Reading and hearing ‘Drafts’

This brief essay, introducing Drafts, was published in its unrevised version in 2017 in a single issue of Thresholds, a prototype journal put out in 2017, that now several years later will publish regularly. I have altered this essay for Jacket2, making some cuts and updates. Here I included a brief consideration of the DuPlessis PennSound Archive in order to celebrate both the 2024 completion of my recording of all the Drafts and the imminent publication of Drafts in 2025 by Coffee House Press.

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What is and was my encounter with this long poem, my long poem, Drafts? And, borrowing the manner of novels — then what happened? What’s the plot? The poem occurred as a number of encounters, along different lines of desire, drives, dérives. These encounters were supported by my writing life and took note of events that irrupted from socio-political materials. I’d suggest a sense of collaboration with a mode — with the long poems that I had read without even knowing that I was “preparing” for my own poesis on such a scale. My work. In 1986, I began to write Drafts by struggling to disentangle two poems written in 1985.

Drafts

Drafts exists both as a whole unmonumental monument and in separate canto-like sections as a large field into which a reader may enter, starting anywhere. Drafts does not comprise one single personal or historical story, nor does it offer an expressivist narrative of individual realizations. The largest unifying emotions are probably double and conflicting: wonder and bedazzlement at the world and amazement — sometimes grief — at what we have made of it. Drafts has no trajectory as a totality or whole with a culminating ending (mainly because it is an open-ended grid), although each 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. In terms of seriality (building a semi-linear, semi-vectored, pensive, self-quarrelling argument inferentially, by leaps and movements) — many individual cantos are internally organized as serial works, and the whole of Drafts is in (or of) that mode. I make an overarching commitment to seriality on a large scale. 

The various poems with their specific sections construct explorations into the world, which is IT. And into the two oddities of all oddities: IT and IS. These are both words for being itself (thus Drafts is an ontological exploration). The poem is always being itself, as a socio-cosmological and ecological work, at times meditating on actual scientific findings, at times citing from journalism some of the astonishing, baffled comments people make talking about our collectively extreme condition. The continuous changes of scale from the little dot of “I” along with other such “dots,” to the magnitude of “it” are addressed constantly. Thus, it is a social poem and a political poem about being here, about what we have made, and what we are trying still to make of our places and times. In many ways, my long poem is an essay-poem, a performance-poem of materiality. It is never only one genre, and never only one tone — say purely lyrical, or purely analytic.

Space, time, and poeticity

The poem (Drafts as a whole) is a site, almost like a territory or a country; anyway, it’s somewhere I went for a very long time. Almost every poem explores a different genre (as title words like Headlines, Cento, Stretto, Rebus, Renga, Doggerel reveal), although the fundamental genre bases are midrash — by which I mean permanent discussion, gloss, and interpretation — and the serial poem, to propose a committed, incremental argument. Line length and metrics vary enormously in the work overall and often within individual works. The sound or tone ranges from an odic sublimity to the starkest aphorism. Rhyme is used at times (including in several poems completely rhyme-based) and is meant seriously and lovingly.

What is a long poem’s shape? How does it happen? Where does the authority for declaring shape come from? It is an informed heuristics. You as poet let yourself go into that developing space, and you are informed enough to know when you find something interesting and provocative. You are also informed enough not to be too self-deceived.

The inhabiting of the long poem as a place in time is not an answer given beforehand. I did not know what writing Drafts would entail when I began in 1986. I did not have a plan or a program, although it might have appeared as if I did. This is because the grid that had evolved or developed for me to keep charting the sections and (very loosely) to track some of their relationships looked perhaps as if the grid were “a plan” instead of what it was: a post hoc map. These contained voids became an invitation. Drafts itself declared an openness to itself. Early on, I had looked up the dictionary definitions of the word “draft” and understood (plus continuously mulled) what I could be implying by this word.

