The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Draft 44: Stretto

RBD: THE INTRICASY OF IS

by Joseph Donahue

So that all is color, and we do not seem to be underground at all.
—D. H. Lawrence

I

In A Long Essay on the Long Poem, Rachel Blau Duplessis proposes segmentivity as the long poem’s defining characteristic. The fact that the work in segments, and that the work perceives itself that way, and we as readers experience it that way, accounts for its capacity to endure duration. A long poem must change yet be the same yet change. Leaving one segment we begin another. Change and perpetuation propel the essentially Ovidian nature of the modern long poem. The segmentation of the modern long poem asserts that we are within a not yet disclosed whole, and our understanding of the nature of a segment, is reenforced by our perception of when one segment gives way to another. Segmentivity is an instruction in what passes away and what continues. Its lesson is not inherently bitter (though a melancholic reader may harbor doubts).

II

Within these segments the poet can perform versions of other genres, or varieties of diction, of narrative, each distinct but tuned to the presiding ongoing if perpetually partial revelation of the totality which may ultimately occur within historical time, when we’ve at last read the whole work, or may signal some absolute of mythic time where the poem conclude or continue. Within these segments no doubt any genre might contests the premise of segmentivity. In fact, for segmentivity to work as an understanding of the long poem the reader must at times forget he or she or they are within a part and not a whole. It may be that rhapsodic song has a privileged place in propounding such a challenge. While any rendering of a form or genre within the understanding of segment could be said to challenge the segmentivity, could be said to banish the illusion of segmentivity for the duration of the segment within which it has been placed and do so in the interest of its own cosmological claims, rhapsodic song seems particularly invested in winning this goal. Rhapsodic song stirs belief that the poem is a direct relation to forces that transcend the form within which the rhapsodic resides.

III

Doesn’t the rhapsodic, if true to its nature, intensify the feeling within the reader of no longer residing within a segmented song but abiding in a direct relation to the universe, as if the rest of the poem and the claim to contain the uncontainable, to embed or preserve or gather into eternity those moments which gesture beyond mortal segments. How does Duplessis understand what we might consider the rhapsodic mode? Or its rhetorical kindred, the vatic? There are no doubt subtle distinctions that will obviate my musing, and no doubt when I include lyricism of a certain transcendent intensity in thinking out not just the understanding of segmentivity, but the feel of it. Perhaps I am merely responding to the fact that long poems enter the canon in pieces, in the operatic reaches of a passage that touches on the conditions of the rhapsodic, the prophetic, or the extravagance of perception associated with a comically attuned lyricism. Obviously, there are endlessly subtle distinctions to be made among these modes. They may, in fact, be antithetical. But within the circumference of the long poem, they are allied in that they contest the boundary of the segment. They encourage us to forget it. Their presence suggests that part of the dynamic power of the longpoem lies in its continuous delineation, dissolution, and reconfiguring of segmentivity.

What stirs curiosity in approaching Drafts is the question of what happens to the rhapsodic within the world or work governed by segmentivity. Further, how does consciousness of segmentivity enters the work within a segment, enter as well the reader’s consciousness of the segment in its unfolding. (Was there still and again within this defining principle of the long poem an innate distrust of the rhapsodic, going back to Plato, that the rhapsode exemplified the suspect nature of poetry itself, bringing to the fore a relationship to the divine which philosophy felt compelled to discredit?)

IV

And so, Draft 44. In this Draft the poet is both rhapsode and, acting out the logic implicit in the rhapsodic, a spirit guide. In an immediate demonstration of hypnagogic color two explorers of Etruscan tombs appear. (The vividness and quickness of the opening lines, the back and forth between red and blue, prompts the possibility that the two figures are personified colors.) Elegance is the method, and beauty is the matter. The dedication of this Draft, which is profoundly moving: “written to “the late Kathleen Frazer, a poet who as well wrestled with the place of aesthetic extravagance, of painterly color, with seriality, not to mention the Etruscans.” Frazer is an attendant spirit in this Draft of descent, maybe even one of the unnamed twosome entering an unabashedly visionary landscape of northern Italy, one familiar to readers of Frazer’s poem “Etruscan Pages.” Nothing in the text betrays Fraser as the companion of the voyage in this micro-katabasis, yet I persist in imagining that two feminist poets, each with substantial commitments to the work and presence of George Oppen, each with complex relations to the transformations of lyric art in the post-Vietnam era, each working through the place of lyricism in serial works, are abroad, on a lark, stepping back into the archeological origins of modern poetry. They enter the land of the dead. They glory in art. Years before her own death Frazier’s rhapsodic spirit glides through the song, bringing with her, as well as the evidence of her own work, the issue of the uncontainable, of the rhapsodic, keenly felt. Perhaps she is the poem’s psychopomp. Draft 44, however, is not an initiation into the chthonic realm but a return to it. We are, once again, in a place where some truth of death is revealed, this time a place less of lament or grievous transport than of aesthetic rapture. The descending plurality, the two embodied colors, the visionary sistren, seems keyed into the long tradition of spiritual fantasia, where an exalted blue might signal the threshold of otherworldly realms. Inspired in part by Frazer’s Etruscan poem, and by D.H. Lawrence’s prose text, Etruscan Places, by being there and looking around, Duplessis presses her long poem, in this segment, towards an extraordinarily compressed assay, a synesthetic assault on materialism stripped of the imagination. The colors are fugal. The very musical form blurs beginning and end a musical equivalent of the post-posthumous, where a question is answered before it is fully asked. “Draft 44” is not the first underworld fantasia in the totality of Drafts, but its elegance, its lyricism and its vividness —perhaps in tribute to Fraser— raise to the realm of a spiritualized phenomenology the paradox of the Etruscan tombs as confessed by Lawrence: “So that all is color, and we do not seem to be underground at all . . .”

