Reminding you of silent doubles

Al Filreis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, teacher, critic, editor: her newest book of poems is Torques: Drafts 58-76, out from Salt Modern Poets since September. Drafts is an ongoing long poem (Rachel calls it her "endless poem") written in canto-like sections, and Torques is the third collection of these to appear since 2001 (she's been writing the drafts since '85).

Rachel has prepared a grid that helps to organized the whole project so far (well, at least as of March 2007). So, for instance, draft 59 is "flash back" and 62 is "gap" and 69 is "sentences" and 85 is "hard copy."

The new book stops at 76, but of course Rachel continues to create drafts of this endless poems, and I've been reading "Draft 85: Hard Copy" lately and here are some of my favorite passages:

Even the simplest things
Their provenance —
a shoe, a prosthetic
post-war leg
reminding you of
silent doubles
unfinished, imperfect,
imperfect, shadowy.

Slowly the particulars
get scattered to the wind ...

And:

Chickens come Home.
And Us Chickens.
Two old sayings.
High crimes and low cunning,
One must refuse. Easy, so far.

Yet a clutch of events
hatches in the world at large
leaving a rash, a stain, an infection, a pandemic.

And here is all of section 18:

Stet atrocity
Stet astonishing events fast come ordinary
Stet particular Presidents

Stet plum of smoke
Stet people burn

With an increase of allusions and referents.

Draft 85 is "mapped loosely on, thinks about, and responds to" George Oppen's masterful 1968 work, "Of Being Numerous." There are citations (marked as quotations from Oppen) and allusions to Oppen and variations around keywords in Oppen's sections.

[] Rachel's PennSound page.

[] Rachel on Virginia Woolf at the October 2000 "nine contemporary poets read themselves through modernism" event.

October 13, 2007

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.