Rachel Blau DuPlessis



‘Seeking to be here, doing this’: Po-Essaying into Agro-ecological Thinking

I don’t eat pork. Dislike its taste and texture. Perhaps this is because my mother is a terrible cook, her meats always tough and dry.

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Poetry, Whatsoever: Blake, Blau DuPlessis, and an Expansive Definition of the Poem

William Blake pinches himself. Yes! He is alive, not in heaven or hell for all eternity, but on earth, for just as long as I need him for the purposes of this essay. In the almost two hundred years since William Blake died many things have changed.

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Owen Bullock Reviews Rachel Blau DuPlessis

The title of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s new book is a reversal of Hesiod’s Works and Days, which introduced the character of Pandora to the world. At the front of the book, before even the title page, is the statement ‘We are living in late catapultism’.

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MATHEMATICS Editorial

I was already quite a few years into a creative writing PhD titled ‘Generic Engineering’ and flailing around quite spectacularly in a galaxy of words when an academic friend, perhaps hoping to spare me the indignity of a completed thesis and potential employment, flipped to the middle of the 526-page book he was reading and wordlessly pointed to a single sentence. ‘Due to a predilection whose origin I will leave it up to the reader to determine,’ he read, ‘I will choose the symbol ♀ for this inscription.’

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from Numbers

Numbers is one of several of my new books and chapbooks that are collage-poems or collage with matching poems.

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Fifth Room

However it seems dictionarily, in writing five means 5. And 5 means five. See what I mean? Pass along here. Nothing more to see except linguistic philosophy. “Number words”– those nouns-are numbers themselves, something more or less than words. They …

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Four Quatrains

Four. Quatrain s make a ballad Four. Veggie s make a salad Four. Quart s make a gallon Four. Quartet s are based on five. The fourth dimension ‘s time. Fourth person pronoun s get to speak it- s posthumous …

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Zero and π

Zero and rr are linked in my mind. Both are beyond “theoretical” right straight into “odd.” Plethora right straight into cornucopias of unrepeating numbers and the absolute empty, yet something. Something that is a total mystery of fullness and of …

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Zero Full

You can say this talks about nothing all you want. but “zero” is clearly and richly filled with signs and signage. Not to say meaning and strangeness, a whole semiotics– signs of being which is nothing– though how do we …

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Deux mille dix

So she says her book Has no beginning and no ending Unlike the architecture Of many books. She says, “because numbers Are in order but can occur Anywhere, anyhow, in any Odd combination Sometimes called physics, Occasionally called time, Sometimes …

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Siobhan Hodge Reviews Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry

Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry presents a compelling cross-section of feminist voices, experiences and engagements in Australia, picking up from where Kate Jenning’s 1975 feminist anthology Mother, I’m Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women Poets left off.

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Traces 6: Quality time

I spent quality time after her memorial reinventing banalities. The absoluteness of her being here, then ™Photoshopped out. What is it that anyone remembers? Most of the speakers were not and could not be eloquent. Everyone nibbled at the borders …

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Comics Poetry: The Art of the Possible

‘MUSIC OF SHAPE’ | from, HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE, 2007 | Warren Craghead III | pencil on archival paper In 1979, Cecilia Vicuña (Chilean poet, activist and artist) tied a red string around a glass of milk and spilled it …

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Excerpts from Graphic Novella

What vision? This thought breaks the borders of the book by an interior implosion. It is impossible, really, to go anywhere, as there are some places that you cannot imagine. Still trying out of the loss, forgotten, obscured, for one …

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Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace

Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.

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Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Abstract Morality In Post-Avant Poetry

“Post-avant” poetry is widely considered to be an important branch of the post-modern tree. Yet, a distinction exists between post-avant & “po-mo” in other genres & art-forms.

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