Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis

BJF: I would like to begin with a couple fairly broad questions. In the opening essay of Blue Studios, “Reader, I Married Me: Becoming a Feminist Critic” (1993), in which you recount some of your own intellectual formation, you write:

What I found galvanic . . . were the political and cultural ideas of feminism and the idea of gender as a critical and compelling element of culture. From the earliest moment that second-wave feminism emerged . . . I established my interest in a feminism of critique. From 1968 to 1970 to today, I have felt that feminist re-vision would necessitate the multiple, forceful, and polyvocal invention of a completely new culture and the critical destabilizing, indeed the replacement of the old. (DuPlessis 2006: 31)

And in an important interview, you repeat “that out of feminism, all culture would have to be changed” (Heuving 2004: 417). This sense of the task of feminism, of how much needs to change—the encyclopedic volume of things that need to be revised, destabilized, destroyed, thrown out, how the archives need to be reindexed, the canons rewritten, the monuments torn down, the forgotten rediscovered, the voiceless given voice, the invisible made visible, the broken reassembled, the erased retraced (in short, all of it!)—it appears that the energy of your galvanic realization has continually sustained your work.¹Though obviously the work of feminist critique is ongoing, how do you reflect on the task of feminist re-vision, both in your own career and in the culture more broadly, at a time when some are calling for postcritique? And, perhaps relatedly, how do you reflect on ambition and the way it animates both feminist critique and your own work?²

RBD: When I was in graduate school, I had already missed the primary lesson—it just passed me right by. I didn't understand that you were supposed to learn what others thought about the works studied, know “the literature” on a topic, the positions, the “debates,” and be able to disgorge them, use them. I was a fairly good close reader but thought that the point was having original thoughts on your text—other people have thought thus and so, but you think differently—and that's what you talk about. That is charming, but oversimple; it took me a while to understand that the “debates” had occurred because of serious stakes in and of interpretation. At my coming-up moment, the energy had gone out of many of these positions. Further, no one had convinced me about the interest of those stakes (except quite late when I was writing my dissertation—Edward Said, in the first theory course at Columbia, and everyone was there, hungry for it). In addition, I wanted to be a poet, but it took me a while to write anything that I'd want to read. I may have felt the stakes there, first, with a connection of mentoring friendship with George Oppen, who was a serious influence. Then I had turgid and unclear abilities to write critical prose—this is true, and it took me a while to shape up—longer than now allowed. Further, I was female, the typical bookish, arty, rebellious, “smart” girl. This was a tragicomic recipe for being pushed out of “the profession.” My luck lay in stubbornness, in curiosity, in a feel for hypocrisy, and in the political fact that my slow maturity or coming-of-age was jump-started by the political explosions, liberation movements, and critiques of the 1960s–1970s—antiwar, antiracist and civil rights, and then feminist and gay. When feminist thinking arrived for me—early, within Columbia Women's Liberation in which I became quite active—I began to understand the necessity of critique. The stakes were, suddenly, in my bloodstream. They were social and personal all at once, individual and communitarian.

Hence what you have presented in the first question: what is and was feminist thought for me. First off, there are many feminisms, that is, gender positions, all intermingled with other social spaces—class, race, religious culture, sexualities, life choices and outcomes, national histories, and the struggles among all these, both socially and within a single person. Some people call this “intersectionality.” But there are so many intersections that the question is how to prioritize whichever ones are pertinent. Some feminisms are more attractive than others; some gender positions are damaging—we know this well. Any political position has singular blind spots. Any intellectual politics of critique and interpretation can be dogma. What happened is—in the classic paradigm shift (and I am indebted to Thomas Kuhn and other thinkers about the social structures of knowledge), I saw opening out a vast terrain of questions about women, and men, and gender issues (among all genders) in cultural products—literature and art are the two I mainly know—present and past. Further, all these issues (and social locations) could be seen in isolation, but they did not live in isolation, and the broader one's range of understanding (in social, historical, and aesthetic terms), the more interesting your readings became. This became my approximate field within modernism, the production, distribution/dissemination, and interpretation of novels, poems, literary careers—this for starters. So I just dug in. One thing led to another (one question to another, one position to another), communities, allies, archives, debates were found, uncovered, propelled and propelling.

Thus I agree with, and could hardly better articulate, your key sentence in the question, beginning “This sense of the task of feminism . . . ”; it is so galvanic—I'd like to begin it all over again! In the course of educating myself I learned—since there was “no” feminism, or (astonishingly) so we thought when this generation began—I could use to my advantage that funny position that I am so fond of—I had to help “make it up”; I had to “be original.” Actually, gender issues were always present—and once that invisible ink was heated up, many precursors, practitioners, priors, lots of already understood nuances, much information was available (some wasn't of course)—but was latent, lost, and buried.

There are only some phrases in your summary that I now slightly disagree with. The first (but which I was myself guilty of once) is “the voiceless given voice.” The Lady Bountiful aspect of this is wrong in many ways, as if I could “find” that (single?) voice and then “give it” to another. The position has a problematic imperial and negative class and racial feel to me now, as well it should. Of course, all that phrase might really mean is “we used our imagination about the past to rethink it,” but “‘the’ voiceless” is a somewhat thoughtless assumption that needs scrutiny. The second is—I never wanted the censoring repressions of iconoclasm; I would absolutely never say, do not teach a crucial but very sexist (racist, anti-Semitic) text—I would want to teach it, to lay it bare, to open it out and understand what the problematics were, where the tropes are revealed. This is not an exculpatory thought—the whole point would be to exercise an analytic understanding. The important texts to write about and teach are a function of questions you want to ask of them—the mini-dialectics and dialogues that go into any choice of what to teach, think over, and write about.

As for postcritique—I just shrug. You can hold any hopeful position you want about where “we” have gotten, but as soon as you walk out into the world, from the hothouse of theoretical positions, you might find yourself yet again under the regime of sexism or racism or any systemic lack of privilege, disparaged, underutilized, paid less and rewarded less than the equivalent male person, with less agency and less social power no matter what your skill set is or your noble nuance about postcritique. Anyone on whom you depend should also be considered—often it is the “other” workers who are still not noticed by the middle-class mind—the tone of my answer is still saturated in professionalism and privilege. The problems of social justice have barely begun to be addressed, recognized, and collectively faced, much less solved. So I think postcritique is a blind-spot myth, a sweet bit of wishful thinking. Critique(s) and convictions may need to be reassembled, may need a different mix of concerns, some of their terms rethought (this could not be a surprise), but this is certainly neither irrelevant nor obsolete as an analytic stance. And post-COVID, as we realize the systemic and long-standing issues that COVID-life has revealed, from vast inequality, to systemic racial injustice, to public health crises, to education on all levels undercut, to rolling gender gains backward, to the panoply of special interests that have sat on the general population like vultures—I don't think postcritique is going to work.

