Title: Relative strangeness : reading Rosmarie Waldrop /
Authors: Duffy, Nikolai.
Publisher: Shearsman Books,
Year: 2013
Subjects: Waldrop, Rosemarie Criticism and interpretation.; Waldrop, Rosmarie Criticism and interpretation.; American poetry History and criticism
Abstract: "A sequence of fragments seems the most appropriate form for a work of this kind, introductory, surveying, essentially personal, marked, as with all things, by my own reading and preoccupations. 'Maybe,' Waldrop writes, 'the essence of the fragment is that it cuts out explanation, an essential act of poetry.' It constitutes, Waldrop continues, a 'lessening of distinctness, of "identity."' I do not claim to be comprehensive. Nor do I mean to speak for Waldrop or her work but simply to speak about some of its aspects, its various senses of poetics, the shifting relationships between theory and practice, to draw out a number of examples and to trace certain lines of thinking, ways of thinking. I do not always know where I am in Waldrop's work. My reading, often, is a balance between glimpses and fades, connections and gaps. Semantic fields slide and frames of reference come and go.^
Contents: Between luggage and language -- Blondsights -- Curvature -- All words are ajar -- 'To peel off childhood like so many skins' -- Music was everywhere -- 'Since I cannot put the world to rights, I speak of love' -- Burning deck -- Bottom line abacus -- Exploring and maintaining -- Collage -- Between, always -- Stutter-flow: The Road Is Everywhere or Stop This Body -- Linearity in pieces: Nothing has changed -- Prose poems -- Short circuits -- Another language -- Theories of translation -- All strange away: Translating jabès -- Shall we escape analogy -- The Caesura -- Poetry and politics -- Disaster -- 'Something else than a stretch of Earth': Living in America -- Bluff.