Rachel Blau DuPlessis in residency in 1992 at Le Centre de Poésie et Traductions de la Fondation Royaumont, Aisères-sur-Oise, France, for translation work that led to Essais: Quatre Poèmes, traduction collective, Royaumont, revue et complétée par Jean-Paul Auxeméry (Bar-le-Duc: Un Bureau sur l'Atlantique, Editions Créaphis, 1996).
“Inside art, poetry would succeed — perhaps — in withdrawing from art; it would exit art within art. Thus we must think, in art’s greatest intimacy and as this intimacy itself, of a sort of spacing or hiatus. A secret gaping. Perhaps intimacy — the ‘heart’ of the same — is always such a gaping, as the possibility for the same to be itself and to join within itself to itself; the pure — empty — articulation of the same.
Cover image for Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “The Collage Poems of Drafts” (Salt, 2011); DuPlessis with camera, September 2011.
A story that all readers of Drafts know well: in 1982, almost twelve hundred sculptures were discovered by trash collectors in a Philadelphia alley. The subsequent search for the artist who produced these pieces was unsuccessful. The working theory is that the artist had died and the pieces were discarded by those left behind — a family member, a friend, perhaps a landlord. The artist was dubbed the “Philadelphia Wireman,” assumed to be a man due to the physical strength necessary to work with the resistant found materials: “a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects, including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewelry.”[1] Additionally, the demographic of the neighborhood, coupled with the apparent influence of African figural aesthetics on the sculptures, leads critics to believe that the artist was African American.
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.