A shape

I projected a shape — it came from necessity,
that things would recur, but that they would recur differently.
That moments of the poem are similar, but also different.
That there is no recurrence in exact terms, but things do repeat.
Or there is no repetition, but some aspects of things recur.
All that is the reason for the shape of the 19 x 6 units.
Numbers occurred to me, and I chose to follow them.
The grid created by 19 x 6 poems, a grid I drew at 7 years into the project, had open spaces or slots, the zones ready for poems.
The establishment of my grid occurred in 1993. This is seven years after Drafts began.  
In it, the poems, some ideas, and their titles linked to each other along the horizontal line of six poems across. 

If the whole project of these poems had gotten dry and ungenerative in those early years, I would have stopped doing that work and would have done something other, something else. That is, if the poem, the poems or any shape, any open space, had gotten boring or mannered, I would have stopped. But the miracle was — it did not. Yes — sometimes this was a struggle with what I heard in the poems, with what poems I was writing, and with many forms of judgment about the project.

But the project was holding and changing in fascinating ways. Each poem was an episode of trying to understand and investigate what “IT” was and to think about its findings. 

As for declaring there would be six groups of 19 of them: it seemed to be enough to make the point without overtaxing anyone’s patience. 

The grid was a shapely “logic” that did not determine anything; it did not determine any title or any content. It might offer a motif (“work” — recurring in and through the 19^th set of six poems), which doesn’t mean that “work” could not appear elsewhere; so there was no forbidding; it was all permission.

That is the story of the open spaces of the grid. There will be a poem in this place! was a declaration made by my choice of this shape. It was joyous! It was a future claim for the making of an individual poem. The grid and postulating relationships across the six poems created a series of waves, possibilities carrying me forward precisely because of each potential poem emerging from a contained void — a titled space into which I was called to write because I had postulated a particular title. I had promised the poem to make something in each open/blank zone. 

The rule was simply: there is some structure — which simply means connection: there is a bonding among the works and, as the words bond and state, they make the thinking and feeling in any one poem; then the many linked works weave overall. The poems (each individual one) close, sometimes firmly, only to open into the whole project.

And aura is a word I would now use — the scheme, the grid has a kind of magic for me. It is not rigid — it is organic in its source and desires. It came about; it was not imposed. And one result — temporality goes several ways, one-to-one (poems in a sequence, loosely, one was written, then another). And poems cross-temporally, read through their own space, a space they create by coexisting on the same “line,” like the sixteenth set of poems. Because of the look of the grid, (up and down and horizontal, as well, sometimes, even crosswise with allusions), Drafts has constructed itself in a dimension neither only space nor only time. 

For various reasons and in a process of discovery that occurred over seven years, I had designated a projected total of 114 separate but related works along (suddenly) with an unnumbered (115^th) “center” made of 57 sonnet-like objects. Having an apparent summary of half the poem placed in the middle of the text (now the beginning of the second Coffee House Press volume) is a set of complex thoughts about “book” and “project” and “finish,” much less the impossibility of summarizing (in capsule form) any poem whatsoever. When I chose to write that work (Draft Unnumbered: Précis) to place in the middle of the whole poem, at first, I was wary — what was I doing!? It was so odd. But then I became gleeful. 

So any individual poem got generated by the mystery of an imagined title. Often the title came first, but sometimes the poem wouldn’t settle until the right title was found.

The titles were like probes. They were suggestive words. They never functioned as “pre-thought” material, but the poem, by being created, became the process of thinking in which the feelings generated by titles were exemplified (in image, by allusion, by event, perhaps by citation) in all cases by and in language that I was inventing. The poems were what were thought about, thought through, produced, or brought to their articulation in the process of writing the poem with that title. The aura of each title saturates the poem.

There are a few examples of titles whose grouping is fairly clear. Take the “Line of 15” that alludes to littleness (based on the title the 15^th poem of the original nineteen), innocence, a child, letters of the alphabet — all apparently small things. The “line” recited as a list of titles goes: Draft 15: Little; Draft 34: Recto; Draft 53: Eclogue; Draft 72: Nanifesto [small manifesto]; Draft 91: Proverbs; and Draft CX: Primer. 

