Torques: Drafts 58-76

Twisted, knotted, struck by events and emotions at our historical moment, these Drafts register and produce torques - exaltation and tension, torsion and force, in their symphonic and bantering surges. In this book, DuPlessis transposes Wordsworth, Mallarme, Pound and Rilke; she writes doggerel, a lexicon, dialogues, a mini-manifesto, and lyrics from a spirit voice. This book continues the ambitious long poem project that Ron Silliman has called "one of the major poetic achievements of our time." Drafts, begun in 1986, manifests thematic and emotional investments centering on loss, struggle, and hope, on the unsayable and "anguage" - the language of anguish. Two main formal and structural principles center this work, repetition and the fold. The works repeat themes and images throughout, a recontextualization of materials, a building of traces, and a repetitive repositioning of images and narrative that also suggests both the waywardness of experience and a pensive responsiveness to what happens. The works are organized on a periodicity of nineteen, what DuPlessis calls "the fold." Each new draft corresponds in some sensuous, formal, intellectual, allusive way to specific "donor" drafts. This tactic creates a widely spaced recurrence among the poems, and a chained or meshed linkage whose regularity is both predictable and suggestive, textured with malleable and porous internal relationships. The key genre animating Drafts is a strategy from Hebrew interpretive practices called midrash. Midrash is a continuous and generations-long commentary on sacred texts. Drafts as a whole project alludes to - but secularizes - this genre of serious commentary, spiritual investment, and continuous gloss.