Difficult bliss

Originally delivered as one of two Plenary lectures for the conference The Modernist Long Poem and Its Discontents, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, September 20, 2024.

 
My book A Long Essay on the Long Poem (University of Alabama Press, 2023) interprets by comparative insights one plausible set of contemporary long poems, but, in it, obeying a critical etiquette, I barely chose to comment on my own long poem. Here, I thought I’d offer an essayistic narrative — by asking how and why Drafts was shaped as it was. What information could I give as a poet by exploring my primary moments of choice and understanding from the 25-year experience of writing one contemporary long poem? I try to give an accurate account of what happened, but all of this is a post-hoc formulation of memories and motives.

First off, why such length? Here, there’s no pat answer. I had no idea in 1985 and 1986 when I was trying to write the first poems that the poet as social subject would engage with its materials for so many years and works. However, recently, from the Brooklyn Rail Curatorial Projects, in a series called Singing in Unison, comes a formulation useful for me as a one-line manifesto. “Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy” (Rail, announcement March 27, 2024).

To say it simply, a tragic vision and secular messianism infuse Drafts. With the enormousness of the poems, my long poems face the enormity of modernity, its major losses of humane promises and premises, while proposing elements of tragic hope. Further, Drafts combines its own aesthetic curiosity with social and historical allusions, mine and others’ collaged subjectivities and observations.

Drafts, in 114/115 canto-length sections, dated 1986-2012 (and using actual events explicitly as part of the works’ moods), is an investigative and propulsive poetic work about the world. It becomes a logbook of continuance without a trackable plot or overall narrative; a set of “drafts” of an imaginary totality (not of a finished wholeness); it is a secular midrash or gloss and debate on historical existence in the absence of a consoling or inspiring culturally hegemonic text (like a Bible or a dogma). It rather has a linked overall shape. Any of the genres/themes of Drafts is hardly exclusive to my poem; all elements are ways of presenting a realistic depiction of cracking modernity. A short poem is often dubbed lyric, personal, and timeless. However, the personal is also historical; a subjectivity cannot be precisely the same over 2000 years, even if we “want” to affirm universally recognizable situations to feel a sensitive response to being. And so, historically precise emotions enter into poems, along with universally recognizable situations, their variations, and various positions, debates, and allusions.

My struggles against the heavily enforced taboos on, and odd displacements of, expressing political elements in poetry in our currently limited culture may be belated, but they are heartfelt. The subjectivity I want does not pretend to tell others the “facts of life” but rather to clarify them, for myself, to discuss what I have seen, to produce an implacable observation of how I feel and think about what I observe. And I don’t want to declaim, with imperatives and exhortations, “Humanity! learn and do better next time!” Trying to write poetry that includes political emotions involves implacabilities, situated, affect-laden ironies, and something way beyond irony (grief?), as far as I can articulate this. I could say simply some of my emotions are political. Drafts explores them.

One aspect of a long poem is its capaciousness and abilities to maneuver among several poetic attitudes — in the same ways that the sections or cantos of that poem can multiply genres and tones. Negative capability and a sense of social meanings or commitment. Both. Never an either/or. Clearly, multi-generic and heteroglossic poetry is my choicest way of exploring this multiplicity in juxtaposition, producing elements beyond factual fit, allowing for a loose aura of the relative, linked ethical and aesthetic entanglements, the spiritually evocative with capital M mysteries, and presenting no fully settled statement at or of conclusion. It is as if the whole work were a gloss on IT IS from the beginning to the end.

The poem is suspicious of, witty, or ironic about any teleologies celebrated by the culture as if they could always be the same and celebrated with the same inflections through the ages. These could be conclusions like marriage, victory in a war, homecoming, distribution or extraction of resources, domination, changes of heart, revenge, misalignment, progress, and/or quest, although all are oft-used and familiar actual and literary experiences.

As a large work, Drafts has the capacity to and interest in generating many potential readings and metaphors about it. It is a tribute to the capaciousness and variety of this work that many propositions about Drafts are plausible. Like: Drafts has been tracking modernity’s cracks with the golden glue of poetry. So now have I taken to thinking of Drafts as a kintsugi epic? Mending yet calling attention to the cracks? Or is Drafts one hope-filled elegy, naming paradoxes of negative, not affirmative capability? Further, this multi-generic and heteroglossic poetry offers its own multiplicity. The work does not have a consistent sound or manner or style in all the poems. Perhaps my long poem in its very length could be viewed as an encyclopedia or assemblage of our culture’s poetic genres, tactics, and modes, combining several styles and sounds in the same work, hyper-saturated together. This encyclopedism presents disparate understandings plus desires to go on and on without a single conclusion but to perform a multi-toned hovering among multiples.

