Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis in 2012. Courtesy Ron Silliman's Blog.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (born 1941) is an American poet, essayist, and academic.

Life

DuPlessis was born in Brooklyn, New York City. She earned a Ph.D. in 1970 from Columbia University; her dissertation was titled "The Endless Poem: "Paterson" of William Carlos Williams and "The Pisan Cantos" of Ezra Pound.

She teaches English and creative writing at Temple University. She is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry.

Writing

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, DuPlessis has been composing this "endless poem" in canto-like sections, grouped in nineteen units. Their themes include 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 20th-century writing and society.

Recognition

Among other 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.

Publications

Poetry

• Wells. New York: Montemora Foundation, 1980.
• Gypsy / Moth: Keats from the 'History of Poetry'. Oakland, CA: Coincidence Press, 1984.
• Tabula Rosa. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1987.
• Some Codas. Buffalo, NY: Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008.
• Interstices. Cambridge, MA: Subpress, 2014.

Life poem

• "Drafts 1 & 2" (in Tabula Rosa)
• Draft X: Letters. Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1991.
• Drafts 3-14. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1991.
• Drafts 15-30: The fold. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1997.
• Draft 37: Praedelle. Ellsworth, ME: Backwoods Broadsides, 1999.
• Drafts 1-38: Toll. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
• Draft 43: Gap. Brooklyn, NY: Belladonna Books / Boog Literature, 2001.
• Draft, unnumbered: Précis. Vancouver: Nomados, 2003.
• Drafts 39-57: Pledge (with Draft, unnumbered: Précis). Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2004.
• Torques: Drafts 58-76. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2007.
• Pitch: Drafts 77-95. London: Salt, 2010.
• The Collage Poems of Drafts. London: Salt, 2011.
• Surge: Drafts 96-114. Cromer, Norfolk, UK: Salt, 2013.

Non-fiction

• Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative strategies of twentieth-century women writers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985.
• H.D.: The career of that struggle. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986.
• The Pink Guitar: Writing as feminist practice. New York: Routledge, 1990; Tuscaloosa, AL: 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. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
• Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the ends of patriarchal poetry. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012.
• The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, politics, and friendship. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2015.

Edited

• George Oppen, The Selected Letters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990.
• Signets: Reading H.D. (edited with Susan Stanford Friedman). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
• The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from women’s liberation (edited with Ann Barr Snitow). New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
• The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (edited with Peter Quartermain). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Second Avenue by Frank O'Hara

• List of U.S. poets
• List of literary critics

External links

Poems

• "Draft 42: Epistle, Studios" poem by DuPlessis at Jacket Magazine
• Rachel Blau DuPlessis at Poetica.net
• Rachel Blau DuPlessis b. 1941 at the Poetry Foundation
• Rachel Blau Duplessis at EPC (Electronic Poetry Center)
• Poetry Online

Prose

• The Gendered Marvelous essay by DuPlessis on Barbara Guest
• Standing Corporeally in One’s Time essay by DuPlessis on Anne Waldman
• Statement for Pores on-line essay by DuPlessis for Pores, a journal which describes itself as AN AVANT-GARDIST JOURNAL OF POETICS RESEARCH
• Manhood and its Poetic Projects essay at Jacket Magazine, subtitled:"The construction of masculinity in the counter-cultural poetry of the U.S. 1950s".
• Criticism online

Audio / video

• Rachel Blau DuPlessis at PennSound
• Rachel Blau DuPlessis at YouTube

Books

• Rachel Blau DuPlessis at Amazon.com

About

• Rachel Blau Duplessis Official website.