda Oppen on October 25, 2011, in front of a Robert Motherwell at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, just before George Oppen event at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University. Photo by Patrick Pritchett.
“Whether as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase” — Rachel Blau DuPlessis to George Oppen[1]
Drafts (1991); Rachel Blau DuPlessis in Strasbourg, France, June 2011. Photo by Robert S. DuPlessis.
October 21, 2010: An invitation and a beginning
It’s kismet. When I left the Poetry/Rare Books Collection a few days ago, Jim gifted me with a signed broadside of Rachel’s poem “Some Codas,” illustrated with a detail from Duncan’s drawing for the cover of his Fragments of a Disorderd Devotion. And now — upon returning home after a month in Duncan’s archives at Buffalo and Berkeley — I have received Patrick Pritchett’s invitation to write about Rachel’s work.
I first encountered Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts when the first two sections appeared in Leland Hickman’s journal Temblor 5,an issue in which I had an essay on the evolution of the sentence in George Oppen’s poetry. I had known DuPlessis’s work at that point for maybe ten years and had met her on several occasions. In 1984, Rae Armantrout & I had traveled down from New York City to read at Temple at Rachel’s behest.
Left to right: Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers performing in honor of Jerome Rothenberg's eightieth birthday on December 9, 2011; Jerome Rothenberg; the jacket of "White Sun Black Sun" published by Hawk's Well Press, 1960.
What follows is the text of a talk presented in honor of Jerome Rothenberg on the occasion of his 80th birthday, at an event held at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, on December 9, 2011.
If you were looking one way for new Americans in 1960, they would of course be found in Allen’s The New American Poetry. But there was another way. Jerome Rothenberg’s first book, New Young German Poets, published by City Lights in 1959, introduced American readers to a postfascist antifascist avant-garde that successfully “oppose[ed] the inherited dead world with a modern visionary language,” crucially among them, Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Emma Bee Bernstein’s work on display at the Janet Kurnatowski gallery. Left photo by Tom Winchester.
I was thirty-three years old when Emma was born. I had been friends with her parents, Charles and Susan, for more than five years.
When Emma got to be about three or four we became friends in our own right. We simply liked each other a lot. I had never had children of my own / so that undoubtedly played some part. But the reality is that I felt some kind of kinship between us that went beyond any of the available clichés / even those of friendship.