Drafts does not comprise one single personal or historical story, nor does it offer an expressivist narrative of individual realizations. The largest unifying emotions seem always double and conflicting: wonder and bedazzlement at the world and amazement — sometimes grief — at what we have made of it. (I found, in my study A Long Essay, that often long poems have such very simple premises.) Yet Drafts has no trajectory as a totality or whole with a single, higher-order, culminating ending, although every single canto does have some definite trajectory, sometimes an argument, sometimes a process of thinking collected by dérive and indirection, sometimes a set of materials organized together to collaborate in their findings and feelings. Ending, including several “final” poems, seems to be a situation for Drafts, not a single site called “the end.”

Given this committed sense of “everything” being involved in a long poem, there’s no single interwoven story, but cantos get composed as poetic essays, odes, serial studies, lyric summaries and explorations, and collage, with a historical reckoning of enormousness mingled with enormity. A Long Essay on the Long Poem acknowledges the genre-familiars “epic” and “quest” — tuned to how and why contemporary practitioners use and interpret these genres now, not whether poems conform to a model. I also propose a genre between an album, an assemblage, and a Gesamtkunstwerk, as a composite that characterizes various powerful modern long poems. This clustering (cluttering?) of genres was one of my general findings, along with a given poem’s many voices (heteroglossia), as discourses, only loosely as “characters.”

Because any long poem seems to demand reader immersion without offering full understanding, a reader’s processing skills and abilities might be held in suspension (or frustration) for a long time. Long poems like Drafts may test your capabilities at Negative (not affirmative) Capability (the phrase is John Keats’ — from a letter of 1817). The phrase indicates being in suspension among intellectual-emotional feelings, pursuing painful paradoxes, holding opposing positions aloft, unresolved but deeply experienced. And to factor in a long poem’s anti-binarist tendency advances Keatsean “negative capability” as a reading experience, including the emotional cost of holding several possibilities without necessarily precipitating one resolved or fixed position. This art and culture of appreciating wonder amid painful ambiguities and the challenge of presenting emotions as thinking and in thought make a long poem a site for difficult bliss.

I borrow the paradox of difficult bliss from a binary suggested in Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text (using the Richard Miller translation). Opening his meditation at once scintillating and melancholy, one finds Barthes’s binary contrast for texts of pleasure and of bliss (with a terminological “vacillation” that softens this useful binary (p. 4) by saying “no absolute classifications”). Nonetheless, here is the binary structure: pleasure resolves; bliss is uncomfortable, “unsettles,” and does not resolve. Pleasure “comes from hegemonic culture and does not break from it” (p.14); bliss has brio, is excessive, wants to overflow, ignores boundaries (p. 13). Pleasure is a fulfillment, euphoric, yet normative, as opposed to an excess that cannot be contained and may not be enjoyed (p. 19). A text of bliss “imposes a state of loss” (p. 14).

Barthes proposes that pleasure and bliss are not on a continuum, yet they are “parallel forces” (p. 20), clearly implicating each other. I would simply state — that a long poem (no matter its structures, its rhetorics, its materials, or its findings) is the zone in which these two parallel forces co-exist and enact their tension.

Long poems present the contradictions of deeply entangled cultural modes. A long poem is so excessive that even if a poet wanted to resolve the work (some do), long-poem composition has let loose so much language, and so many insights, shapes, and materials that it is definitionally a text of bliss (and therefore loss) even if it has engineered closure (like the close of a long day) that draws on the plots and poetic containments of texts of pleasure. A long poem’s implicit formal challenge is presenting the magnetic, parallel relationships of its own elements of pleasure and bliss. This will put a real pressure on the concept of Ending. Can a poet negotiate an ending, or want to?

A plethora of the mechanisms (piling Poetry on Ossa so to speak) in tactics, and claiming to write thematically about “everything” (one key and odd point of long poems) are not the experiences we are trained to expect from poems, mainly visually tidy, well-framed, consistent items. (Even the page of much past poetry as we consume it looks as if it is set in a white frame, no matter how past folks consumed the poems. However, Whitman — certainly a fellow long poem writer — has a somewhat different engagement with the page, with the endless poem, and with a plethora of sections and rearrangements).

