Thinking with the Poem
Thinking with the Poem
Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau DuPlessis
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.
“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
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.
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Andrew Mossin
PART I. FEMINIST PRACTICE & THE POETICS OF CRISIS
Chapter One. Knowing Your Own Mind: Rachel Blau Duplessis and the Poetic Scandal of Inner Speech
Peter Middleton
Chapter Two. Twentieth-Century Feminist Influences on Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts
Megan Jewell
Chapter Three. Infinite History and the Mortal Body: Re-Reading the Unending Surge
Amber Manning
PART II. MATERIALITIES OF MAKING: COLLAGE, DETRITUS, AND WASTE IN DRAFTS
Chapter Four. Intersections and Interstices: A Layering Art Practice as Embodied Feminist Philosophy: Intertexual Appliqué as Collage at the Nexus of Text, Textile, and Texture
Maria Damon
Chapter Five. “daily politics, weird shit”: Waste and Future Politics in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Later Work
Eric Keenaghan
Chapter Six. Rachel Blau Du Plessis and the en dehors garde
Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum
Chapter Seven. An Extra Horizon can be Spun: On Editing and Publishing Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Numbers
Ariel Resnikoff
PART III. ACROSS TRADITIONS: ROMANTICISM, OBJECTIVIST AND PROJECTIVIST POETICS, SECULAR JUDAISM AND THE WITNESS OF HISTORY
Chapter Eight. Between Objectivist and Projectivist Poetics: Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the “Force Moving”
Jeanne Heuving
Chapter Nine. “Immerginated Raptures”: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts 1–38, Toll
Joseph Donahue
Chapter Ten. Spark Me Up or the Light of Shattered Language: The Holy Un()hole in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ss, “Psalm 151”
Adeena Karasick
Chapter Eleven. Romanticism and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Moth: Ode to Psyche”: A Herstory of the Origins of Drafts
Jeffrey Robinson
Contributors
