The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

A Restless Messengers Blog Symposium

On Draft 2—Megan Jewell
On Draft 6—Adeena Karasick
On Draft 15—Julia Bloch
On Draft 44—Joseph Donahue
On Draft 52—Patrick Pritchett
On Draft 87—Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
On Draft 104—Divya Victor
On Draft 114—Eric Keenaghan

The publication of The Complete Drafts of poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a major literary event. This two-volume boxed edition of DuPlessis’s serial poem, produced by Coffee House Press, standing forth boldly in orange and blue, and decorated with one of the author’s dynamic collages, is nearly a thousand pages long. The poem consists of 114 sections (plus an unnumbered “Précis” between Drafts 57 and 58), and each section bears its own title. “Draft 1: It” is dated “May 1986-January 1987”; “Draft 114: Exergue and Volta” is dated “2008-212.” The long publishing history of the poem is recounted on the verso page of each volume; it is in itself a kind of temporal portrait of a representative poet’s experience in the world of small press publishing. I mention this because Restless Messengers, almost by default, focuses on this world. And as readers of this blog know, small presses are the lifeblood of American poetry. The Complete Drafts is thus not only a triumph for its author, but a triumph for small press publishing itself.

When I first became aware that The Complete Drafts was to be published, I immediately decided that it merited a Restless Messengers blog symposium. Ordinarily, these symposiums, or special features, would consist of a set of essays about the poet and her work. But in Rachel’s case, the recent publication of Thinking With the Poem: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, edited by Andrew Mossin, complicated the matter, as many of the potential contributors I would have turned to had already had their say. I was discussing this with Liz Gray and Joe Donahue at Wrack Tavern, our occasional Zoom get-together, named for one of the gnostic watering holes which appear in another beloved long poem, Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou. Liz and Joe suggested a set of pieces devoted to individual Drafts. Such a gathering could serve as a set of sign posts or milestones for a reader about to follow the track of Drafts. And so this feature was conceived. My thanks to Liz and Joe, both of whom know something about long poems…

Some years after completing Drafts (and already well into its multi-volume successor, Traces, with Days), DuPlessis published what might be regarded as a summa of her critical work, A Long Essay on the Long Poem. Having established herself as one of the most important feminist critics of modern and postmodern poetry with volumes such as The Pink Guitar, Blue Studios, and Purple Passages, DuPlessis, drawing, naturally, on her own poetic experience as well as her deep reading in her precursors and contemporaries in the practice of the long poem, poses a simple question: “Why does someone write a long poem? Why such commitment, even devotion?” Why indeed? Serious readers of Drafts will probably want to look at A Long Essay: its determined unfolding of the “longing” of the long poem, of such poems’ desire to include “everything,” and of their resistance to but endless movement toward ending—all this makes it an important complement to DuPlessis’ own lifework.

At the end of the new edition of Drafts, DuPlessis happily reprints the Afterword which originally appeared in Surge: Drafts 96-114 (2012). “The term and concept Drafts,” she tells us, “offered a prompt to writing. The word stated that every individual poem was in some sense provisional, never quite finished. Of course given the title word “drafts,” the work was structured to continue for a good long while in order to illustrate and enact the fact that every poem is not quite it.” Keep this in mind as you read the responses in this Restless Messengers symposium.

—Norman Finkelstein