And ambition is desire—to do that work. To do the work that has chosen you; to do it in fair and informed ways; to make ethical and nuanced choices; to claim neither too much nor too little; and to try to pass empathetic understanding on by example.

BJF: In recent interviews, you discuss an ethics of salvage, an “ethics of debris” (Dick 2019: 106). A concern with making use of “the rags, the refuse” (Benjamin [1982] 1999: 460), with gleaning and collage, runs throughout your work, and I find your poetics of assemblage and mode of midrashic salvage to be an immensely important and resonant project for our particular moment of ongoing planetary catastrophe. How has your thinking about debris and fragments—and also perhaps the relationship between parts and wholes, the momentary and the historical—changed over the course of your career (if it has)? In light of the ongoing enormities of the twenty-first century? Do you think an ethics of salvage entails something different when writing in different modes—criticism, essays, poetry?

RBD: Noticing the unnoticed is where this begins, and thus the question of “debris” and “the discarded” or “overlooked” does have a lot to do with critical thinking. What is unseen? Why? What is considered unimportant? Why? What is marginalized and who/what draws those “margins”? How to see the unseen in its potential value, interest, and history? What kinds of eyes and stances have to be developed? What ethics?

There are two rhetorical/syntactic traditions or modes of practice that interest me a lot these days and have for a long time, and while some people think of them as incommensurate with each other or contradictory, I am trying to work between them. One is the fragment and one is the fold. In my poetry and essays I try to work with the emotions both generate. I know I “use” both but I am more comfortable currently with talking about the fragment and the Roman Jakobson essay ([1960] 1987) that discusses poesis (making) with selection and combination as root enterprises. (“Selection” creates a “fragment”; combination puts “the fragment” in a new context. This is quite schematic.) The fold is perhaps an “enfolded” entity within a processual (changing) larger entity that remains an irritant, something different, something that still needs to be accounted for to make that temporary “whole” be accountable to the fragments that it has enfolded.

I do find that thinking in terms of “the whole” these days is only a temporary, if sometimes useful, postulate, an “as if” that different people—artists, writers—enact to affirm a closure that is incomplete but, as I said, satisfying, the postulate of poise, balance, a complete feeling. But as Adorno said: “The whole is what is untrue.”³ Seriality in poetry often is an example of the open form. Redundancy in languages, in the universe, in the operation of cells seems the name of the game in social and organic matter. So I think of a moment of “holding” with aesthetic products, not a moment of “the whole.” I might make a good aesthetic network as far into the horizon as I can, but I'd be very suspicious of calling it a “whole.” I could round something off with some very nice and deft learned conventions (narrative, critical, perorational, poetic)—and that rounding gives pleasure and is a good action, but more insistence on the rectitude of ending and not on its existence as a choice of degrees of contingency is simply an exercise in judgment about a shape you've made. I have actually always been quite curious about the aesthetic and ideological concept of “ending.”

BJF: It's fascinating (and somewhat surprising) to hear that you're still trying to understand the fold! When I read Drafts and your writing about the poem's emergent structure, I found the concept to be of a piece with your sense of poetic midrash and what you call “torqueing” in “Singing Schools and ‘Mental Equity’” (2015b).⁴In that essay, you note that “everyone rewrites everyone” (65), and so I've been thinking that what you call the fold is a structure for self-reflexively enacting this unavoidable aspect of writing—rewriting—with regard to your own work.

I recently read Gilles Deleuze's book The Fold (1988), to see if there might be something there to put in conversation with your own concept. Though I feel that his thinking might present a potentially productive intertextual nexus—particularly his sense that the endlessly divided parts of matter “form little vortices in a maelstrom” and that “to unfold is to increase, to grow; whereas to fold is to diminish, to reduce” (Deleuze [1988] 1993: 5, 8–9), and that these ideas share something with your explorations of indeterminate deictic language and the yod (which I understand as a kind of generative point or germinal singularity)—it seems that you mean something rather different than Deleuze when using the term fold to talk about the larger structure(s) of Drafts, that it's something you've made up yourself, that in Drafts, the fold is a method of repetition, a way of growing rather than diminishing the work. Do you think my understanding is somewhat correct? What do you see as the relationship between the fold and the fragment? Why do you think you find the fragment more comfortable currently? And you mentioned that you see the fold as a form that is present in your essays—I'd love to hear more about this too.

RBD: This is a very generative mix of intense questions. The Deleuze question is charmingly embarrassing, since the part of Deleuze (plus Guattari) that I know is not The Fold, but in fact their fascinating and suggestive book on minor literature ([1975] 1986). Why not The Fold? Why, indeed? Because I don't “get” the fold as he explores it—everything he says about baroque art seems apt and perceptive; everything he says about Leibniz and the monad is disablingly opaque for me. I was not influenced by it for my poetry because I could not understand his thinking on the fold enough to scoop it up and “apply” it (like a poultice?) to my poetry. In fact, I don't write that way—making theory be the frame and boundary and compelling the poem to stay inside those terms. If I had understood it, I might have been able to find analytic juice in some very suggestive bits like the fold (as a manifestation) of “the Baroque [which] invents the infinite work or process. The problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it” (Deleuze [1988] 1993: 34). That's not the only way to get to all this, but the thought of aesthetic continuation, the concern with outside and inside; the sense of trying to capture something in movement, all are fascinating. But since “the Baroque” is a conglomerate that has no agency, it is difficult to know how “it” invents anything. So the questions of agency and subjectivity seem to be unanswered.