For this author, the unexpected power and long temporality of such a call into poetic vocation as a long poem (not to speak of a long poem–author’s long temerity) along with the multi-year-invested acts of composing, and its curiosities, follow-through, judgments — are to be the biography of any long poem. What I as a poet found in and by the experience of construction might claim the gnomic motto: Structure is the message of materials — discovered as method.

I had first intuited that I would be writing a long poem in 1985, by having difficulty disentangling two rough drafts that seemed like very different poems yet had the same energy of proliferation. Surprisingly, these poems seemed not to have boundaries from each other. Were they not one poem? It was not that easy for me to see that they were actually part of one larger thing, so the further question became — what was that thing? And how was it to work? To “answer” (at least somewhat) took at least seven years to discover and invent.

At this time, I also had a pre-poem fantasy (never actualized) of a poem, montage, or textual-sculptural piece (or something!) that visualized The Waste Land with its lines written on transparent plastic sheets moving endlessly over and under each other. This visualized remaking of a canonical work imagined something quite unforeseen in my poetic (lyric/objectivist) career to date.

(Incidentally, I find The Waste Land a truly adorable poem — an astonishing, odd achievement that made its own author very uncomfortable. Thus he tried continually to slough it off. I discuss this in my critical book. Further, curiously, I did write an appropriately long torque of Eliot’s poem — Draft 109: Wall Newspaper — as one of the final group of Drafts.

This precipitating Waste Land image was imagined as a cross between a palimpsest and a constant rough draft. I had imagined an iconic modernist poem broken up and broken through, shifted and reformulated, as if the poem were also reconceptualized away from being an icon to a mobile event, emerging as re-collaged assemblages. Drafts was the generative title word suggestive to me of liberating poetry from the contained lyric and an already fixed collage. Drafts was a gift from the situation — that included the task of separating two poems (then labeled with simple literalism Draft #1 and Draft #2) and the imagined remaking of a modernist classic. I was suddenly able to claim desires to Make, Fabricate, Tinker (Try out, Experiment) — no matter how odd and risky.

The word Drafts was also a meta-word about writing. When the word Drafts struck me so positively, I checked its definitions and considered what I could be saying with this word. In simplest terms, a draft is a piece of writing you write and rewrite because a draft is only the preliminary outline of a plan, document, or picture; it is as yet imperfect, incomplete, and exciting but not finished. To draft is another word for to compose or to make, bringing poesis — fundamental making — to the center of the formulation of a long poem. Other definitions offered me interestingly relevant metaphors.

So the poem began without any particular scheme. I was making interesting poems, and in seven years, I had made just about nineteen of them in a vertical line, going from one to the next. The writing of these suddenly longer poems (seemingly odes?) went on from 1986 to 1993/1994). But seven years into my intuitive activities with this title, a stark question occurred. What was I doing? And taking “faire” as the infinitive for to do, then What was I making? Related questions. Without an early choice of experiential narrative, a recognizable style or sound for all poems, clean use of a focusing poetic, ritual, or formalist procedure (number of words, lines, or sentences), or a clear chronology connecting poem to poem, what pertinent structure overall did this work have besides an array of interestingly titled poems claiming entitlement? Was this work going to consist of a chain of disparate poems, going on, one after another allowing an array of thoughts or insights to accumulate over one, or a bunch, of ongoing works? Was that it? So Drafts presented a set of concerns, yet not really held together except as a long list with perhaps limited local linkages? There was nothing wrong with a chain into infinity, but was this my full choice for pertinent saturated structure?

That is, was this set of poems to be like, say, a freight train where other cars could always be coupled to the rest? And that’s it? (This metaphor probably does not offer a railway engineer’s perspective.) My other picture was one of those spool-yarn projects that children sometimes do which end in a nice, long, useless wool tube. (I imagine that it’s plausible to sew that tube in a circle — like a mini-rug, but . . . then it would curl annoyingly — following the physics of its materials.) An additive structure simply presents whatever number of individual items are made. Was this large-scale structural parataxis or general seriality enough?

