Description
This book is one long poem in many sections. It is the masterwork of this avante garde poet, who has been working on this composition for a decade.
In Drafts 1-38, Toll, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has built a work which mimics memory and its losses, and which plays with the textures of memory, including its unexpectedness, its flashes and disappearances. Her recurrent motifs and materials include home, homelessness and exile; death and the memory of the dead; political grief and passion; silence, speech, the sayable and the ineffable. Drafts 1-38, Toll functions as a long poem comprised of 38 pieces, or drafts. These poems are conceived as autonomous canto-like sections that work on two procedural principles. One is the random repetition of lines or phrases across poems, a self-questioning, processual, and reconceptualizing strategy that honors the term drafts. A second procedural principle is the fold. This is the reconsideration of a donor draft and the deployment of some aspect in the donor draft in a related draft. The periodicity of this reconsideration is the number 19; hence drafts 1-19 make up the original layer, while drafts 20-38 constitute the first fold on top of this material.
Author: Rachel Blau Duplessis
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 11/29/2001
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 8.46h x 5.50w x 0.86d
ISBN13: 9780819564856
ISBN10: 0819564850
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General
In Drafts 1-38, Toll, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has built a work which mimics memory and its losses, and which plays with the textures of memory, including its unexpectedness, its flashes and disappearances. Her recurrent motifs and materials include home, homelessness and exile; death and the memory of the dead; political grief and passion; silence, speech, the sayable and the ineffable. Drafts 1-38, Toll functions as a long poem comprised of 38 pieces, or drafts. These poems are conceived as autonomous canto-like sections that work on two procedural principles. One is the random repetition of lines or phrases across poems, a self-questioning, processual, and reconceptualizing strategy that honors the term drafts. A second procedural principle is the fold. This is the reconsideration of a donor draft and the deployment of some aspect in the donor draft in a related draft. The periodicity of this reconsideration is the number 19; hence drafts 1-19 make up the original layer, while drafts 20-38 constitute the first fold on top of this material.
Author: Rachel Blau Duplessis
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 11/29/2001
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 8.46h x 5.50w x 0.86d
ISBN13: 9780819564856
ISBN10: 0819564850
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General
About the Author
RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS is Professor of English at Temple University and author of six books of poetry and four books of criticism including Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908 - 1934 (2001) and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990).