Or there is the “Line of 9.” loosely the surface for writing or surfaces on which there is print. Those are Draft 9: Page; Draft 28: Facing Pages; Draft 47: Printed Matter; Draft 66: Scroll [a double column poem]; Draft 85: Hard Copy [a pun on how I wanted to “answer” and extend George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” but of course it would be a hard thing to “copy”]; and finally Draft 104: The Book. Each Draft number is the original poem plus 19.

The kinds of associations, thinking, and relationships created across these thematic and situational lines are very suggestive and proliferative. The relationships do not necessarily have the same tone, or mode, or even genre within the “lines.” Some of them are mysterious associations.

26 years and opening

It is a miracle to me that this poem, the whole thing called Drafts, has happened. That I could and did, for twenty-six years, continue it, stick with it, be satisfied enough with its unrolling, have poems with the main title Drafts happen over and over. And to be with it, learn from it, engage, and have it grow and change — and change me — over all these years. 

Why could I stick with it (with all this) for so many years? Some reasons are precisely because of the sense of openness, that is not carrying out a rigid or fixed plan, but having a goal, an almost ineffable goal. Another reason was because each work (each separate canto) constantly generated more work. Any poem made more poems possible. The whole, thinking of itself as a draft of some enormous and “complete” work even though being just a “draft” — was able to articulate and hold its own thought and feeling. That sense of “form” was adequate. It was, to borrow Winnecott’s terms, a “good enough praxis” like a “good enough mother.” I guess that means it held me and refracted back. These terms, suggest that a poem like this provides you the poet with a complex holding that you’ve invented to “hold” yourself and some vision of the world — but not just hold yourself. Also, others. 

Drafts doesn’t have just one sound or one mode or even one length, moving from middling length to extremely long [See Draft 87: Trace Elements, originally delivered as a plenary lecture], but despite its generic variety, Drafts has a “self-similar” sound for me, a sound I recognize, built in part out of the scale, the diction shifts and change-ups, the juxtapositions of materials, even sometimes two sets of things (words, dialogues, debates) struggling in the same page space. 

Changes could occur such as my making two collage poems: Draft 94: Mail Art and Draft CX: Primer. In both, I created a visual text with words involved. They are a wonderful departure — and led a new feeling of making. Drafts continued to make more space for itself. One motif or theme in any given poem led to another. “The conservation of matter does not apply to language.”

It is odd talking of “sound,” because I mean a lot by that word — a feeling tone. (I think that phrase belongs to Keats or Shelley, but I’m not sure). An inner ear test, so that the poem feels right when it finally gets to be what it aspired to. A sense of form becomes a large experience that the reader passes into as if into an actual space, or field, or zone filled with voice, song, statement, thought, and echoes. Individual Drafts definitely have a sense that you go into them, and a performance of the poem occurs: it is a big stage space inside the page, and you have an experience or set of encounters there with voices and feelings.

Subjectivity and self-citation

This work is written from multiple subjectivities that are all mine. One recurrent citation strategy is unmarked self-citation. This is a recycling texture, where I will put lines from prior Drafts into a new context. I have never fully elaborated on the mystery of re-citing or re-contextualizing verses/lines. It is: 

• a kind of linking texture picking stitches up to extend the poem.
• a midrashic texture — but commentary by extension. Gloss is a way of thinking with and in the poem. 
• ways the same statement can mean different things, or lead to different ruminations — the mystery of words, of context, and of interpretation.
• an idea that already existing words and statements in the poem become the “muse” for future poems. This means that not male or female figures, but my words and formulations are a muse for another text. This is an extension of feminist thinking into poetic modes — and a critique of necessarily gendered muses as deployed throughout poetic tradition.  

What or who is writing? Agency 

Drafts had to be flexible to itself, while, at the same time, it had to be alert to when it needed to enforce its own “rules.” So as the poem took on its own history, it became an entity that needed to be reckoned with. That is almost a kind of agency (by weight of accumulation and its own history with itself — and with me). Agency in writing is so peculiar — you really are the-person-writing-this and you are making the poem (because who else is doing it?) — but many people writing have testified to the apparent will of the materials, the pressure some concepts and choices exert back onto you. I once pointed to this phenomenon by citing the composer Rautavaara. When he was commissioned to write a string quartet he found that “the work demanded a second cello.” It thus had to, and did, become a string quintet. 