The prestige value of evoking “theory” here is minimal. I tend to evoke poetics—that is, the practices of working out the terms and procedures of any given work—and why—knowing enough that a work can get written and be pleasurable and feel necessary, but not knowing so much that it becomes desiccated. I seem to have my own theorizing practice of the fold in Drafts. That practice is anti-binarist—not two sides but a continuous fabric with enough room in it to loop over itself, capacious and incorporative—is that how I would say it? That the fold as an activity of connecting material is linked to numerical ambiguities like even/odd; to never finishing but being shapely (no telos); to an endless dialogue between closing/not closing; to proposing at least two opposite things at once, an anti-binarist “A and not-A” occurring at the same time (DuPlessis 2013: 1–19). Recently I found Robert Duncan's paradoxical phrase about ending a long poem practice: to “close and not close” (Duncan 2017: 144) is his goal. How he works that out in specific (with two enfolded serial works in his oeuvre) seems to fuse the fold and the fragment of serial structures. There's no doubt that discovering my version of “the fold” for Drafts was ratifying and inspiring: that pleating creates a porous linking among elements and it was expandable and metaphorically erotic—disparate things can touch each other by that mechanism.

BJF: Following up on your curiosity about ending: Your first critical book, Writing beyond the Ending, is largely focused on twentieth-century women prose writers who invented “strategies that sever the narrative from formerly conventional structures of fiction and consciousness about women” (DuPlessis 1985: x). Your critical work has mostly focused on poetry rather than narrative fiction since this widely cited book. In your work as a critic, was it a conscious decision to focus more exclusively on poetry? And do you think “writing beyond the ending” means something different in poetry than it does in narrative prose?

RBD: This is the backstory of what appears to be a shift from fiction to poetry as a critic—at first it will be a surface tale. My dissertation was on Williams and Pound and the long poem—this was a rather unusual choice of topic at that time (mid-1960s). I was very serious and doing serious work but very poorly served by advising; on one hand, I was not listening much and no one I ran into did any empathetic intellectual nurturing or had particular ways of challenging me to shape up (both would have been a good idea, as I look retrospectively at the uneven access of a female incipient academic to her own development). Further, modern poetry was an outlier topic particularly where I was in graduate school, not to speak of any tilt to “experimentalist” practices. So even though I spent some time after the PhD “trying” to “rewrite my dissertation into a book” (a grim, unleavened task), I could not succeed. For one, despite having an incipient desire to accomplish social readings of poetic texts, I could not figure out how to face the meanings of Pound's fascism. It was an intellectual, poetic, ethical dilemma (actually just about no one could figure it out then either) as to how that structure of feeling was formally inscribed and whether it mattered. Thus the long poem topic went flat for me after all that earnest “trying.”⁵

Suddenly, with feminist efflorescence, reading women's writing became more and more central to me (it mattered) and both the Victorian and modern novels seemed to offer coagulations of current and past social dilemmas and formal renderings of them, tropes, narrative lines, “solutions” to issues at once historical and narrative that were compelling. Hence I began reading and teaching a good number of those texts at the very start of my career. Plus, teaching in my field (modern poetry) seemed to be blocked where I was, particularly on the graduate level. So my working on narrative fiction was doubly determined, and, perhaps because I was not in those fields (modern fiction with a dabble into the Victorian), I had some “baby Marxist” senses of asking social questions of formal (aesthetic) arrangements in literature. Hence I created some interesting readings. Writing beyond the Ending was also a book that taught me how to write a book, perhaps because it wasn't the dissertation.

So to answer your surface question, modern and contemporary poetries (especially from the United States) were “always” my real field—the conscious decision I made was to stick with this array. Eventually I made several mixes of socially inflected and aesthetically nuanced readings of poetry and the poetic career. In the course of “teaching myself” about gender issues by having them fall on my head, along with the heads of my whole generation, I could also do some investigative work on underread women writers, and on all writers, along with key social contradictions.

The much more difficult part of your question is the last sentence. I will say that Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry tries to accomplish the linkage of social debates and poetic forms in shorter poems concerning three propulsive modernist entitlements—to use their contemporaneous names: New Woman, New Negro [Black], New Jew—by the particular poetic mechanism of reading distinctive details of text, almost anomalies, choices of poetic language in which might be found the condensed contradictions, debates, and dilemmas in social ideologies presented in the poems. Poetic close reading met a version of cultural studies. Because contextual readings are often parodically extractive, my key methodological goal in that book was wanting to find and interpret these moments of socio-aesthetic crystallizations not “just in poetry but as poetry” (DuPlessis 2001b: 11).

One question I am trying now to answer has to do with forms of the modern long poem and its social evocations. The question of “ending” as it's presented in these poems has a lot to say even when most of the poems I am attempting to discuss are not narrative and have ambiguous endings. In my first book, the word ending clearly means assumptions, ideologies around female figures, and the trajectory of narrative. I was saying writing “beyond” certain gender assumptions by identifying new depictions or “new combinations” for female characters, neither marriage nor death (Woolf 1937: 296; DuPlessis 1985: 162–77). One has to postulate what the normative ending is—a generalization—in order to discover what stance got “beyond” that normative ending. The phrase “writing beyond the ending” is evocative still. But poetry does not work so clearly by narrative endings but by constructing sequences. Much harder to discover where ideology is (the places it emerges or is visible) in sequencing or in the shape of a long poetic text. It is probably in its own poetics. It's an interesting question anyway where, how, and why ideologies play in poetry.

BJF: The recent essay you sent me, “Statement on Poetics” (2019), I find to be a powerful argument for understanding “poesis as a practice (the making of things)” that exists in a dialectical “feedback loop with its explicit or implicit theorizing” (DuPlessis 2019: 15). I know you are currently writing a book on the long poem. Returning to “Reader, I Married Me,” there you note how “my poetry propelled my criticism, criticism propelled my poetry, and essays were originally born in a spurt between them” (DuPlessis 2006: 30). How have you experienced or enacted the feedback loop between your critical writing on the long poem and your recent work in poetry and collage? How have you experienced the relationship between these modes—criticism, poetry, essays, collage—more generally in your career?

