We are excited to announce that Rachel Blau DuPlessis will be reading from her most recent collection of poems Surge: Drafts 96-114 on October 9th, 2013 at 7:30PM in McKenna Hall 100-104.
DuPlessis (PhD, Columbia University) is known as a poet and essayist, and as a critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry. From 1986 until 2012, she has been engaged in a long poem project, collected in several book-length installments from Wesleyan University Press and Salt Publishing. The newest book, Surge: Drafts 96-114, was published by Salt in 2013, bringing this 26-year long poem to a temporary fold. Books belonging to this project are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001); DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004): Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007) and Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (Salt Publishing, 2010). The Collage Poems of Drafts appeared in 2011 from Salt Publishing.
Surge “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.”
The reading is free and open to the public.
Cheers!
Julia ’15