Rachel Blau Duplessis Poetry Reading

Rachel Blau DuPlessis will be sharing selections from her most recent publication, "The Complete Drafts."

A major work over three decades in the making: a long poem addressing the intimate and dynamic nature of poetry, culture, and life. - Coffee House Press

The Complete Drafts comprises 114 endlessly innovative cantos engaging the poet's life and our times. Saturated with polyphonic responses to the historical and artistic sweep of the 20th and 21st centuries, all emotions are double and conflicting: wonder and bedazzlement at the world alongside grief for what we have made of it. Transcendent and ethically inquisitive at once, The Complete Drafts is an urgent contemporary long poem of hope, critique, resistance, and melos.

Bio:

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar, critic, and collagist. Her work includes the notable long poem Drafts (1986-2012), as well as related historical-serial books such as Daykeeping (2023), and collage poems. As a poet-critic, she has written extensively on gender, modern and contemporary poetry, and both feminist and objectivist poetics, with special attention to H.D., Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest, and George Oppen.

"With recourse to an astonishing range of techniques and material devices, formal concern as inclination and qualm, these poems register, lament, react to and wrestle with erosions on multiple fronts-psychic, social, historical, somatic....They affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between." - Nathaniel Mackey, Duke University English Professor