Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (born 1941 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry.

Life
DuPlessis was born in Brooklyn, New York City. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Temple University)

DuPlessis earned her PhD in 1970 from Columbia University and her dissertation was titled "The Endless Poem: "Paterson" of William Carlos Williams and "The Pisan Cantos" of Ezra Pound. Among some of her honors, she has received the Roy Harvey Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize (2002) as a scholar poet. In 2002 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship for Artists.

Poetry
In conjunction with teaching and editing projects, DuPlessis has been writing her "poem of a life," called "Drafts." Among others, poet Ron Silliman has referred to DuPlessis's poem Drafts as a "life poem":
 * More than any other text, Drafts has made me understand the difference between the longpoem and the life poem, and I read Drafts, like (Zukofsky's “A”), like The Cantos, like Bev Dahlen’s A Reading, like my own project, as an instance of the latter.

Since 1985, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been composing this "endless poem" in canto-like sections, grouped in nineteen units. Their themes involve: history, gender, mourning and hope. The first two numbers of Drafts initially appeared in Leland Hickman’s journal, Temblor, two years before being collected into a volume entitled Tabula Rosa, published by Peter Ganick’s Potes & Poets Press.

Non-fiction
Her non-fiction work Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 demonstrates how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around such social issues of modernity as suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets like Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and H.D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes. These writers are still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. By a reading method she calls 'social philology', this book is an attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society.

Life poem

 * Drafts 1-38, Toll. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
 * Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis Salt Publishing, 2004.
 * Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007, also Salt Publishing, 2007.
 * Pitch: Drafts 77-95 forthcoming.
 * Uncollected Drafts
 * “Draft 78: Buzz Track.” Interval(le)s II.2-III.3 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009)
 * “Draft 81: Gap.” BlackBox Manifold (Summer 2009).¹
 * “Draft 84: Juncture” Salt Magazine 2 (March 2009).
 * “Draft 91: Proverbs.” 17 seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (Fall 2008).
 * “Draft 92: Translocation.” EOAGH 5 (July 2009).
 * “Draft 94: Mail Art.” Jacket Magazine 37 (March 2009).
 * “Draft 97: Rubrics.” BlackBox Manifold (Summer 2009).

Non-fiction

 * Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Indiana University Press, 1985.
 * H.D.: The Career of that Struggle. Indiana University Press, 1986
 * The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Routledge, 1990; University of Alabama Press, 2006.
 * Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-48335-2
 * Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. University of Alabama Press, 2006.

Edited

 * The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Duke University Press, 1990.
 * (with Peter Quartermain) 'The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics''. University of Alabama Press, 1999.

The “Line of 15” from Drafts. All poems to date (2009) from this thread, which is “the little.” Other Voices Anthology, ed. Roger Humes. (Journal sponsored by UNESCO)
 * A Periodicity of


 * Six Vispo Works

Drunken Boat 10 (July 2009).