The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Draft 114: Exergue and Volta

On ‘this endge’ and Other Impossibles

by Eric Keenaghan

Drafts is a personal project, growing organically and rooted in the poet’s person, like a cutting that has taken. More precisely, it’s cultivated, as the maker transplants material from life to the page. We, as readers, are aware of the maker, Rachel Blau DuPlessis. You can’t help but feel close to her, for she signals herself throughout, showing how her creation is based on the fact that she’s a reader, too, just like us. Meticulously, she documents the texts and contexts on which she draws. It’s an impossible situation, this feeling of being close to a poem because we feel close to its poet. It’s especially impossible if one believes the old yarn that the author’s not just voiceless but dead. So it goes that even the “someone,” the anonymous figure “hold[ing] together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constitute,” that virtually nameless one, is just a composting body, buried on the page, amidst its “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”^[1] Voice and text, these are the supposed irreconcilables DuPlessis performatively brings together in Drafts via a desiring, live act of transplanting into the poem her position—which is not just <her person> but instead <herself + her context>, or our context focalized and re-created through her experience and interpretation.

Maybe some readers can sift her person and position out of the page, but I can’t quite do so. And I’d venture she’d say that she doesn’t want us to. Roland Barthes had wanted to make sure the author was dead because her presence and voice in any literary work would “impose a limit on that text.”^[2] Supposedly, as he claims, “it is language which speaks, not the author.”^[3] But DuPlessis’s being and speaking in Drafts ensures that we, the readers, have a companion. She’s not a limit but a guide. We need one if we’re going to pick up this hefty poem and embark on its journey. After all, Drafts is a long poem, or as DuPlessis likely would specify (after critic Peter Middleton), it’s a very long poem.^[4] Very long poems—lengthy poems, usually serial and written over long stretches of time—are made from big desire. “Length responds to an author’s endless longing,” DuPlessis says. “So a long poem does not end—on principle,” she adds; and that principle is “poeisis itself,” the act of making. “The poet turned out into the world, the world turning into the poet all together become the project.”^[5] The line between poet and world blurs, and her desire to forge onward through her context is translated into unending textual activity, nonstop creation.

Consequently, it’s impossible to parse out where each of Rachel (the person) and DuPlessis (the author) begins and ends in what’s born of that living, creative process. Both she and her poem are too self-aware to make that basic critical task easy, as we can see in this passage from “Draft 114: Exergue and Volta”:
This moment, arriving in the very last installment of the very last volume of a very long poem, initially seems a simple exposition of that Barthesian chestnut about texts’ separate existences from their creators’ lives. But the texts are spectral, and they haunt the writer. If this were true to theory gospel, the ghost would be the author—i.e., the person supposedly mistaken for the text’s origin and source of meaning. For devout poststructuralists, then, this is an impossible situation. The author’s not dead, as she should be. Instead, the poem is pronounced D.O.A.; and the writer, the haunted one, is, ipso facto, a traumatized survivor left doing all the work. By Barthes’s reckoning, the writerly subject—or, as he names it, the scriptor—is distinct from the dead author and should be no more than an anonymized functionary, the glue merely holding all the quotations, all the language together. But if the writer survives, then she also is living. If they’re living, are writers distinct from authors? And if living means working and creating, DuPlessis shows that culture work, as in Drafts is meaning-making. She’s more than glue binding all the linguistic tissue, even when stretches of the work, including Draft 114, consists partly of dozens upon dozens of literal citations of other poets and poems. DuPlessis is a source, too, then.

The self-awareness found in Draft 114 is characteristic of Drafts, in its entirety, but this part of the whole, more than others, reads as much like a poetics statement as it does a poem. That rhetorical quality, occurring at the very end of this journey reminds us that Drafts is not only categorizable as a very long poem but also enacts very-long-poemness. Throughout, we witness DuPlessis wrestling with the questions of whether her poem is over and if it even can end. If the poem, Drafts, is a translation of the author’s contextualized living, then the answer to either question is “No.” It’s not an existential situation. There is no “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” to it all.^[6] DuPlessis is not compelled to write, to eke out more life, by some “you” (even if that party is only another facet of herself, a superego). Instead, this process, organically growing out of her desire, is impelled. What’s important is not the why or even the what driving the process. Instead, the poem’s very-long-poemness is a matter of modality. DuPlessis starts this last bit of Drafts by observing, “It’s how to finish and how / to begin again” (emphasis added). How might she wrap up and then continue onward, to something else? With what strategies? Innovation, obedience to the Poundian injunction to make it new, is only partly at issue. These questions about how to carry on also are related to a quality of living that links attention, curiosity, and desire to the process of writing out of one’s life and positionality. If that process genuinely embodies that quality, then how does one “end”?

