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A surge into twenty-first century poetry and poetics, a book of passionate poetic energies and odic verve, "Surge" is the provocative, open-ended ending to DuPlessis's twenty-six year long poem project, Drafts. This work exemplifies a tertium quid, transcending poetic schools and critical binaries with its fusions of intellection and emotion, with its reassessments of Dante, Eliot, Duchamp, with its witty genre experimentation, with its strands of eco-poetics, feminist analysis, conceptual torques, and unstinting poetic commitment. The book contains a contemporary mirror of "The Waste Land", a striking political-emotional reflection on divided cities, an investigation of gender in a work of poet's theater, a ballad on science and reality, an index, a canzone and--over all--a scintillating texture of meditation in which the analytic lyric is intensified by the refractions of gloss.
List of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Surge: Drafts 96-114
- Draft 96: Velocity
- Draft 97: Rubrics
- Draft 98: Canzone
- Draft 99: Intransitive
- Draft 100: Gap
- Draft 101: Puppet Opera
- Draft 102: One-on-One
- Draft 103: Punctum
- Draft 104: The Book
- Draft 105: Pilgrimage
- Draft 106: Words
- Draft 107: Meant to say
- Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss
- Draft 109: Wall Newspaper
- Draft CX: Primer, a selection
- Draft 111: Arte Povera
- Draft 112: Verge
- Draft 113: Index
- Draft 114: Exergue and Volta
- Notes to Drafts 96-114
About the author
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet-critic, whose on-going long poem project, begun in 1986, is collected here in Torques: Drafts 58-76, as well as in Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan U.P., 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnnumbered: Precis (Salt Publishing, 2004). DuPlessis was awarded a residency at Bellagio in 2007; she was the recipient of a Pew Fellowship for Artists and of the Roy Harvey Pearce/ Archive for New Poetry Prize, both in 2002.