And speaking of “enough,” how many of these canto-length poems were there to be? I had then written about twenty. What was my commitment? How many of these cantos were to make enough? These are defining issues about any art practice — what is enough; what is too much; how do you know? And how do those questions matter, to whom, and why, declaring what questions in poetics? Could I figure out what the number goal of Drafts was; how else could I understand where/when to end a series of insights otherwise going on forever? (Is the poet trapped by the poem?) As I said, I had noted my impatience and discomfort with making this endless line of interesting poems just around the seven-year mark.

What then happened was a transformative moment of choice in writing, answering (responding to) both worrisome questions — of the total number of Drafts and of thought-provoking structure. After picking and picking at this question for several of these years, I had a great flash (true) postulating that I could begin the whole group of poems as if again (re-starting the beginning; or “beginning again and again.”). Given that I had written “Draft 1: It,” I could write a corresponding extension of its concern for an “it” (general gloss: how to represent the world out there with what connections and associations). This next beginning would emerge as or be set out in a corresponding position in the developing work, nineteen poems later than the very first poem, thus extending, touching on, alluding to, and re-beginning that first poem but differently. The title “Draft 20: Incipit” proposed beginning again, even alluding to the phoneme “it” in the second title of that initial “line” in the developing series of first poems.

In the second position, given the second seed poem, “Draft 2: She,” with its mother-daughter-female situations rather clear, I could re-begin the female mark of redness occurring inside that poem with “Draft 21: Cardinals.” This next poem on the “line of 2” did not correspond TO the first in the exact same tones or genres repeating from “Draft 2: She,” but corresponded WITH it, as if the poems were letters sent to each other. Both of these poems involved the same child at different ages, but not as a biography.

A further corresponding move could occur with all the next poems, allowing each horizontal array of works to pivot to some imaginative exploration of connection on a periodicity of 19, that now had become a numerological motif for the whole work of Drafts.

This considered, but not rigid tactic not only solidifies the poem around its own writing history — how it was written, starting in a paratactic list and modulating into a wide-scale concept of “repetition-difference-similarity,” it claims the idea of a related, motion-inflected temporality, and the touch of each individual poem upon its numerologically related section in an analytically aware, content-laden, allusive, even metaphorically erotic space (erotic by virtue of folding and touching).

The postulated links among the poems could be metaphoric, metonymic, historical, allegorical, tactical, associative, or allusive — but whatever they were, or could suggest, the structural result was that the earlier poems had later poems pleated over them, related numerologically, with five more iterations connected to the corresponding Drafts of each nineteen first-written ones. (As if a “Composition by fold.”) Each poem of this numerology of 19 (on a y-axis) is now repeated in some allusive particulars, development, or association of idea, theme, and feeling across the corresponding works on the x-axis, but never exactly or rigidly — always in motion.

This establishment of unscripted, associative connections was made in the composition. It was not pre-established before I began — as is shown by the fact that Drafts’ structure gets fully declared or clarified only after seven years of writing. A structure really was pursued heuristically, made of its own making, a poem fabricated by multiple acts of situational poesis.

This structure was active — with every new poem, a title, and statement indicated some relationship of that poem with the whole work but particularly across each horizontal “line,” going for six rounds. That is, five more poems across, imagined as the x-axis on the poetic “graph.” Yet remember again the heteroglossic, multiple in diction and tone; in range of vocabulary and allusion; in rhythms and trajectories, in general demeanor. Each poem could have different shapes and sizes of relationships — thus constituting the grid as it emerged as a work of aesthetic and intellectual choices on scales from words to statements to cited connections across poems, to sounds, to change-ups in tone and topic. The whole poem or a part could be viewed as connected — yet I was making a matting that also had a lot of temporal space for options and local choices by readers of readings. The grid of titles also allowed readers to mull their intuitions or surmises about my invention, given my claim of thematic or other connections.

Thus it was not only me who made this poem. The poem helped make itself, via me, my poetic knowledge, and language, and readers could make interpretations of whatever connections they saw or felt. This is not a ceding of the poem to others — readers are not writers, but they do have their own work with feeling and perception beyond the reading of an “icon.” The words I made, the individual poem’s styles and genres that I evoked, readers could then interpret by speaking of the connections that they saw, an opening to words’ different implications, allusions, and histories. Any individual Draft was either similar enough (say in a theme) and different enough from its cohort along the row of six. Even and odd; self-similar and different in shape; similar in some topics (meditations on war recur, the processing of Shoah recurs; alphabet poems are several and various in other topics, tones, and functions) but unique and specific — that’s why the poem draws on the energy the reader may have for experiencing, as if in Negative Capability.

