cover image DRAFTS 1–38, TOLL

DRAFTS 1–38, TOLL

Rachel Blau Duplessis, . . Wesleyan, $17.95 (292pp) ISBN 978-0-8195-6484-9

Life-works in the Pound/Zukofsky/Olson tradition have become scarce in the last few decades, with Ron Silliman's The Alphabet project being one of only a handful. Duplessis's Drafts is another, and this large volume collecting pieces of the project published over the past 15 years arrives with a certain antique aura, reminding one of the stirring beauties and frequent lapses of those sprawling, open-ended works. Duplessis, who has written extensively about Zukofsky and the Objectivist poets, adopts a whole series of tones and methods from the modernists, resulting in a fragmentary, intellectual, autobiographical style, in which pieces of history, stray thoughts, voices from different poems, hand-drawn icons (recalling Pound's use of Chinese ideograms), unglossed references and rapid juxtapositions prevail, held together by the author's expositing ego. What differentiates Duplessis's style from her models, though, is a concern with memory, witness, the metaphysical dynamics of text (presence vs. absence, reference vs. free-floating signifier, the Deleuzian "rhizome" and "fold") and an overarching concern with knowledge of the "other," who at times is problematized as a mirror of the "I". At times, Duplessis ruminates beautifully on these issues, and the poem takes on the feel of a strange mental database governed by principles of quantum physics: "Blessed, one could say,/ with a bad, with almost no/ memory,/ gifted with it,/ the flowers was always / false forget-me-not,/ tender blue, very like the real,/ those sugar'd golden-pinky eyes / but not right, a lack—/ something / of how the texture of memory/ puckers,/ slippage./ It's never what you think...." Perhaps too often, "[t]his kind of speaking/ doubles the unspeakable" as one Draft begins, and doesn't get much less abstract. At its best, though, the poem resembles A.R. Ammons's longer improvisations, with Duplessis opening the mind's floodgates and finding the perfect rhythm for channeling its contents. (Nov.)