Articles - July 2013

Fierce storehouses of articulation (PoemTalk #69)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, sections 16 & 29 of 'Draft 85: Hard Copy'

Mary Oppen, George Oppen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis sitting on the deck of the DuPlessis house, 211 Rutgers Avenue, Swarthmore, PA, in 1979. Taken by Robert S. DuPlessis.

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In a special long episode of PoemTalk, Ron Silliman, Jessica Lowenthal, Randall Couch and PoemTalk’s producer and host Al Filreis gathered to discuss two sections of “Draft 85: Hard Copy,” which is the 85th “draft” or canto in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's ongoing long poem Drafts.  “Draft 85” is itself a long poem, running from pages 42 to 71 in the book Pitch: Drafts 77-95This big draft was written between February and May of 2007. All forty sections of “Draft 85” were recorded by the poet for PennSound, in our studios, in October of 2007. We decided to focus on two of those forty sections — sections 16 and 29. The forty sections of “Draft 85” are mapped onto George Oppen’s important long poem, Of Being Numerous, a typescript copy of which Oppen in 1965 had sent to Du Plessis, and to which she responded then, and has, in a sense, been responding here and there since, although never more fully than here in “Hard Copy.”

Into the Field: Astrid Lorange and Eddie Hopely

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Astrid Lorange and Eddie Hopely are a pair of poets living in Sydney, Australia with strong links to the Philly and New York writing scenes. Eddie has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Temple University and currently works as a freelance editor, research assistant, and independent scholar. Astrid recently finished her Ph.D. at the University of Technology, Sydney and has taken a position as lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Both are members of the assignment-based writing group Collective Task.