If the work is “your voice(s)” speaking. How does it “demand” anything? There is a complex mirroring between your own desires for apt composition and an intuition that emerges from the materials you engage — and which thereupon engage you. The quick shifts of thought can seem to offer you answers or comments from the work, ones that redirect you.

Mobility, open curiosity, imagination of odd possibilities, and wit about Drafts’ own demands became part of my poetic responsibility. I began to develop a sense of the poem as an entity — it did not break down under its own weight. Even as the work changed, some core sense kept going. The poem became adequate to its own implications. It is also true that part of the heuristic bargain was that the poems all have a unique shape. Sometimes a different texture. Certainly, different genre allusions. Definitely different materials. That is, I not only didn’t want each of the drafts to resemble each other — the self-differences I chose were a positive value, a sought-after feature. This in contrast to stylistic consistency and self-sameness as literary values.

“Ending”

So now what? Well, as I indicated rather clearly in my debates over “ending” both in the final poem (“Draft 114: Exergue and Volta”) and in the Preface to Surge: Drafts 96 -114 (in the Salt Publishing volume from 2010), I do distinguish between finishing/completing, and ending/stopping. The poem named Drafts has stopped. I have folded it up. Is it complete? No. The very premise (and promise) of Drafts precludes this idea. What is the definition of the word “drafts” after all? One attempt after another to express and perfect the words. No work is fully ended though it can stop; no work has one final answer even if every poem has a completed form or shape. Every closing somehow implies an opening, however small and attenuated, or even painful this pinhole is. 

In Drafts as a whole, I engaged a good deal with Steinian recognitions in poetics: beginning again and again, using everything, and continuous presenting. These three propositions come from her “Composition as Explanation” (1926), And I engaged with H.D.'s paradoxical remark — pivoting constantly between the same and different, different but the same as before (in H.D.’s Trilogy [1945], “Tribute to the Angels,” section 39.) This somewhat paradoxical mix of principles in poetics — invention, proliferation, and repetition — has been true throughout the writing of the poem. And these principles continue true at its terminus, which is a stopping place, a pause after a period of effort and of poesis — after a period of intense fabrication. 

Was the stopping organic to the project? Yes, in certain numerological ways, but also no in certain other ways. Why did I stop, then? First, because of the number scheme I wanted to fulfill and did. This often had created combinations of both even numbers (114) and odd (115). That was satisfying. Second, because I didn’t want the work to become too taxing and so long that the poem would never be read. Well, who knows? And third, because after twenty-six years of inhabiting the creation of “cantos” of varying genres but a kind of sound — certain moves became both satisfying and habituated. The question then is distinguishing between habituated (a mode of practice) and habitual (a bad habit or just an obsessive habit). So, I wanted to stop in order to try beginning again overall, to see “what would happen.” In 2012, I was now leaving Drafts in the shape it had come to, and with that interesting structure and suggestive themes (cosmological, social, political, and quotidian) available. That shore receded as I re-embarked — no, not really embarked, but pulled the same boat of me-and-poetry elsewhere. I was still, I felt, on the same vast ocean.

Another way of knowing the poem: Drafts read aloud. 

Drafts — the complete work — has now been recorded in toto and is fully accessible on my Author’s Page on PennSound.

The sets of recordings accumulated by any poet over the years are a particular modern resource. The stun of excitement hearing Tennyson read part of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” a high-pitched sound emerging from a wax cylinder recording, delivers an eerie charge today, a spasmodic electricity combining the aura of the poet with the scandal of the battle, and the date — 1890 — of the recording. 

An aura and charisma may still accompany the experience of being read to by a poet (despite the non-rarity of such recordings now). Still, now, a poet’s voice may wrap a poem and a listener in its presence and may construct a shadowy backbone for even scattered or odd work. Thus, the ear is another avenue through which we receive any poem’s argument, feeling, sequence, syntax, and song. A recording will often offer a sense of inevitability and conviction from the words. 

