Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Draft 94: Mail Art”; DuPlessis in 2007 in Philadelphia. Photo by Robert S. DuPlessis.
but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes … — William James
To say that Rachel Blau DuPlessis has built her entire poetic project on the logic of the provisional and the contingent is no exaggeration. And reader, make no mistake — she has married us to this process. In the School of DuPlessian Midrash every seam and suture is exposed as a subject of instigation cum investigation. Investigation, in Drafts, is not simply a prod to the ethical; it’s heuristic: in teaching us how to read Drafts, Drafts teaches us how to read. (So maybe it’s chiasmatic, too?)
