Abstract
This chapter conducts a reading of the overall form and structure of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ long poem project Drafts. First started in 1986, it is a work of dazzling formal variety which displays not only direct engagement with phenomenological texts but also with previous American long poems, and as such constitutes not only a long poem in its own right but a commentary on the procedures and processes involved in their composition. Carbery reads the poem in terms of the various ‘levels’ of the text’s structure; firstly, by reading the ‘drafting’ process phenomenologically; secondly, by exploring DuPlessis’s engagement with the deconstructive phenomenology of Jacques Derrida; and thirdly, by positioning DuPlessis herself as a major voice in the wider criticism of modernist and contemporary long poems.
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Carbery, M. (2019). The Book Withdraws into Itself: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts. In: Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05002-3_7
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