The ear may also reveal odd contemporaneous conventions of reading poetry aloud — inabilities to create any drama on one hand, flat-voiced (perhaps) to “let the poem’s words shine” rather than the poet’s voice; too much stagey drama on the other hand; pallid versions of fixed and fixated “poetry voice”; seriously skilled delivery; unevenness; carefully calibrated conventions of humility and reluctance; apt readings; embarrassing or revealing moments of the improvised comment. The poetry archive is potentially fraught. 

Since not every reading by a contemporary poet could have been recorded even if the poet gave many readings to audiences, and since technological glitches and street noise may accompany some moments, it is doubly interesting and sometimes even precious to have any record of readings through a poetic career. The PennSound archive collected under my name has become a record of participations, times, places, and occasions from 1982 (two years after my first book of poetry was published) to 2024 when soon (in 2025) the complete Drafts will be available from Coffee House Press. 

Aside from hearing the poems, other thoughts and gleanings might follow from listening. What did some poetry communities sound like? Are there some historic high points both for the poet as an individual and within a specific event staged and performed? What does this particular PennSound site generate in its rituals and presentations? Was there an interesting error or slippage in the reading?

I certainly appreciate the strong and often very lively programming that has occurred regularly at Penn’s Kelly Writers House. In my particular archive are presented KWH sessions on the 60s; on Ron Silliman; celebrations of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein; and a further archival reach to occasions elsewhere — to panels on and celebrations of Robin Blaser, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky, and Jerome Rothenberg in which I participated. And there are other interesting occasions represented here. When I taught work by both Susan Howe (1986) and Alice Notley (2001) in graduate classes at Temple University, I recorded their talks and our interactions. There is also a striking discussion among Mary Oppen, Frances Jaffer, Anita Barrows, and myself about women and feminism, recorded by radio KPFA-FM. Though scheduled to participate, Kathleen Fraser was teaching at that exact time. Such are the vagaries of time, chance, and opportunity that lead to the construction of such an archive. 

One also sees the compelling reach of poetry in this period in other recordings collected here — readings local to Philadelphia — at Robin’s Books; at Chapterhouse among recorded Philly venues; and at an early poetry conference at Tyler School of Art (when the school was still in Elkins Park, not at Temple University Main Campus). My retirement conference (2011) at Temple University was recorded. Nationally, places represented among my readings and panels were Ear Inn and St. Marks Poetry Project in New York City; Woodland Pattern Bookstore and Arts Center in Milwaukee; and San Francisco and Buffalo reading venues. Then, of course, I read at universities such as Naropa, Kansas, Arizona, and Washington. Internationally, I was recorded in Canada, Singapore, and Italy (by proxy). And, when I was briefly on a poetry residence there, some of Drafts were recorded in a studio setting at the University of Auckland in Aotearoa/New Zealand, recordings now held at their Electronic Poetry Center archive, but also generously shared with PennSound.

And speaking of generosity — having observed in about 2022 that only a certain number of the hundred-plus poems of Drafts had been recorded at various KWH occasions, I wondered aloud whether the full set could be constructed/recorded and made available. There followed an intense schedule of my recording the remaining works (over seventy still to record), a project undertaken from 2023 to mid-2024. The result is that I have now recorded every canto of this long poem, and further, by the existence of other recorded moments at various of my readings elsewhere, some Drafts are presented several times. To say I am grateful to the founders of this archive (Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein) and to the people who recorded and prepared my specific archive (mainly Zach Carduner in 2023-24 and earlier, Michael Hennessey, along with a number of helpers within KWH) is a mighty understatement. To say this outright, I am enormously grateful that this archive of Drafts now exists.

As a codicil, I would urge anyone who holds recordings pertinent to my own PennSound collection and to other archived poets here to contact this archive, choosing to share the materials for educational uses, and for the joys of listening. 

The full Drafts grid as it appears on PennSound. Click image to visit the dedicated PennSound page.

To browse the full collection of recorded Drafts, visit the Drafts grid here. To browse all of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s content on PennSound, visit her PennSound page here.