RBD: In the heat of various moments over the decades of doing my work I was sure that one thing sparked another—one insight in one medium led to another in a particular time frame of writing. This might have simply been an identification of energy and commitment. In my close study of Woolf that was part of Writing beyond the Ending, I found very evocative an image in a discussion of pre-oedipal yearning, just a footnote (DuPlessis 1985: 223n34). This emerged as a whole motif in an essay in Pink Guitar on the mix of oedipality and pre-oedipality (a topic then much discussed) in theories of both gender learning and language learning—and this in turn gave rise to the essay “Language Acquisition” (1985) that mingled Kristeva on the chora (Kristeva [1969, 1977] 1980: 133–40; also DuPlessis 1986: 85–86), my daughter's early language and babble, H.D.’s very overt matrisexuality, and Beverly Dahlen's A Reading (1980–). Given that the (strange) six months teaching in the Netherlands where I wrote this just preceded the writing of the first poems of Drafts—there is a cluster of power in that whole conjuncture. This kind of thing happened a certain amount when all three modes (criticism, essays, poetry) all conflagrated at once. This is now difficult to identify retrospectively.

In The Pink Guitar, I found the emotional and analytic conviction to say a few bold (sometimes overgeneralized) things about male modernists. These convictions were research based up to a point—for example, finding (it was hardly hidden) T. S. Eliot's very late memory of what seems pretty clear: the copying/rendering of the working-class female voice of his housekeeper directly into “The Waste Land” (1922) (seen in the manuscript publication) without Ellen Kellond having been identified in the original notes to that poem (DuPlessis 1990a: 49–52). Or decoding what William Carlos Williams meant when he said to a woman interviewer and Flossie Williams about an enthusiastic and nubile audience at a women's college where he had given a reading: “I could have raped them all!” (Williams [1958] 1978: 95; DuPlessis 1990a: 65). Or what it meant when the New Freewoman shifted to The Egoist (I overstated here, in fact—both her male board of editors and Dora Marsden were involved; they did not hijack her [DuPlessis 1990a: 44–46, 2016a]). I was trying to identify meanings of the trace of the female writer in modernism and the shape of art and practices when gender issues enter. I tried also to do some of this work with ideologies of race and religious culture, always seeking to treat all parties to a dialogue or an exchange, and what the impact was on both.

The sudden impact of my seeing those (then quite underrecognized) features and some newly articulate ability to interpret them gave my critical work some of its energy—seeing the choice detail and being able to generalize into an interpretation. The essays depended on a challenge-laden, noncautious voice, not a blaming voice but a porous, curious voice. What were choices to make, what were solutions, what were blocked paths, why, and how to name them? How to connect with the agency of all parties in an exchange by identifying with all of them (Keats's chameleon sensibility) and rendering the ethics, blind spots, and desires in texts and assumptions? I had a drive to make a shape (form) in time/space in an artwork and, in my criticism, to try to surmise from the work and debates of prior writers why choices led to what we now read on the page. Trying to compare depictions and what happened socially, so you sometimes got representations that could not keep up with what society allowed. Trying—without being stupid or tendentious about it or generalizing too acutely from one case—to see what the stakes of gender were in any cultural matter. My critical stance involved getting some “new” facts in play, then working through a mode of empathy that encouraged an analytic stance. I wanted to protect no one from what they said, but rather try to understand what was invested in their saying it. (Examples here would be Woolf in an anti-Semitic riff when faced with Stein [Woolf 1978: 269–70] and Stevens with a blind-spot nonchalance about race [DuPlessis 2001b].) I do not do name-calling criticism but want nuanced readings of what mechanisms are chosen and why. I am interested in how specific opinions play out and are expressed inside artworks and relationships (like letters, diaries, manifestos) and for what reasons. Such a discussion depends on close readings of context, ideologies, and cultural debates as well as of texts.

BJF: You've mentioned to me that you're intuitively finding the overall structure of your post-Drafts poetry projects (including Traces, with Days) as you write, discovering their structure heuristically. So, I guess I'm interested in details about the big picture, the “whole”: What do you see as the larger organizing structure(s) of these projects? And how do they (dialogically) intersect or go together? And if you're still discovering this structure, what has that process been like (and where does it feel like it's going)?

RBD: I see the Drafts project and everything before 2012 as one project and whatever I come up with now as another project. They are related because I've done them, and I consider them either in canto lengths (in some cases chapbook lengths! like “Draft 87: Trace Elements” [2009]) for Drafts, or in “book length,” for each book-unit of Traces, with Days being—as I'd say now—a book of assemblages of books. In a sense, once any serious bunch of poems and texts gets large, becoming a life's work, it's all oeuvre, but I have no need now to declare a super-whole, an overarching megapoem (to use your terms [Fest 2017]) or total poem out of what I have done.

It seems that any such super-whole is the zone of a more vatic and assured poet, one who claimed that super-whole status early and organized himself/herself to it (someone like Duncan, among the people I know or knew). I am somewhat too self-suspicious and skeptical for that, but that skeptical stance (dubious of moves to make, not taking adequate risks, or being self-suspicious) is also a negative side of my femaleness. However, I knew men who were not vatic or claiming extra space (like Oppen). I think you have to be skeptical enough to be able to judge your own work and know when you are faking. You also have to recognize urgency, necessity, desire to follow through even when you don't know exactly what you are doing and how it will turn out.

The full sense of Traces, with Days has not yet come clear. The “with” in the title says to me that these poem-statements (the Traces)—often now about time, political tragedy, the oddness of life along with the oddness of death, and the sense of the vastness of the cosmos in which we abide without understanding much—are always necessarily found in an intersecting context that's much smaller and in some sense pettier than traces—just a day. With a small emotion, something mattering, but not necessarily “adding up” to anything—like a still life trying to be a sketch and not the finished painting. One knows them only as delivering these odd little contexts of glimpses, notations, evanescent insights and feelings. You can't have the big thought (that some of these poems represent) without the little-nothing bit. That bit is sometimes not even necessarily developed. They are like “haiku,” inferential, suggestive, notational—what you have is “enough” (that's like some of Around the Day in 80 Worlds [2018a]). Or they are like a matting of newspaper clippings, all sludgy with everything happening—no clean pure “poetic” thing (thank goodness!). They are like particles or waves—the “same thing”—but coming through at any given moment in two different physical forms. They get “spoken” in slightly different rhetorics—shorter even casual poems—“doesn't look like a poem”—that is one form. And the other is something constructed more like a poem. It does begin to seem as if the books are paired by those twin words traces/days. Each pair of books takes on a slightly different coloration.

