In this Book
- Drafts 1–38, Toll
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: Wesleyan University Press
- Series: Wesleyan Poetry Program
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.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- Draft 1: It
- pp. 1-10
- Draft 2: She
- pp. 11-18
- Draft 3: Of
- pp. 19-23
- Draft 4: In
- pp. 24-27
- Draft 5: Gap
- pp. 28-32
- Draft 6: Midrush
- pp. 33-39
- Draft 7: Me
- pp. 40-44
- Draft 8: The
- pp. 45-51
- Draft 9: Page
- pp. 52-56
- Draft X: Letters
- pp. 57-74
- Draft 11: Schwa
- pp. 75-80
- Draft 12: Diasporas
- pp. 81-86
- Draft 13: Haibun
- pp. 87-91
- Draft 14: Conjunctions
- pp. 92-99
- Draft 15: Little
- pp. 100-102
- Draft 16: Title
- pp. 103-107
- Draft 17: Unnamed
- pp. 108-113
- Draft 18: Traduction
- pp. 114-120
- Draft 19: Working Conditions
- pp. 121-129
- Draft 20: Incipit
- pp. 130-133
- Draft 21: Cardinals
- pp. 134-140
- Draft 22: Philadelphia Wireman
- pp. 141-144
- Draft 23: Findings
- pp. 145-157
- Draft 24: Gap
- pp. 158-161
- Draft 25: Segno
- pp. 162-165
- Draft 26: M-m-ry
- pp. 166-168
- Draft 27: Athwart
- pp. 169-173
- Draft 28: Facing Pages
- pp. 174-178
- Draft 29: Intellectual Autobiography
- pp. 179-186
- Draft XXX: Fosse
- pp. 187-192
- Draft 31: Serving Writ
- p. 193
- Draft 32: Renga
- pp. 194-218
- Draft 33: Deixis
- pp. 219-235
- Draft 34: Recto
- pp. 236-241
- Draft 35: Verso
- pp. 242-247
- Draft 36: Cenfo
- pp. 249-254
- Draft 37: Praedelle
- pp. 255-260
- Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow
- pp. 261-268