Why six units of nineteen Well, first, in those seven years I had written nineteen poems. Then I wanted to hit a total number larger than one hundred (Dante’s number, here self-forbidden, a taboo desire), yet a number not excessively long and large (a comic judgment, a reader might opine). This number would also allow a small homage to Ezra Pound (his number is 117) for the title word and final canto-fragment of Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII.

That is, the multiplication of 19 times what number offered a plausible solution for the stopping of the poem cantos. That number turned out to be six — and gave me that Goldilocks number for this situation, the Just Right 114. Six groups of 19 of Drafts seemed to be enough to activate a pattern without overtaxing anyone’s patience. That pattern became the grid of and for Drafts.

Notice that thinking numerologically in a long poem is a strong, familiar action. I made a number organically based on what I had already done (19 poems). Arbitrary numbers are also usable, the poet’s age at the beginning of the poem is built-in with later updates (Lyn Hejinian’s 37 and 45). Other numerologies might use seasons, 24 hours in the day, or a religious number like 3 (the Christian Trinity), 54 (the number of weekly readings/portions of the Torah in a practicing Judaism); 108, a Buddhist sacred number with auspicious potential; or any culturally well-known numerological allusions. Plain Numerology (an allusion only to the Dante/Pound story of Pound’s yearning first for one hundred, then beyond it) and the grid structure that became the material embodiment of numbers for me allowed the question of ending (and the mystery of ending) to be postulated/solved without too much story or culturally-supported telos.

I projected a shape — it came from necessity, given my existing play with a somewhat wayward heuristic seriality, repetition, and difference. The grid was a shape, a “logic” that did not fix or determine any title or any content. It might hold a motif (“work” — recurring in and through the nineteenth set of six poems), visible in their titles: 19: Working conditions; 38: Georgics and Shadow; 57: Workplace, Nekuis; 76: WorkTable with Scale Models; 95: Erg; and 114: Exergue and Volta. This didn’t mean that “work” could not appear elsewhere; or that my poems about work all looked the same. The grid held the space for a poem in readiness until a poem was made to satisfy the writer and thereby engage the possibilities of connecting with other poems.

As a writer, I had been called into a poesis — an activity of making that was both pretended and unfinished, and yet played with real extension and endlessness. I had made a structure whose theme (for me) was poesis (making) by thinking via poems and poetry. I had postulated that I would stop this poem when the multiplication of six times nineteen reached the goal of 114 separate long poems. This number was chosen, but it had no secret meaning. The number was not a culturally teleological powerhouse, but a self-homage to the poem’s own history, a heuristic solution as an answer to a dilemma. (When to stop — not necessarily to finish or complete or conclude, but simply to stop.)

However, between 2001 and 2003, I made one more decision — which was a great surprise conceptually, because it intervened in a central act of structure — that is, the question of ending. Having thought my poem would end with “Draft 114: Exergue and Volta” (a poem that proposed an anthology of thoughts about ending), I destabilized number 114, the total number of poems I had long projected. I thereby complicated the numerology in a way idiomatic to what I now understood had become the aesthetic ethos of Drafts. I did so by choosing to write an “unnumbered” poem called “Précis,” placed in the exact middle of the 114 works between Drafts 57 and 58, which is where I had gotten (when this choice had occurred to me).

This poem as poem thereupon consisted of fifty-seven quasi-sonnets, each summarizing the fifty-seven written Drafts to date. Of course, I am quite aware that a summary of a poem is a very peculiar claim, aka an impossible act, self-mocking, almost. And of course, I thought this whole idea was unheard of. A partial ending of half a poem placed in the exact middle of a postulated array — half written and half unwritten (since Drafts 58-114 were, then unwritten). However, then I started to enjoy its untoward aspects, for I got used to the shock of the idea, and to the further shock of my thinking it would be excellent to have a displaced, incomplete ending. I further saw that I absolutely would not ever make a parallel summary for the fifty-seven poems that followed. Because that would involve a reductive closure.

This act or choice announced a more completed or matured sense of the ethos of the poem, a visible allegiance to the heuristic (perpetually reinvented) practices of making (dare I say, to the poetics of poesis). Numerology and the grid structure allowed the question of ending (and the mystery of ending) to be postulated and solved without any story or culturally supported telos. Drafts involved the fact that my activities and choices about building structure from my specific matter and materials became a commentary on making, or a meta-theme. In summary, the poem’s own process of making became meta-commentary on itself.