The way I began recently to visualize them was very exciting, like one mode was across a barely existing line and the other mode was on the other side of that line—but hardly. In fact, Traces and Days intertwined. So visually—what intertwines around or on or connected by a line? Two snakes having sex! The caduceus is the glyph or icon of this. But just two intertwined poems of equal import—so the two poems are like that. Neither is the gloss of the other. They are interdependent. They are doing the “same thing”—intertwining to create the whole (temporary, contingent to now) statement. But the logical way of working from that thought of interdependence would be to signal (to the reader) points where the two modes touch (like by a theme waving at you or an image repeating).

BJF: In an interview with Kristin Grogan (2015), you mention that Drafts, the interstitial works—“Churning the Ocean of Milk” (2014a), Graphic Novella (2015a), Interstices (2014b), Life in Handkerchiefs, Numbers (2018b), Poesis (2016b)—and Traces, with Days have become “a triptych of works.” In a contemporaneous essay, you ask, “What does it mean to produce a ‘second’ or nested serial poem within the gigantic piece of seriality that both Duncan and Blaser claim is the ‘total book’ of their whole poetic oeuvre?” (2015c: 4). Are Tabula Rosa (1987) (as portal), Drafts, the interstitial poems, and Traces, with Days all part of a single, massive work, “a serial form and an oeuvre considered as ‘one book’” (2015c: 4), maybe even approaching a Book (in the Mallarméan sense)?⁶If not, how do you think about the relationships between these three larger works?

RBD: It's really fascinating that you ask this. I am not sure I would offer that “triptych” remark now. I try to think of how my works are arranged in relation to themselves and my answers are provisional, passages concerning how to visualize the forms (structures) I build.

It's true that I am a big user of serial forms. However, I do not want imperially to make everything I do part of one thing. I want oddities, little contradictions, fissures, openings that don't fit or fully open. If you have too solid a total paradigm, there are bound to be elements that make such a big system crack. It is an unreasonable and not even pleasurable design to have all as a solid total. Even crystals have flaws inside in the way they've formed, their quirks. So that has never been my goal, that “mega” thing. And the Book is an “as if”—as if you could get everything in it. No one can agree on that “everything”—it is a user-friendly chimera for a long-form writer to claim, but if they try it!—they will probably discover a too monothetic structure of feeling doesn't hold—time and change get in the way, luckily. It is a structure that cannot be successfully built—and more—there is little reason to try, since it is a bit unhuman or aggrandizing. It leaves no room—it is not porous enough for me. That's why serial forms appeal to me—they are open as they go along and open-ended, generally. On the other hand, I like the dream of The Book. I have just spent quality time on a semicritical book called A Long Essay on the Long Poem, and a number of the patterns of thinking of long-poem makers are discussed there, some applying to my work—which I do not discuss in this manuscript.

I think I was signaling to Kristin Grogan that the work I was trying to do was going in some way to parallel Drafts. I am not sure this can be true now; I don't know whether I might be accorded that long a time for Traces, with Days. However, the two projects have a similar function for me—that is, working out how to invent a form for another long poem (in this case one that contains [at least] two modes of poem in one project). Projecting a form that satisfies the emotional, poetic, and socio-cosmic needs of this moment is hard enough without claiming that its mechanisms will necessarily “join” Drafts. Triptych (the word I used in this interview) seems to function for myself privately, used to signal that collage poems are a real zone for me, a place, a task, a calling to make these pages.⁷

I've just (2020) spent some quality time writing a chapter about the dream of The Book in the Mallarméan sense—what he said in his essay, what he might have meant by it, how he treated this Book dangling out there, his trying to write Le Livre, and how that worked out (hmm), this interesting and tempting chimera of Everything in a civic/secular assemblage that is a key motivator for the modern long poem. And how I think Pound was the actual carrier into Anglo-American modernism (via Symons) of this desire to make a total Book, how he interpreted it as his modern long poem, and how that worked out for him, starting with the “sacred book of the arts” and rolling on through the incomplete secularization of that idea in The Cantos (1925–70) and what happened to that work (a damaging sacred politics; patent pending!).⁸ I think it is a real topic in literary history. Is it a solution to “my” literary history as you want me to tell it here? Yes and no are my definitive answers.

BJF: The citational notes to each volume of Drafts are quite extensive (I count forty-one pages printed in a small font across five volumes). Though you still have pages of notes at the back of your recent books, they are fewer in number. Does this indicate a different approach to citation? To the literary archive and your poetry's relationship to it and contemporary events? Or do the shorter notes simply highlight how Drafts is a different project than the newer work?

RBD: My notes are like the “back end” or the result of some features of my poetics. First, given that I was writing a long poem in Drafts, I was aware (when I began in 1986) of the citation strategies of at least Eliot in “The Waste Land,” Pound, Williams, and Moore, to which one might add Zukofsky and Olson, along with Duncan and Melvin Tolson. This all has now been the topic of some scholarly comment, but on the surface, one observes that some poets explicitly annotate, most don't. Of those modernists who do use notes (Eliot and Moore), they have different sources and rhetorics, therefore different politics are at stake. (Typically for reading a Black writer, I found Tolson and his notes later, so I won't comment on him here.)

Eliot's citational strategies involve (his claim . . . ) a choice of what to use to “fill out” a putative book—either with almost luridly self-revealing shorter poems or with professorial, half-concealing high cultural notes that don't “let in” vulnerability, and certainly do not let in what emerges in one quite late memory of the (apparently verbatim) narration (Lil's) made by his housekeeper, Ellen Kellond, and then further with only semi-trackable uses of Vivienne's voice, not to speak of any music-hall allusions in his work (DuPlessis 1990a: 49–52; 2012: 44–58). Appropriation is not a problem to me (it's the name of the game)—the problem is the political event of semi-forgetting more demotic and female voices. The result of Eliot's adding another speaking subjectivity to the already teeming “Waste Land” gives even more dimensions to that work. Moore's footnotes (now well documented also) are quirky and rangy. They draw on high cultural sources, but there is also a magpie-like plurality, an open view of what culture is and who is creating it—not just the “priests” but all cultural producers. So: leaflets, brochures, newspaper clippings, reports, odd turns of speech, citations of letters, sermons, and so on, all figure and are noted, manifesting a collagist ethos from, inter alia, her early-career scrapbook keeping. She claims a nonauthoritarian authority and a constructivist intelligence by the use of these; Eliot has produced an authoritative, distancing sound in the notes, but subjectivities often dissolve into the citations in the poem. (In all cases of notes in poems, they are both paratext and text, part of the writing; interpretation is left to the reader.)

