Thinking with the Poem
Thinking with the Poem
Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau DuPlessis
“Mossin’s collection of essays on the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis makes an important contribution to contemporary literary scholarship, given the poet’s many contributions to feminist theory, modern and postmodern criticism, and poetry. Thinking with the Poem is a capacious survey of those contributions, providing essays by leading critics of contemporary poetry covering all aspects of the poet’s career.”—Michael Davidson, author of Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error
Broad-ranging and pluralistically investigative, the essays in Thinking with the Poem document Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s authorial interventions as a poet, scholar, and cultural critic steeped in the linguistic and political frames of her time. The writers included in this volume engage root-level questions at the heart of DuPlessis’s praxis as posed by her in a recent essay: “What is a poem, what is a poet, what is an oeuvre, what is the ‘poetic’?” Inventive and noncanonical, these essays offer substantive responses to these and other questions, providing new routes of inquiry into the poetry and poetics of this preeminent figure of new writing.
Andrew R. Mossin is an associate professor of instruction in the Intellectual Heritage Department at Temple University. He is the author of several books, including Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry.
