Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Modern Poets S)
DuPlessis asks us to take seriously Olson's call for the poetry-page as a wide-open field on which historical, theoretical, social and aesthetic problematics unfurl, twist, evolve and mutate dialectically and/or dialogically, bouncing off each other in collision or play, interlocking in agonistic intensity or affectionate rapprochement. Drafts (the series and the present volume under review) is one manifestation of that Duncian meadow to which we are permitted to return as often as we can handle the immersion it compels ... DuPlessis is after nothing less than a "dolce stil nuovo" for "women's poetry" -one that is "outside gender" but indebted to the insights of the women's movement in which she participated. A new form. New forms, unpredictable, that inch into being as the poems find their appropriate forms ... Adorno and his tortured dialectic, especially in the wake of the European Jewish genocide, also become interlocutors as the poet searches for rigorous but supple means of reckoning with history and the wayward intellect. Knots, quipus and other textile figures abound as models for poetry, for language and for thinking; so does terrain, textual or terrestrial, verdant or menacing, florally bucolic ("Draft 40: One Lyric") or gutted by an imperial warfare ("Draft 47: Printed Matter") in which the poet, as US citizen, is implicated.--Maria Damon "HOW2 "