These two enriching models of authorship and indebtedness were on my mind. The ethical issue around acknowledging citation was also on my mind. So explicit citation was definitely something I consciously chose as I began publishing Drafts, even though (for a female author) the tactic might make you look prissy, “academic” (ha, I already was), and nonpoetic. It was an oppositional move inside an oppositional or questioning poem. (Of course, one loses some citations, but I try not to, including in recent work incorporating newspapers, the names of reporters/writers. This, in Days and Works [2017].) Now more people use at least some indicated citation, which also acknowledges the investigative nature and cultural breadth as well as some documentary attitudes of a lot of the contemporary poetry that sees itself in a broader zone of “writing,” not the more constrained zone of poetry or even “the” poetic.

BJF: As historian Ann M. Blair stresses in her book Too Much to Know (2010), the feeling of information overload and its relative novelty are not experiences limited to the digital age.⁹But I do get the sense in Drafts, as it develops, and certainly in your post-Drafts work, of a particularly digital sense of overwhelmedness, an experience of what I have sometimes called hyperarchivalism—just totally overloaded, awash, drowning in information, text, data, images, all endlessly accumulating with little apparent goal. How much do you think digital technology has inflected your poetics?

RBD: Well, I am glad to have a name for my perpetual sense of overload! But not to disappoint the digital age, I have been talking of plethora from the very beginning of my work on long poems and have always felt this as a set of vectors in which I live. I think it is a condition of literate life, or perhaps just life, to feel overwhelmed by something—let's say knowledge—its endlessness, or the universe—its mysteries, or daily life—its habit and strangeness, or the news—its repetitious miseries. These can all occur predigitally, as I see Ann M. Blair indeed says; I am congenitally suspicious of the thought that postulates our “Now” is particularly beset and represents a particularly acute Break or a Turn. We underestimate the complexities of the past—but there is the question of speed for us. Plethora does seem to accelerate with modernity. As Oppen says in Of Being Numerous, “We are pressed, pressed on each other, / We will be told at once / Of anything that happens” (Oppen [1968] 2008: 165); the tone is wary. I think digital technology has made the individual more vulnerable to supersaturation, spectacle without ethics, and feelings of powerlessness sugared by entertainment. It's also true that online publications have broadened cultural access.

BJF: I find your recent book Late Work to be an absolutely remarkable collection. Its title, which I feel like you indicated in a recent reading is at least somewhat ironic (DuPlessis 2020b: 31:23), also reminds me of Edward W. Said and Theodor Adorno's discussions of “late style,” particularly Said's gloss of Adorno's last few lines from “Late Style in Beethoven”: “[Beethoven] does not bring about . . . the harmonious synthesis [of the objective and subjective]. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art late works are the catastrophes” (Adorno [1937] 2002: 568).¹⁰Said comments: “Beethoven's late works remain unreconciled, uncoopted by a higher synthesis: they do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and unsynthesized fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. Beethoven's late compositions are in fact about ‘lost totality’ and are therefore catastrophic” (Said 2007: 12–13).¹¹This sense of being “uncoopted by a higher synthesis” seems important for your own thinking about ending from Drafts onward and resonates with some of the other things you have said to me about your resistance to completion and totality. I wonder if you might speak about this most recent book and its title a bit.

RBD: The poetics of “late style” as Said articulates it, “unreconciled” and of “constitutive” fragmentariness, and of words “neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else” is, as a whole, quite appealing as an ideal to me, although the latter phrase, objectivist in propulsion, is probably more difficult to achieve in words and in visual texts than in music. Part of the interest of words (and visual materials) is facing both meaning and the traces and layers of prior historical meanings and usages. If one were to play a note, it is (a “pure” B) just itself (yet already in a scheme—not “microtonal” or melismatic for instance), but as soon as there is a melody or chord or orchestration, one can hear prior conventions attached to key signatures, the past of that cluster of sounds, where it has been, how it has been used, and perhaps even by whom. This richness of the medium is even thicker when one deals with words. Although his analogy is music, still Said always half convinces me by his own general aura of skepticism and resistance.

However, I did wonder why (in this observation) a “lost totality” is “therefore catastrophic.” This led me to the original texts (with your help), and I realized that in the context of Said's interpretation of Adorno, “catastrophic” does not get used as we might, right now, as a great and sudden calamity, a disaster. Of course, this is the dictionary meaning—and we hear it with apocalyptic force in these days of COVID-19 and the Trump regime (said in August 2020). It's plausible that Adorno was going to the etymology: a turning over or overturning—kata—down and strephein—to turn. A shake-up, a drastic change. It is hard to unhear “disaster”—more than the trace of that meaning enters, but perhaps Adorno and Said were themselves adjusting that meaning to something unable to be put together and synthesized, something it is precisely worth leaving in shards, fragments, and ruin—though this last, too, is a weighted word. “A lost totality” is definitionally “catastrophic” might be what is implied, yet with a frisson from the term catastrophic in the normal usage; Adorno is getting a “twofer.” The unassimilable and unreconciled (Said 2007: 14) is pertinent in its negativity (that is, a critique of wholeness, melding, unity).

Regarding Late Work: my title falls in the gap between a claim of “late style” (which can happen at any life moment) and “late work,” corresponding in Adorno to the ending works in Beethoven's career, works characterized by late style. Late style is an amalgam of the fragmented mode that we were just talking of and little reminders of conventional “stuff” that is dropped around, but somehow not developed to fulfillment. These things are like textual reminders that some conventions don't quite work anymore.

I am using the term to title one work in a long poem occurring as we speak built of book-length sections, fragments (each book is one fragment), temporally saturated and attempting poems as abrupt and inexplicable, pretty sure that synthesis is not possible, but recognition and confrontation is a way. I use both fragments (in the sense that Adorno speaks of) and an abrupt unfinished feeling that often is expressed at the ending of a poem, but also in jumpy development. The whole ongoing long poem Traces, with Days is not going to be resolved and it will undoubtedly be “instances of” rather than a melded vision. In many ways the collage-poem book Graphic Novella is the portal poem to this whole situation. Most of the poems so far, including those in Late Work, are not built in our period style of fragments—but they are baffling, abrupt, and often confrontational in their noticing of disorder and disordered feeling, an exilic resistance. One poem, for example, ends “smatter smatter smatter” (DuPlessis 2020d: 87).

