Drafts 1-38, Toll

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Publication Year: 2001

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.

Published by: Wesleyan University Press

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

pdf icon Download PDF (114.0 KB)

Acknowledgments

pdf icon Download PDF (260.6 KB)
pp. ix-xii

A 1990 Temple University Faculty Summer Grant, and a 1990 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, helped provide some of the time during which I composed this work. I also thank both The Fund for Poetry for a spirit-sustaining grant in December 1993 and my colleagues for ...

E-ISBN-13: 9780819572561
Print-ISBN-13: 9780819564849

Page Count: 296
Publication Year: 2001

Series Title: Wesleyan Poetry Series

Drafts 1-38, Toll

Contents

Acknowledgments

Draft 1: It

Draft 2: She

Draft 3: Of

Draft 4: In

Draft 5: Gap

Draft 6: Midrush

Draft 7: Me

Draft 8: The

Draft 9: Page

Draft X: Letters

Draft 11: Schwa

Draft 12: Diasporas

Draft 13: Haibun

Draft 14: Conjunctions

Draft 15: Little

Draft 16: Title

Draft 17: Unnamed

Draft 18: Traduction

Draft 19: Working Conditions

Draft 20: Incipit

Draft 21: Cardinals

Draft 22: Philadelphia Wireman

Draft 23: Findings

Draft 24: Gap

Draft 25: Segno

Draft 26: M-m-ry

Draft 27: Athwart

Draft 28: Facing Pages

Draft 29: Intellectual Autobiography

Draft XXX: Fosse

Draft 31: Serving Writ

Draft 32: Renga

Draft 33: Deixis

Draft 34: Recto

Draft 35: Verso

Draft 36: Cenfo

Draft 37: Praedelle

Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow

Notes

Research Areas

Recommend

Related Content

Welcome to Project MUSE

Connect with Project MUSE

Cover 1

Cover 2

Cover 3