The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Draft 15: Little

by Julia Bloch

The first two lines of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Draft 15,” composed May 1992-December 1992, enter the space of the page by folding it nearly over on itself:
Even quickly parsing the poem’s opening line can reveal whole histories embedded in deceptively simple language: more than—what? The title, “Little”? More than, after all, a “draft”? More than something else alongside, adjacent, to the poem that has just begun? Is the poem “little” because it’s hard to say—anything? More, or something in particular? Because the poem has entered a space of silence, of speechlessness?

The second line is not, actually, blank, not actually absent. It exists, drawn, in space. But it does make the poem pause, at least for a stanza break. The poem hinges, halts. Has the poem turned away from its subject—whatever that may be—even as it’s just begun?

“Little,” “hard to say,” “drawing a blank”: the poem begins with empty space, by drawing its blanks. But then the poem incrementally (little by little, say), begins to accumulate. The stanza that follows takes up a little bit of space, and then more and more, before taking up all of it:
The poem turns first to perhaps the biggest blank there is—the clouds in the skies above—and imagines first their indeterminacy or even mistakenness (how is a cloud errant? because irregular or changeable, therefore “hard to say”?) before then imagining their textures “ply over ply”: layers, depth, fabricated or woven, accumulation and design. Maybe what “floats” is even the layers or strands of something not unlike a helix—the helix is something to which DuPlessis turns so often (particularly in her scholarship) to describe the interplay of form and argument, or form and the social, or form and the aesthetic, or form and critique. These clouds, then, against the big blank of unspeakable sky, still float, the poem suggests: they’re there to remind us of errant indeterminacies as they weave. “And still”—clouds floating often look as though they aren’t moving at all, but the phrase “and still” is also another way of saying “and yet”—despite all this action-inaction, despite all this blank errancy, this quiet difficulty of not-speaking, a person enters this poem, not quite in the clouds but moving-not-quite: “I float on eddies in a rocking enormity.” Floating and rocking, both, on eddies, where an eddy is itself a figure of movement and flux. And that enormity, which recurs throughout all of the Drafts—Daniel Bouchard offers a thrilling quotation collage of “enormity,” which includes “enormous historical crimes,” from “Draft 91: Proverbs”—leads the poem to confirm what is tensely felt in those opening lines, which is that there are whole catalogues of history about to unfold.

What follows is that helix of form and everything else. There is a train in wartime, there is a “afikomen so well hidden,” there are not photographs of the war but something seen “like photographs of the war.” Catalogs of objects so shakily visible that the poem wonders about, wanders through, its own complicity and observation, ply over ply: “I was part of all that it, / a lucky nothing / not in the way of particular harm, / half witness half witless.” The “it” returns several stanzas later to confirm that the “blank” drawn in the poem’s opening is not a void but a field: “Not hero, not polis, not story, but it.” And then confirms that “little” is also a kind of field:

                  Thus my voice is empty, but I speak and sing
                  only of this. The undersentences
                  that rise
                  tides of sediment, the little
                  stuff agglutinating in time, debris
                                 I sing.

A voice that is a blank, yet produces sound; sentences submerged and emerging; sediment and stuff and debris not just accumulating, but agglutinating, sticky, forming shapes and arcs like a story or a history or a timeline. If “it” and “little” each forms a kind of axis, the poem spools its helix around them.

As DuPlessis has written elsewhere from the deep well of her thinking on form and the history of forms from which Drafts emerges: “This conflict or incommensurability of little and large and its unstable resolution by some of these tactics might be what incites anyone to write a long poem in the first place: a refusal of the putative perfections beyond time in favor of time’s messier activities.” “Draft 15: Little” is one of the few poems in Drafts 1-38, Toll not to be marked by notes and references at the end of DuPlessis’s volume; uncited, the poem shores up the impossible archive of blank song.

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Julia Bloch is the author of three books of poetry, including The Sacramento of Desire (Sidebrow Books, 2020), a recent book of poetics scholarship, Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem (Iowa, 2024), and several essays on gender, race, lyric theory, and the long poem. A Pew Fellow in the Arts and contributing editor at Jacket2, she teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia.