Some Cursory & Probably Palimpsestic Thoughts on Rachel Blau DuPlessis's "Draft 69" from Torques

                     

1. I've been reading the poems in this book over and over for many months now. Most books can't sustain that kind of rereading. The machinations and poses and aesthetic agenda usually begin to gnaw at one's mind in a most unpleasant manner. Most books are like difficult lovers. You only want to see them infrequently, and that way you will be able to appreciate them. Otherwise, a horrible confrontation may occur. And you will lose that book forever. Sadly, I have lost some books of poetry forever by not following my own rules of restraint.


2. I like to think of Blau DuPlessis's Drafts as the anti-Cantos. I bet there are numerous people who think that. Whereas Pound's Cantos quite frequently erect false gods, bully history to fit his tortured and tortuous theories, and pontificate, the Drafts witness. The titles Blau DuPlessis gives her works are the opposite of hubris. I read the seemingly nondescript titles of the works as an ethical stance regarding the nature of pronouncement. Nothing is finished. The poems are never finished. The reader needs to arrive and alter the work of art, to assay and react. Blau DuPlessis is scriptible where Pound is lisible.


3. But enough about fucking Pound.


4. Draft 69 is very much a poem about the impossibility of poetry. I couldn't help thinking of Godot, where aporias occur all the time. And yet the characters continue past them. That is the impossible possible. That is the metaphysical zero sum game. Metaphysics may have ended in the early parts of the twentieth century, but the physical isn't going anywhere.


5. She captures the current zeitgeist of poetry perfectly with her opening lines:

"Impossible to write a poem.
No sentences can be made.
Sound founders, kitschy gabble.
No collection mechanisms seem engaged
except razoring facts from the newspaper page
to which I am sentenced."

I think this describes perfectly the aporia capital A which poetry faces now.


6. Has language become too self-aware? Has poetry? Various linguistic theories have filtered down into all the nooks and crannies of all the media. Everybody manipulates
language now the way only poets or other belletristic writers did in the past.

"...................Words are suspicion.
Syntax is contamination, structure pat.
Praise praises itself, blind and unctuous.
Language corrupted, corrupting,
corruptible."

Amen.


7. And then this devastating line: "There is no revolution via cleverness."


8. For those who have been following the Drafts, one knows how aware these poems are of what is occurring contemporaneously with the drafting of the poem. The world's political struggles, the individual's existential struggles, are omnipresent.

The work doesn't shrug off the world.


9. It's strange how upon reading Torques I see how close this work often comes to the work of a poet like Adrienne Rich, say. The ethical is a constant in both poets' work and their critiques often overlap. I think somebody outside poetry would agree with me on that. Somebody working inside poetry would probably not. This is really about internalized agenda, often subconscious agenda. Certain categorical judgments must overrule critical acumen for most poets seeking to position themselves. I see the same thing, oddly enough, when I read a poet like Rae Armantrout and then follow it with a reading of say, Joe Wenderoth's It Is If I Speak. To borrow from evolutionary models: it could be common ancestry or it could be similar morphological adaptations. Scientists are now rethinking the (fixed hierarchical) Linnaean system of classification based on morphological similarity in favor of a model based on true evolutionary interrelationship. Cladistics: is "a method for constructing phylogenies based on shared derived characters of species, originally rigorously detailed by Willi Hennig in 1950." (Hennig did not use the term cladistics; he referred to his method as "phylogenetic systematics.") "From the time of Hennig's original formulation until the end of the 1980s cladistics remained a minority approach to classification. However in the 1990s it rapidly became the dominant method of classification in evolutionary biology." How time sorts things. Maybe we need a change like that in critical theory. The Linnaean might be on its way out.


10. How not think of reciprocal orality, the joke of soixante-neuf with those above lines from Draft 69?


11. After a few virtuoso turns inside the materiality of language, meditating upon the mechanisms she is using to "wow" you, the poet suddenly asks, "How fake is that?"


12. She is funny, sometimes, in her dark way:

"Only you alone are listening,
perhaps; and thanks.
Or maybe not, can't count on that."


13. To what degree can a poem become a self-conscious bot? Is this the final reduction?


14.

"It Is
impossible not to write.      Not to; Or to."


15. And how beautiful the following impossible appeal to the metaphysical! I think instantly of those classic lines from Stevens' "A Primitive Like An Orb."

"Ghost poem, ghost poem
poem on the other side of the poem
wraith poem, wroth poem
     poem of inadequate sentences,
of voiceless vowels of uh uh uh
stuttering
schwa-wards, grunting

     and oh
if the lyric impulse strikes,
as is its wont, a poem of unique luminosity
and loops of beautiful o."

"And loops of beautiful o" seems to be posited as the polar opposite of the engage, the poem open to the world as an ethical engagement.


16.

"Could the Poem come forth?
Or is it simply unnecessary.
flat out."


17. The poem seems to take a stand for witness at one point; the poem ceases its constant undermining of its own thoughts.

"The letter has fallen out of the book of laws."
  Acknowledge this. Face it.
  And then, and only then
  will Shadows shudder
     shape wobbling alphabet outlines
in and out of nowhere in a fettered place.
Which constitute a register of loss
   that must be claimed
and mourned
    from here to there
    from it to is
    from the to that.
From such letter bits and snags
   what are the words?
     Who will set them out?

Blau DuPlessis often reminds me of Oppen (not formalistically--she is very much her own poet) in the way she manages to find that via media and innovate formalistically, and yet engage the ethical and the contemporaneous. Neither poet ever stepped too far away from the earthly struggles which should engage any sentient being; neither stepped too far away from the idea of the poem as a "virtual" social polis. Even if the poem might be a hologram. Why should that stop one? Robin Blaser is another poet who fits that description.


18. As Janet Jackson says in one of her song's breaks: I love this part...

"Flies are little people with wings.
They're me. I rub my thready hands along large things.
I taste the germs sucked through my hollow mouth
the sights that clarify my crystal-facet eye."


19. She ends nobly, but she doesn't promise anything. That's the only ethical move since there's no endgame, or else it's all endgame.

She mocks herself like Beckett:

"A lot of words to say there are no words, just rifts.

What is "the behest of this reality"?

Possible, word by letter, letter by word,

trying to true, again to enter and

engage the saturated task.

But this poem has to exit.

This is enough to mourn.

Impossible to stand it."

    JANUARY 2005