I wasn’t sure if Rachel would be my cup of tea but I’m really glad I went to hear her speak. Rachel is a contemporary of Ron Silliman and Rae Armantrout. She’s written a lot of critical works on women writers and the modernists – Writing Beyond the Ending, The Pink Guitar and many more. (Full bibliography here)
She’s written a ‘Life Work’ an epic poem called Drafts, which has been published piecemeal across several books. She aimed for lyrical compression but has escaped the confinement of the lyric form. She said her work was a product of the internet age in its piecemeal production (I also think it is influenced by digital culture in its form). There is an American tradition of Life Works from the likes of Pound and Louis Zukofsky. She liked the modernists but wanted to ‘do modernity in a fresh way’. She sees problems with modernity, feels respectful but critical.
She spoke of her work as the folding of ideas into each other, that poetry on the page is a wide open field. “DuPlessis asks us to take seriously Olson’s call for the poetry-page as a wide-open field on which historical, theoretical, social and aesthetic problematics unfurl, twist, evolve and mutate dialectically and/or dialogically, bouncing off each other in collision or play, interlocking in agonistic intensity or affectionate rapprochement. “ - Maria Damon.
‘I write what I want to read’. Her work has also been described as an un-monumental monument. ‘Drafts’ is written like Cantos – as a practise, not an Oeuvre. In her Canto Draft 98 she is poking fun at Dante in a good natured way, the way he explains himself before and after the Cantos like a stuffy professor. In her Canto she talks to her soul like it’s her daughter, I really liked it. Her soul is like a doll, a scaled down 7 year old girl the size of a baby that you can hold in your arms. (This made me think of Avatars and Simulacrum)
She spoke of trying to create vastness, from a tiny dot a ‘.’ to something huge, like constellations; something to create the feeling of awe. She was also interested in the notion of being tiny in a social and political sense.
She uses rhyme in some places even though it is an indicator of conservatism because she says she like to use all the tools available to her.
Stéphane Mallarmé said “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” She thinks this is crazy but also kind of interesting in that it’s good to notice the small details.
Rachel talked of the whole epic as a brain trying to remember what’s going on, hence some repetition and looping back. She sees the whole poem as a grid with 19 poems in a column and 6 columns = 114 poems. The initial reason for this form was to combat the fear of a blank page. She wrote the first two pieces – ‘it’ and ‘she’, and they were in discourse with each other, she knew there would be more but wasn’t sure how many to do. At first she thought he’d do 100 like Dante (Pound also) then after she’d done 19 she saw them as a long string without a break (she described it like a long string of French knitting!) and decided to insert a column break of sorts. This was a random number but turned out to be fortuitous in that it’s a prime number. She said George Olsen does that too (see wide-open page).
She spoke of drawing coloured lines of connected and re-occurring themes and ideas through the grid to create streams or weave. I said that I thought her work lends itself to hypertext and she agreed. Her work is like a precursor to hypertext, she’s asking your brain to create and recognise the analog hyperlinks (I guess many poets do this in a way but hers seems very intentional).
Janet Murray has referenced Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" as a precursor to the hypertext novel and aesthetic. “Borges mentions how hypertext has similarities to a labyrinth in which each link brings the navigator to a set of new links, in an ever expanding maze.” Rachel said something similar to this in her talk – ‘You always have to make choices when you write and every choice is so complicated and affects each next one’
A hinge. Open, close, open, close. After things end they have to open up again.
‘A book is a hinge’ - - Rachel Blau Du Plessis
No comments:
Post a Comment