V

And so, this segment of Drafts is a cascade of chromatic euphoria. The poem is an immense effort to convince us that if we follow red and blue into the tomb, we are not underground at all. It’s a bravura performance, calling upon the legendary beauty of the of the tomb paintings to further the illusion that we are not among the dead, though we are. The dead, here, heighten our life. The poet’s sensory dazzle and rhythmic virtuosity expend themselves in the exalting of consciousness, in a way reminiscent of modern poetry’s long preoccupation with the phenomenon of shamanism:
Lawrence long ago noted the capacity of color as it is rendered in Etruscan tombs to blur the distinction between what is underground and what is above ground. Duplessis amplifies this observation by way of music and pagan ritual. The contemporary poet wants to push this farther. While Duplessis may be temperamentally disinclined to embrace color mysticism in the tradition of Klee or Mondrian, a reader might be forgiven for raising the matter of immaterial segmentivity. If when underground we do not seem to be underground due to the virtue of Etruscan color, when above ground might we seem not to be merely above ground, but in some lost Etruscan paradise? In the interest of dissolving ontological distinction, the fugue is evoked explicitly several times in Draft 44, beginning with the segment’s title, “Stretto,” which itself has a ritual form and function that complicates boundaries. Stretto is the repeating of a line of a song before the first iteration of it is complete. Doubling if not outright conjuring, is built into the form itself, a form which blurs the line between beginning and end. The first line has a second life arising before its end. Eye and ear are thereby wedded to the transformation of death into life, as befits an ultimate invocation of Dionysus, who enters the poem at the end by way of a drinking game: throwing wine lees against a wall. The earlier melancholy of a Ronsard poem urging the reader to seize the day as might inspire melancholy amours, is revised. (Mention of Ronsard in a tomb, that’s some grim wit!). Romantic love gives way to ritual jouissance. Ronsard is reborn as Euripides. Fugal music and Dionysian drinking game both find in repetitive gestures a gateway to transformative states. The invocations of Ronsard’s rose broaden the divide between life and death (as might, one can only suppose, any carpe deim poem recited in a necropolis!). Yet is there a gnostic twist hidden here? Is the rose not a rose again a rose, Eros, arisen within a grave? A rose is a rose is Eros. Here Duplessis—perhaps by way of Stein and Duncan—nods toward the deep back history of classical archeology and the recovery by scholars of Greek religion (while, for the record, expressing no nostalgia, at all, for patriarchal sex cults). “We do not seem to be underground at all.” In Draft 44 segmentivity appears to be well beyond being a formal component of the modern long poem. Segmentivity is a subject taken up within the longpoem, as a part of its overt or concealed cosmic drama. Segmentivity appears as the rupture and continuity and rupture that we all live, shaping life as well as art. And the perception of it, in life as well as in art, the feel of it, the solace it offers, its oppressiveness, its liberation, its illusion that life has parts and that arts are part of a whole, is a key to the totality of Drafts. We do not seem to be underground. We are underground. We will be underground, as are all those who pitched their wine lees against the wall. But for the duration of the poem, which summons and coordinates all the arts, we are not underground. We are hyper-alive and abiding in some elsewhere.

VI

Tombs are doors, doors where the dead are, doors through which the soul goes, or so they appear, for readers in the summoning spell cast by color, by music, by companionship, and by drinking games. Draft 44 teems with a perverse ambition: to transform a necropolis into a cite of abundant, super-numinous life. In enacting this desire, Draft 44 must reimagine the most pressing manifestation of segmentivity, that between life and death. Tombs are doors. To the metaphysically minded the poem proposes a principal which holds in a single thought art and life. Segmented long poems are philosophically inflected. They continually raise, in the most literal and the most expansive ways, the ultimate cosmic questions, what is the place of the part within the whole, and what is the intimation of the whole in each part. Draft 44 twice advises the reader that its mythy-minded meditation is upon “the intricacy of is.” If we understand segmentivity as the structure of the longpoem, and if we understand the experience of segmentivity as a recurrent aspect of the reading of a long poem, and the reading of a longpoem, the writing of a long poem, is like the living of a life, perceiving segments are part of “the intricacy of is.” Tombs are doors. The tombs themselves are an iteration of segmentivity. Death makes a segment of life, and, if only from within a pagan tomb, life makes a segment of death. (I think here of The Bridge, where individual segments of the poem lift away from the sequence, in defiance of the pressure to be a segment, to accept a fate as a part of a whole that may substantially differ from the whole that the part proposes.) It is part of the provocation of Drafts, part of its exploration of that ultimate segment, that we consider that a long poem might hold within it what is beyond it, the segment of endlessness.

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Joseph Donahue's most recent volume of poetry is This to That and Thus: Poems 1983-1998 (Shearsman Books, 2025). Volumes four and five of his ongoing poemcycle, Terra Lucida XII-XXI (Verge Books), and Disfluency: Collected Uncollected Poems 1973-2023 (Dos Madres Press) appeared in 2024. He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er (Zephyr Press, 2018). With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry,1970-2000 (Talisman, 2002). He teaches Creative Writing at Duke University.