Many unresolvable binaries are palpable in the poem, in the ways pleasure and bliss are (as I suggested earlier here). Other similar structures of Drafts are both/and; stability/ instability; a finished summary but only of half the poem (57 works, not 114) and thus finished and unfinished. Hence the final number of poems in Drafts became 114 and 115 — both numbers and both/either — depending on how and what you count. These twin numbers are an even number and an odd number; thus there is odd/even doubleness (This Unnumbered: Précis, the summary of half the poem placed in the middle of the text, will begin the second Coffee House Press volume of the complete Drafts, to be published in May 2025.) This generative instability around the question of “the final” has always accompanied Drafts as an idea. Adding two visual poems among the 115, another temptation and choice, also had this effect. Within the question of structure, again Negative Capability haunts the poem; postulating negative capability as provoking a structure, that is, a hovering between and among materials of individual poems.

The implications of Keats’ reverberating idea for me do not include his rejection of fact and reason, however. There are several key moments in Drafts of thinking through a proposition, as in my taking up Theodor Adorno’s striking propositions (in plural) about “writing poetry after Auschwitz”; or my weaving through prior poems in acts of torquing, such as my work “Hard Copy” that tracks “Of Being Numerous” by George Oppen; or my taking up a Dante Canzone with mother and girlchild as one kind of “bonded couple” rather than only the iconic heterosexual one.

The homage and resistance operable in various acts of “torquing” prior dynamic poems is another defining topic for the work of Drafts since I write this type of poem about twenty times in the course of the 115 poems of Drafts — both with poets and with social and philosophic problems.

So Drafts has an anti-Aristotelian mixture of beginnings, middles, and endings all over the work. It had become an example of the Gertrude Stein advice-triplex for “Composition as Explanation”: Beginning again and again, Using Everything; Presenting continuously. That last, in my view, is not a tense (the “continuous present”) but an activity, similar to later proposals in poetics. There is an ethos of multiplicity, an “anthology of transit” involving the work of Marianne Moore, as Williams proposed, and much later that ethos in Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.”

Drafts had begun as a chain of poems, one after one, following through on title thoughts. However, my curiosity about the overly simple structure of a chain with one element arbitrarily following another made me reframe the structure from accumulative to transformative. The structure is an activity expressing thinking with and about the ongoing activities of poesis. I chose the possibility and potential of a fold and beginning again, taking the elements (individual poems) each in relation to prior work, in order to construct a structure involving repetition-similarity-difference. A grid shape thereby emerged. This grid became a serious, numerologically spry, associative, and interpretive structure for the poem as a whole. The poem thereupon got built as a grid that involved multiple acts of beginning again.

Theoretically speaking (as work by Rosalind Krauss tells us), a grid has no necessary beginning and no necessary ending — it’s a cut into an endless or extensive territory. (Like what we call life, or what we call history, or the universe). The thinking in and of poetics with a grid structure became the concept of Drafts. But there are grids and grids. Curiously, as a poetic grid, mine is not like grids of artists like Sol LeWitt or Agnes Martin, or most quilters. In these grids, self-same elements — and modular repetition — are emphasized: and the boxes produced by those grids are filled in ways about the same as any equivalently-sited box in the work (size of the shape, the material, and the color of the shape. Repetition of the pattern. Drafts differs considerably in this particular — more resembling the quilts of Gee’s Bend women, rectangular but with these shapes and rectangles that can and do differ in size, material, and color/pattern, often by life and chance necessitating a choice from the few materials at hand, needfully arranging what you have. These materials, like the poems in Drafts, are both modular and organic. Each “inside matter” content in each “rectangle” or “poem site” is rather distinct, and the modes and textual allusions vary.

So unlike some uses of grid, Drafts is not based solely on exact patterns of iteration but on difference, and on an organic flexibility via materials at hand — the ethos of the outsider artist. Working through feelings and thoughts about the world as such by these acts of making provokes for me a difficult bliss. 

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Test, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Brooklyn Rail. Curatorial Projects, in a series called Singing in Unison, a one-line manifesto. “Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy.” (Rail, announcement March 27, 2024.)

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. A Long Essay on the Long Poem. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023.

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