Full Description
Pitch: Drafts 77-95 is a skeptical monument built and reassembled by a continuous folding over itself - tracking an encounter with an edge we might pitch over, with the pitch dark of our time, with our lurching desires to do the necessary work of seeing and understanding.
Anchored by two major serial poems proposing a poetics of the trace and responding to a key work of George Oppen, DuPlessis continues in this fifth book of nineteen poems working with themes of awe and grief, of confrontation with the world as it is and the projection, from the shards, of chips and gleams of another world.
The work is multi-generic, with a dazzling range from proverbs, fragments and interrogations to lists and open-page works. Drafts embodies and exfoliates a poetics of critique inside poetry, producing one of the more distinctive ethical-aesthetic practices in contemporary poetry. Other highlights of this collection are a two-poem dialogue with a work of Ingeborg Bachmann, a rewriting of a work of S.T. Coleridge, and an investigation of the meaning of writing that incorporates a serio-comic playlet between R and her Pen.
Contents
Draft 77: Pitch Content
Draft 78: Buzz Track
Draft 79: Mass Observation
Draft 80: Envoi
Draft 81: Gap
Draft 82: Hinge
Draft 83: Listings
Draft 84: Juncture
Draft 85: Hard Copy
Draft 86: Scarpbook
Draft 87: Trace Elements
Draft 88: X-Posting
Draft 89: Interrogation
Draft XC: Excess
Draft 91: Proverbs
Draft 92: Translocation
Draft 93: Romantic Fragment Poem
Draft 94: Mail Art
Draft 95: Erg
Notes