When one, as a writer, comes up against this question, one is “being on this endge,” as DuPlessis neologistically locates herself in Draft 114, at both the very long poem’s end and its edge. She knew she’d get to this point, the end in sight. Yet, if living is intrinsic to writing, then ending is really a beginning again. DuPlessis quotes Gertrude Stein, from The Geographical History of America (1936), not long after mentioning her Drafts’ endge: “Ordinarily anybody finishes anything. / But not in writing. In writing not any one finishes anything” (145). Up to the very end, writing is edging: getting to that place where old meets new, present becomes future, conclusion reboots to a new start. Just keep it going, as long as one’s desire, body, can hold out, refusing the climax, that little death which would bring it all—world, text, the author’s self—to an abrupt, irrevocable end.

Endge: it’s not a portmanteau word. It’s really just another impossibility in a very long poem full of impossibilities. For it is the nonexistent rhyme to American English’s orange. Nothing for her to quote here—it’s sui generis. By introducing into the American language the rhyme we’re all taught is impossible, DuPlessis magically renders impossibility an opportunity for potentiality. Yes, orange can rhyme. You just have to will it, change the language. The writer, by making that happen, makes herself present. She authors language, she’s not just writing a text. Reading those five letters, we discover the poem’s exergue, as forecast by the poem’s subtitle. The O.E.D. tells us:
The word endge embodies the “small space” where DuPlessis has inserted herself, engraving herself into both her poem and the American language. By coining that word, she minted a new bit of linguistic currency to convey a meaning that, in the end, does originate with her. DuPlessis, the author, bears down into the material of the page, pressing it, making it bear all her weight once this poem and all of Drafts are brought to press. Thus, she takes action, by short-handing the language and fusing its words. She’s not Beckett’s Unnamable protagonist, who laments, before pushing himself to go on, “you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me.”^[7] She’s got a name and can name her own damn self. She refuses to wait, passively, for the right word to find her and call her by her name. The linguistic fate women and other socially and politically marginalized folks suffer is that we’re not called by our rightful name when we leave it to language and its vehicles to interpellate us. If the words won’t say her name, then, fuck it, she’ll make the words that will do that job. Impelled to make the word and mark the endge, she also compels us, her readers, to name her, to recognize her, to see how she is present with us, before us, on the page, on our tongues, and in our ears, all those exergues and other spaces she fills with language.

An endge, when written into the exergue, becomes a turn, a volta. That last word in Draft 114’s subtitle—volta—is more familiar than exergue. It’s poetic, even. When we reach the point where Drafts seems to be coming to a full stop, DuPlessis pivots enough to signal that, after having named herself the author, now she can and will go on, willfully and desirously. Earlier, in “Draft 100: Gap,” she had prepared us for the fact that “The volta will happen / when the poem is over.” Once we reach the very end of this very long poem, in the very last lines of Draft 114, she makes good on her warning: “So vector the crossroads once again! / Volta! Volta!” Drafts may have ended, but Duplessis and her authoring have taken a turn, as she goes on, pursuing her desire further in her new serial poem Traces, with Days (2015-present). In that new very long poem, she remains just as engaged as she was in Drafts with the world and her position in. And she continues to leave her impressions upon it, and us.

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Eric Keenaghan is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State University Press, 2008) and co-editor of the recovery project The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell University Press), co-winner of the MLA Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship. His current projects include a critical edition of Muriel Rukeyser's The Middle of the Air, alost verse-play that imagines a fascist revolution in the United States. He teaches at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

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^{[1] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968) in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-8, 148 (original emphasis), 146.
[2] Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 147.
[3] Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 143.
[4] See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, A Long Essay on the Long Poem: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Practices (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023), 26-8.
[5] DuPlessis, A Long Essay on the Long Poem, 29.
[6] Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953) in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 2009), 313.
[7] Beckett, The Unnamable, 313.}