The title of this book is also a recognition that this (lateness) is some sort of a life stage for all and leads to particular questions for an artist. One feels urgency, but also a reluctance to rush, a desire to “get it all said and done” and then a sense of slowing down, even against one's will. There might be bitterness or euphoria (that last until one reads the news), a desire to be admired, or simply not caring, consolidation of familiar kinds of work or further exploration. And then there are pulls between those extremes. These paradoxical opposites might certainly have occurred under the same “rubric” as before—that is, Drafts; I chose to begin something anew because it felt unstrategic and ahistorical to have Drafts go on forever.

One might say this choice to “fold up” Drafts and then continue differently was a guess, a risk. I truly don't yet know the full outcome. It never occurred to me that I was not going to continue writing in some versions of serial modes toward more work—the question was when and then perhaps how. My general idea was a slightly different long poem with less “oneness” and more severalness/plurality.

I have given some thought how to achieve the poised but non-closural, the thing that gives satisfaction as a shape or form, but that retains a porous quality. I know that the doubled poem modes of Traces, with Days feel like my version of Robert Duncan's “close and not close.” This is a heuristic desire leading to structures and poetics, and it is a fascinating claim that I cannot yet insist on. The pattern was to be alternating but mutually involved works with a ground note of Traces (in all definitions) via a time frame—I chose a very normal one, days. Traces are both invisible or marking the barely visible passage of something already happened or somewhat indexical—the trace of a heartbeat and vital signs on machines. With a trace, the event that caused it is always gone by the time it is marked, or it's in the future (a marked-out path to follow in the future). One is always Between with a trace, hardly ever There. A sense of the simple quotidian helps to mark the trace itself in its particular or palpable “thereness.” That's one way to think about the two terms in concert.

A poem from Drafts, “Draft 87: Trace Elements,” lay in wait and was one ground from which this after-Drafts project emerged. “Trace Elements,” a long serial meditation on the idea and actuality of “trace,” was delivered as a plenary paper at a conference at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in 2008, and it took fifty minutes to read, a full-scale conference presentation. Triumphantly exhausting—I still remember it. Another way to think of the intertwining is days commenting on traces, traces on days, and what is happening now, in a book I am currently completing called Poetic Realism, an undecidability whether one is “in” one or another because both are palpable.

With Traces I was as if reworking the marks and marking characteristic of (or motivic in) Drafts but more faded (as traces, not as “incised” or written over and over) along with quicker notational and quotidian moments—quirky, comic, unforgiving observations that simply are as such, almost implacable, or perhaps ironic, painful, and odd at once. The presumption was that the two modes (traces and days) constantly interact. One is a more developed insight, the other an oddity, insights in motion. Is there a main text and an ancillary text?—neither and not—they are interdependent with a sense of mutuality and alternation.

BJF: The work of Walter Benjamin appears to be a significant touchstone in recent work—in “Statement on Poetics,” in “Angelus Novus” (2019) from Late Work, elsewhere. What do you think it means to return to Benjamin, and particularly “On the Concept of History” ([1950] 2006), at this moment?

RBD: I also play with the term Jetztzeit in the poem “ETZ/TZE” (2020c) in Poetic Realism. I feel very congruent with both Benjamin and Adorno, but I will say this here in a low-key way—I've not done enough studying of either but enter certain texts as intensely as I can. The way you are wording this question asks me for a big pronouncement about Benjamin. A materialist, historically infused sense of a horizon of hope (loosely a secular “messianism” without any figure called “the” Messiah) is what attracts me. I don't like to speak for others—your “at this moment.” Just for myself and what I see.

How have I entered the texts of the two authors that interest me? Sometimes in critical essays, but mainly in poetry—by tracking the reasoning and the emotions that those thinkers have seemed to be provoked by and illuminating the feelings and contradictions that they provoke in me. That is, by poetic debate and curiosity, most notably in serial poems: in “Draft 52: Midrash,” from Drafts 39–57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (2004), written March–April 2002, on Adorno's pronouncement on poetry after Shoah ([1951] 1983: 34), and in “Angelus Novus” in Late Work (written 2013–18). These are essay-poems or analytic odes—but I don't care really what they are called; both are ways of thinking through specific, talismanic texts. I am neither a philosopher nor a theorist. I am a poet.

BJF: I find it somewhat surprising to hear that you don't consider yourself a theorist. I've been rereading the incredible introduction to Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry (2001b: 1–28), in which you discuss your method of “social philology.”¹²I have definitely been feeling that your writing there is what I would call theory, but perhaps you are distinguishing between your work as a poet and your work as a critic? If so (or not), I am still intrigued to wonder where a line exists, if it does, between these different genres and modes of writing for you, and what are the stakes of making this distinction: “I am neither a philosopher nor a theorist. I am a poet”?

RBD: The word theory to me implies a system of sometimes very useful thinking trying to make generalizations or logical axioms about basic situations. Insofar as theory is an analytic and critical stance, a set of hypotheticals or suppositions that is flexible and active (being-thought), it is something I admire and try to emulate. A coherent philosophic system is a wonder to behold, a choreography of connections. However—often there are no dancers: the materiality of human conditions is supposed to be ignored in favor of principles for all times, places, and situations. Theory has referred in the near past to an all-encompassing thought system which takes in ideology, method, assumptions, preferred vocabulary, and it is often going for the gold ring of timeless universality and human neutrality. None of these is tenable, reasonable, or defensible except as a self-conscious, agreed-upon performance. I am unwilling to pretend that I am not embodied, living at a real time and place, and female enough with various benefits, debits, and social zones—this is the site I think from. I do not assume my subject position is the only one possible as “theory” asks me to with its universal subject, oppositional binaries, and absolutes. The false universalism of “theory” is implausible: the etymology gives it away: Greek theoros, meaning spectator or an observer, suggests untainted noninvolvement, static and iconic in its axioms. One is supposed to lose self-interest and a heat-generating involvement when inside one of its abstract or speculative systems. However, in the real, even claims of magisterial noninvolvement are politicized positions and are not untainted by prejudice and power. The more interesting theorists are also “practitioners”—like Darwin and Freud. This gives some situated mobility.

