The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Draft 2: She

by Megan Jewell

Although it appears second in Drafts, “Draft 2: She” introduces readers to the long poem’s primary personal pronoun—the additionally-objectified, subsequently-marked, other position. Not only an it but the distinctly othered She. As the poem makes clear, She, written over in layers and eternally gazed upon, is a tenuous position from which to write. The poem’s pronominal title, “Draft 2: She,” establishes a clearly gendered other and is a working through of the possibilities for women’s poetic expression while writing within established social and artistic contexts that situate woman as the second sex. “Draft 2: She” is an extended poetic engagement with a seemingly autonomous Modernist poetic vision underpinned by and reliant upon the secondary position of She. As a feminist poet-critic working in an experimental vein and well-published on the gendered implications of poetic forms, DuPlessis, in “Draft 2: She,” must write differently; or, as, as she terms it, “otherhow.”

In The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, DuPlessis articulates writing “otherhow,” in an essay of the same name, and published around the same time in the late 1980s as her early Drafts. She writes that she seeks an “eternal and endless practice of critical rupture through which and one to which a plethora of ‘polygynous’ practices teem as a plausible female practice of poetry.” Disruption, experimentation, heterogeneity, and play characterize her woman-centered, “polygynous” poetics. “Draft 2: She” introduces and, with the momentum needed for “critical rupture,” enacts with feminist force and formal experimentation the practice of writing otherhow. The poem moves swiftly from section to section, employing irregular line lengths and layered, lyrically-disruptive literary, cultural, and personal references; sections of fragmentary poems reveal the discursive interconnectedness of She-hood. The poem sometimes lays bare the poet’s word possible choices, exposing the multiple ways in which gender infuses and inhabits discourses while simultaneously rejecting more singular and limiting modes of expression. DuPlessis early in the poem proclaims the passive stance from which she proceeds otherhow: “‘I be a good girl with my magic markers.’” Not only is she writing from the object position, the speaker must overcome internalized feelings of praise for obedience that the poem additionally works to defy. In The Pink Guitar, DuPlessis elaborates on the difficulties for women writing from such secondary positions, providing an example of the identity-erasing psychic spaces they occupy: “I am the female reader, I am the *marked marker* am she inside the outsidethe dividing barrier, I am the penising eye, and the missing I.” She concludes “I am the one who looks, I am she who cannot gaze, in reciprocity, back.” Silenced, rendered as a pouting muse, DuPlessis asserts her desire to enter the realm of subjectivity:
Some might ask whether such poetic risk-taking is too dangerous for women. Later in the poem, perhaps also in response to forms of condescension, she drafts a memo: “Dear (name) / I (morder) / for departure’s sake. Murdering—or disordering—forms, lines, and the whole of the page in most places—is necessary to departing from the lyric.

The poem also represents ambivalence regarding the historically male-centered practices of the avant-garde that the speaker takes up as—while also speculating about the positionings of—She. DuPlessis writes in the notes to the poem that she alludes in the fifth section to Marcel Duchamp’s assemblage, Étant Donnés, an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp’s work epitomizes the ubiquitous term “male gaze” as it depicts a headless nude woman being viewed through a keyhole. This woman has an amputated breast, and the scene is oriented so that her pubic area is the work’s main focal point. In the ekphrastic fifth section of “Draft 2: She,” DuPlessis writes:
The eye (or the penis) perfectly penetrates the keyhole compositionally-designed to welcome it. Ambivalence—dialogically presented through hunger and nausea—seems to permeate the air. DuPlessis has noted in Pink Guitar: “Here I look at myself looked at by Duchamp, reobserved by female me, and I am confused between my impotent distance as male voyeur and impotent identification as female voyeur.” “Draft 2: She” infiltrates phallic perspectives.

The poem identifies additional perspectives, modes of thought, and genres of writing that might be worked through and re-presented as a feminine poetic practice. For example, a later section of the poem offers a portrait of the artist as a young woman, gesturing towards the Künstlerroman and instead offering a domestic feeding scene as an alternative introduction to linguistic sensibility. The section invokes images of toddlerhood by interspersing in irregular lines words such as “blankies”; “din”; throw foo foo”; “Feed ‘n’wipe”; “Woo woo petunia.” The “oo” sounds here are associated more with the maternal roles of caring for children than the formative Joycean moo cows vital to the development of male modernist artistic sensibility. In this section, categories of mother and daughter are collapsed, and the section ends with additional particulars of the poet’s upbringing, including references to her family’s Judaism.

“Draft 2: She” ends with a final inquiry into the kinds of gendered interventions into male forms of language that are possible for innovative women writers. The poem ends with an allusion to Hélène Cixous’s concept of women’s writing, écriture feminine, a speculative form of expressive agency derived from the female body; it invokes multiplicity, intransitively exceeds, and is therefore unrecognizable within phallic discourses.
The final lines of “Draft 2: She” read:
The reference to mother’s milk is to Cixous’s “invisible ink,” one that disappears soon after being written, and re-emphasizes the provisional and feminist nature of DuPlessis’s process of writing in this secondarily-positioned way of being. Drafting and its temporality are all bound up with the body, the provisional, the She.

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Megan Jewell is English Faculty, and a Core Teaching and Research Faculty Member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University. She researches and teaches twentieth- and twenty-first century American and British poetry. In articles and book chapters, she has published on language-school poets and innovative women writers.