N.B. As a master of the multivolume long poem, one of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s motifs, she tells us, is “making a commentary in a poem that glosses key modernist texts in suspicion and homage.”
Extracts from: 'Various Variable Words Variably Arranged in the Form of a Celebratory Talk-Essay on Language & Luxembourg on the Occasion of Receiving the 2020 Batty Weber Award'
I left Paris in 1967 not only because I had quit medical school to become a writer (Paris too does have some writers, right?) but because I had decided to write in English — or more accurately in American English. If French or German (and now, Luxembourgish) are the likely languages a citizen of the Grand Duchy normally decides between on the way to becoming a writer, I, except for very few teenage tries in those languages, always preferred that other one, my fourth language.
[Anne Tardos’s forthcoming book, Undulations, collects poems written from 2020 to 2021. Composed in journal format, it chronicles our global crisis years with poems varying in form and content. Her language and imagery speak to the grueling conditions and fascinations of our time. The book’s focus, morphing from subject to subject, is an interpolation of political and scientific news, developments in astrophysics, and what seems to be a permanent threat from COVID.
Poems and poetics