I prefer to sum up what I do as “theorizing practices”: linked to nonnormative subjectivities, felt conditions, observed and material realities—and investments that meant something. The moment in the 1970s when that abstraction “theory” began to interest me was when it could be interpreted as theorizing practices. For me, that had to do with thinking through basic ideas about the meanings and uses of art and the meanings and uses of gender. This is not an anti-theory position; it makes theory an act (practices) described by a gerund—theorizing—not by a noun, theory. One aspect of the resurgence of feminist and social-justice speculation was the number of organic intellectuals who became invested in thinking within and unsettling the boundaries of “given” philosophic and social thought. These questions postulated situated subjects—thinking people in actual situations of dilemma, choice, or judgment. Theorizing practices maintain resistance to master codes, suspicion of inflexible universals, understanding the position of a “between”—between binarist formulations, even a willingness to see that language is the way thought happens and is not a neutral information system without affect, rhetorics, or unexpected forms (riddles, fables, essays). The recognition that theory or thought is not a neutral disinterested arena of pure speculation but was deeply saturated with social and cultural assumptions and with serious affects and emotions (including grief, outrage, bitterness) sharpens certain analyses because the observations it propels are invested and have stakes (as about texts and the representations in them), making discussions and debates more interesting, not less. But that's why I am not a “theorist” or philosopher, but I practice certain ongoing acts of analysis, judgment, and poetics as “theorizing practices.”

BJF: I note that you have been quite prolific during the past decade, publishing numerous collections, essays, Purple Passages, collage works, interviews, et cetera. What, if anything, has felt distinct about the post-Drafts portion of your career? Do you feel as if anything has changed with regard to your relationship to poetry and poetics more broadly, to your work as a critic, or with regard to your sense of your reception and readership?

RBD: I retired—that's what changed. Not to make a joke about it—but I retired from my job in 2011, from one journal on which I was among the small and hard-working editorial collective (Journal of Modern Literature), and from the series that I had been asked to start by Palgrave (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics), accruing quite a number of books over the circa-ten-year run in which I was “chief.” (It is currently [2020] edited by David Herd at Kent—so the anglophone [mainly] and deliberately non-nation-oriented engagement continues.¹³) I did love teaching; I have a real commitment to public education; at Temple University I could be useful as a critic, scholar, and a practicing poet. I also decided after retiring, and within reason, to try to commit more fully to certain ongoing projects. There's always the gap that most people know me as a critic first, so the poetry comes as a “surprise,” but to me I am and always was a poet first—no surprise to me. I hardly want to quarrel with whatever readership I have about “what I represent to them”! Also, I recognize that I am (variously) a bit belated to my generation (I was not in a useful poetic formation in my twenties and early thirties). Thus, for example, my Selected Poems is dated 1980–2020 (CHAX is publishing it). And a Collected Drafts (it looks like) will follow, from another press in 2022 or so. The question of reputation in the Big World or on some mystical Big Board on which there are stock quotes linked to poets—I naively and occasionally look out of the corner of my eye (who can resist?), but the whole thing is an opaque mystery, and I just try to do my work in the time I have to do it.

BJF: One final (big) question. We find ourselves communicating during what for me and so many others is an unprecedented confluence of social distance, intense domesticity, immiseration, and dangerous labor conditions. During the spring and (now almost concluded) summer of 2020, my immediate family was almost always at home, away from friends, family, colleagues, and total strangers—all, I feel in my more optimistic moments, as a mode of solidarity. This fall, at least as of this writing, my college is planning on being face-to-face, which means I will be back in the classroom with young people in a little over a week. While the global pandemic has raged, I've so far been privileged enough to try to continue carrying on my work with some semblance of normalcy. I've somehow still found (or perhaps more accurately: felt the pressure to find) a bit of time to read, write, research, do committee work, attend endless Zoom meetings, design “concurrent” (i.e., online and face-to-face) fall syllabi; I compose my annual review for part of the day and then care for my child, whose day care was closed for five months, the other half. At the same time, an uprising over police brutality and the ongoing history of US racism continues apace. And there is an election looming and daily instances of overt authoritarianism and extreme weather events from climate change and an unemployment crisis and a global economic depression just getting started. . . . How are you experiencing this moment? How, if at all, has it intersected with or influenced your own work as a poet-critic? And the hardest question that I nonetheless feel obligated to ask, especially given your exploration of poetry as a mode of historical witness: What role do you think poetry might play in a time of global pandemic?

RBD: How am I experiencing this moment—as lonely, untoward, challenging, playing right into manic-depressive glissades; as the time for assessment of one's work without allowing a person to have the heart for doing that. In short as reality. And not to only “personalize” it—as a very dangerous political, social, and ecological reality. It is a reality of not having active children at home, of not having to carry out a job or profession—a luxury to be retired. To continue to answer: The political crisis certainly and even a little of the COVID crisis have both gone into my recent work, although I tend not to write poems “about” one thing, with one sole expressive end in mind. My newest book (2021, from BlazeVOX) is called Poetic Realism. That means something in terms of a stark look at historical events mediated by an individual voice and her language materials. As for the “right now” (speaking explicitly of the period March 13, 2020, up to the date at which I am completing this, August 29, 2020), I experience at least one full hour or more of political dread per day, based on fascist tendencies and some outright fascist acts, cascading with a deliberate wash-over-you and dull your abilities to respond; the intensities of the real and long-gathering crises around social, racial, and economic justice; the endless lying and gaslighting of America, the violation of ethics, norms, and laws by Trump, his appointees, and enablers in Congress; and the intent continuously to deny your actual agency and citizenly powers (however curtailed by the pandemic). My dread is that we will almost never “get out” of this world if Trump wins the 2020 election for president. My dread is it will probably take a good ten years to reestablish and renovate norms and laws under social justice-oriented auspices if Biden wins—and then climate change is in fact occurring. These are great pessimistic statements. What role does any professional and in fact any person at all have to hold to? To embody one's positive values; to witness and remember (as you say); to use language with care and empathetic judgment; to stand for ethical and helpful principles of speech and action; to not be afraid, nor afraid of certain actions.