The book withdraws into itself
Rachel Blau Duplessis' drafts
pp. 193-223
in: , Phenomenology and the late twentieth-century american long poem, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstract
This chapter conducts a reading of the overall form and structure of Rachel Blau DuPlessis' long poem project Drafts. First started in 1986, it is a work of dazzling formal variety which displays not only direct engagement with phenomenological texts but also with previous American long poems, and as such constitutes not only a long poem in its own right but a commentary on the procedures and processes involved in their composition. Carbery reads the poem in terms of the various "levels' of the text's structure; firstly, by reading the "drafting' process phenomenologically; secondly, by exploring DuPlessis's engagement with the deconstructive phenomenology of Jacques Derrida; and thirdly, by positioning DuPlessis herself as a major voice in the wider criticism of modernist and contemporary long poems.