Working the Between: Sociopoetics and a Writing Life

In section 37 of "Draft 85: Hard Copy," Rachel Blau DuPlessis cites and comments upon lines from both her first book of poetry, Wells (1980), and from section 37 of George Oppen's "Of Being Numerous" (1968), which itself glosses lines from Discrete Series (1934), his first book of poetry. An as yet unpublished "draft" in DuPlessis's long poem project, Drafts, "Hard Copy" is mapped on and responsive to the later Oppen poem and also, implicitly, their relationship: he was her friend and early mentor; she was his editor and scholarly advocate. The citations form a complex mesh of intertextuality: both poets view their early work from a distance of about thirty years, taking the measure of the languages in which they first tried to enact a shared poetics of what DuPlessis calls "saturated realism" (Blue Studios 205). The poems question the adequacy of their efforts "to see / what was really going on," in Oppen's terms, especially in a time of war. The layers of overlap and deviation between the two texts are too thick to peel away here. A cursory reading might find that while Oppen appears to affirm that "to 'see' them" is "still.../ Relevant," DuPlessis presses further into "trying to act / on this murky path" in response to the "terrors of historical time."¹

But what this quick comparison fails to note is the practice that distinguishes DuPlessis as a poet-scholar, a richly productive life's work in which Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work is an important milestone. Poring over and writing back into all of her and Oppen's accumulated language, DuPlessis engages in what she calls a "midrashic" process; she creates a fluid site of critical exchange at which multiple temporalities—historical, literary historical, autobiographical—meet. This is a big, precarious feat, and it is one that yields fascinating insights into, among other things, the gendered nature of "what could then be written," as "then" points to the locus of constant change—1902, 1934, 1968, 1980, 2007. Oppen opens Discrete Series with the Henry James character Maud Blessingbourne; his effort to "to 'see'" past her into a new century's clarity, typical of modernism's abjection of a feminized fin-de-siècle, comes to mark, in his retrospect, a limitation of his first book. When DuPlessis cites the feminine images of her own "incipience" in their "tender scale and proportion," then, she absorbs Oppen's self-questioning as part of her early authorization and gently turns the gendered screw on him again. "The muse/beloved or antimuse/cautioned and reviled is a central...discourse of poetry" is an argument DuPlessis makes and substantiates numerous times in Blue Studios and, indeed, in different terms, over the course of her career. "What happens when you are a female poet wandering in the museums of, the mausoleums, of poetry[?]," she goes on to ask (76). The poetic exchange with Oppen and the twelve essays collected in Blue Studios demonstrate the vitality of midrash as DuPlessis's searching, generative response.

Blue Studios doesn't demand an accompanying reading of Drafts, though the last of its four groupings of essays takes up the inception and progress of the poem. What makes this collection fascinating as a literary text and powerful as "cultural work" is the way it "work[s] the between," in DuPlessis's terms, revealing and transgressing the boundaries on which the institutions of poetry, gender, scholarship, and autobiography depend. In "Reader, I Married Me: Becoming a Feminist Critic," DuPlessis locates the essay itself as the genre of conjunction: "My poetry propelled my criticism, criticism propelled poetry, and essays were originally born in a spurt between them....The three genres I use offer (at least) three different and related subject positions, answerable to different social expectations and writing forums" (30). Braiding autobiography and intellectual history, this piece embodies the "transpersonal" quality that DuPlessis—in "F-words: An Essay on the Essay"—argues...