The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Draft 52: Midrash

by Patrick Pritchett

Draft 52: Midrash is Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ spiritual agon: a secular Jew struggling to come to grips with Theodor Adorno’s vexing observation that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I’ve written a lot about Drafts over the past 25 years. It’s a poem of inexhaustible richness: prolix and profound and perplexing; maddeningly recursive, like consciousness itself—a latter-day Prelude. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment. And its animating principle is midrash, that forever circling back form of inquiry, of opening up the text to ever fresh readings and new meanings.

The recursive mechanism of midrash challenges not only fixed bodies of doctrine and opinion, but the very idea of a stable form of unified, immutable subjectivity. Midrash, as a specifically literary practice, introduces multiplicity into the play of poetic language. The elaborate use of citational endnotes and cross-referencing marks Drafts as a poem that unabashedly incorporates the devices of scholarship (thereby breaking down the wall separating the poem from its body of commentary). It stages the long poem as a non-linear, denucleated, constellated structure.

Draft 52:Midrash (from Pledge) juxtaposes dissimilar rhetorical styles and registers, mixing confession, investigation, lyric, and scholarly exegesis, accompanied by copious end notes. (She’s got the receipts). Its deliberately anti-lyrical posture is exploratory and open-ended, continually probing both Adorno’s provocation and the poem’s own assumptions.

In section 6, the poem poses a crucial question: “Does poetry ignore crisis / trump up event / say policy does not matter to it / accept the normal / prettify hegemony?” In other words, if lyric is merely a tool for valorizing the bourgeois subject, is it nothing more than ornament? How can it become an agent of intervention, a force that disrupts the homogenous empty time of historicist ideology’s amnesia? Yet as Adorno himself makes clear in his essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society:” “lyric poetry is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism.” Seamus Heaney, writing about Mandelstam, put it this way: “obedience to the poetic impulse was obedience to conscience; lyric action constituted radical witness.” A poem needn’t be charged with overt political content in order to make a meaningful intervention. All too often such protest poems age poorly. (See Robert Bly’s “Teeth Mother Naked at Last”).

The confusion about Adorno’s remark on Auschwitz derives from the unacknowledged collusion between civilization and barbarism which, as Walter Benjamin notes, are mutually constitutive categories. This is why Adorno can write in 1949, to the outrage of many, that in a total society reification colonizes culture to such an extent that “the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism” poses an excruciating aporia for writing poetry after Auschwitz. Writing’s complicity in the catastrophe of the modern means that poetry itself is deeply vulnerable to a reifying absorption by the very social structures it would contest. The poetry that does not acknowledge its complicity, but insists on valorizing the subjective as a privileged mode of experience somehow outside ideology, runs the grave risk of multiplying, rather than resisting, the conditions that make an Auschwitz possible.

By saying that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Adorno was not condemning the power of art, nor was he issuing a ban. He was saying that the culture that produced the poetry of Goethe and Rilke also produced the language of the Final Solution: culture itself is the problem. It’s impossible to think the two apart from one another, as though civilization was safely walled off from barbarism. This is the aporia poetry must engage. But poets are so easily scandalized. And perhaps not all that accustomed to thinking dialectically.

When DuPlessis compares the supposed ban on poetry to Abraham’s command to sacrifice Isaac, the tensions animating the poem reach a delirious fever pitch that threatens to tip over into melodrama.
It’s a rhetorical statement. DuPlessis is too smart, too committed, to succumb to such a self-abnegating posture. Poets after Auschwitz don’t have the luxury of simple condemnation, writing from some isolated clinical position outside the event. They must take up the more difficult, perhaps impossible, task of writing from within it.

Lyn Hejinian tries to leverage Adorno’s statement as an injunction for poets “not to speak the same language as Auschwitz … poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities.” Her own disjunctive, paratactic work certainly embodies that, estranging sense and torquing syntax in playful and bewildering ways that interrupt normative communication. This is the path Celan took as well, practically inventing his own idiom. (DuPlessis cites Hejinian in her end notes, performing another midrashic twist).

In the final sections of the poem DuPlessis delivers a wonderfully supple non-resolution to her dilemma.
Poetry must remain “half-built,” an “impossible draft,” unfinished, forever liminal, and deeply skeptical toward language and itself. Always provisional, always in conversation—the work of both midrash and Drafts.
These sharp injunctions name the necessary conditions for a post-Auschwitz poetics while laying out the map for Drafts’ own construction—a poem that enfolds the personal lyric inside a reticulation of grid and fragment, surfaces and incomplete memories, suspended in the serial force field of messianic interruptions and midrashic reconnections. Writing about Adorno and Auschwitz, Terry Eagleton comments that “art can only be valid if it provides an implicit critique of the conditions which produce it … can only be authentic if it silently acknowledges how deeply it is compromised by what it opposes.” This is exactly what Draft 52: Midrash does.

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Patrick Pritchett is the author of Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism (Black Square Editions, 2024) and Brief Mercy of This Life (The Bodily Press, 2025). He teaches at Rutgers University.