Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Thursday October 4, 8:00 pm
The People’s Co-op Books
1391 Commercial Drive
In the world as such
DNA dumplings
(with thin skin wrapped around them)
spatter
recklessly (unwittingly? uncannily?)
because of randomized events
in a politics of explosion.
How then?
Shaking with the instability
of calculations,
more in anger than in fear
one “shows one’s work.”
This is written entirely on off-cuts.
an internal translation of itself
marking shards with mackle.
It’s true the work must be redone.
This time scribbling mirror-wise,
an addition problem
with uncountable vectors.
from “Draft 111: Arte Povera”
Poet-critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry, and as a poet and essayist. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, a book of essays, was published by University of Alabama Press in 2006; in the same year, Alabama reprinted DuPlessis’s classic work The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Another recent critical book by DuPlessis is Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her books of poetry are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). A poem from this book appears in Best American Poetry 2004. Torques: Drafts 58-76 appeared from Salt Publishing in October 2007 and Pitch: Drafts 77-95 is in press with Salt Publishing.
The Kootenay School of Writing
