Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Poetics of Midrash in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts

The Poetics of Midrash in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts PAUL JAUSSEN The Poetics of Midrash in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts ew contemporary poets inhabit the tradition of modern- ist long poetry as self-consciously as Rachel Blau DuPlessis. DuPlessis’s modernist credentials are exten- sive. She was mentored by objectivist poet George Oppen (whose selected letters she edited), wrote her dissertation on Paterson and the Pisan Cantos, and has, as Lynn Keller argues, been profoundly influenced by Robert Duncan’s developments in serial form. Drafts, her major work-in-progress, owes its title, in part, to Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, but DuPlessis’s willingness to borrow from Pound does not signify a friendly debt. She has written that while her work “was involved with Pound from its inception,” her intentions were to offer “a critical resistance to the impact of [his] work,” “to make an alternative Cantos, a counter-Cantos”(Blue Studios 250). This statement comes from an essay in which she criticizes Pound’s politics and his poetics as being fractured by “paradoxical, embittering con- tradictions”: on the one hand, The Cantos develop an open poetic practice grounded upon “deferrals and displacements of mean- ing,” yet on the other, Pound held to a notion of “language with- out sociality, language as pure force http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Literature University of Wisconsin Press

The Poetics of Midrash in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts

Jaussen, Paul.
Contemporary Literature , Volume 53 (1) – May 30, 2012
Download PDF
29 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-wisconsin-press/the-poetics-of-midrash-in-rachel-blau-duplessis-s-drafts-cFJKJT6D7b

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright
Copyright © the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin.
ISSN
1548-9949

Abstract

PAUL JAUSSEN The Poetics of Midrash in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts ew contemporary poets inhabit the tradition of modern- ist long poetry as self-consciously as Rachel Blau DuPlessis. DuPlessis’s modernist credentials are exten- sive. She was mentored by objectivist poet George Oppen (whose selected letters she edited), wrote her dissertation on Paterson and the Pisan Cantos, and has, as Lynn Keller argues, been profoundly influenced by Robert Duncan’s developments in serial form. Drafts, her major work-in-progress, owes its title, in part, to Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, but DuPlessis’s willingness to borrow from Pound does not signify a friendly debt. She has written that while her work “was involved with Pound from its inception,” her intentions were to offer “a critical resistance to the impact of [his] work,” “to make an alternative Cantos, a counter-Cantos”(Blue Studios 250). This statement comes from an essay in which she criticizes Pound’s politics and his poetics as being fractured by “paradoxical, embittering con- tradictions”: on the one hand, The Cantos develop an open poetic practice grounded upon “deferrals and displacements of mean- ing,” yet on the other, Pound held to a notion of “language with- out sociality, language as pure force

Journal

Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press

Published: May 30, 2012

There are no references for this article.