A masterful meditation on our most mercurial and abiding of poetic forms—the long poem
 
For decades, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown readers how genres, forms, and the literal acts of writing and reception can be understood as sites of struggle. In her own words, “writing is . . . a praxis . . . in which the author disappears into a process, into a community, into discontinuities, and into a desire for discovery.” It is cause for celebration, then, that we have another work of warm, incisive, exploratory writing from DuPlessis in A Long Essay on the Long Poem.

Long poems, DuPlessis notes, are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. She cites both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in thinking of the poem as a “box,” both in the sense of a vessel that contains and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. This study’s central attention is on the long poem as a sociocultural Book, distinctively envisioned by a range of authors.

To reckon with these shifting and evolving forms, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and a composite she terms “assemblages.” The poets she surveys include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Louis Zukofsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Robert Duncan, Kamau Brathwaite, and, finally, Mallarmé and Dante. Instead of a traditional lineage, she deliberately seeks intersecting patterns of connection between poems and projects, a nexus rather than a family tree. In doing so she navigates both some challenges of long poems and her own attempt to “essay” them. The result is a fascinating and generous work that defies categorization as anything other than essential.
 

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is professor emerita of English at Temple University. She is a poet (with a long poem called Drafts) and the author of many volumes of essays and criticism, among them The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.

“I know of no other poetics of the long poem that engages such a range of questions and works. This is a must read for anyone working in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century long poem because of its numerous ways of examining its subject. DuPlessis’s intuitive and reasoned understanding of just what it means to write a long poem drawn from her own experience of writing her long poem Drafts, as well as her astute reading of the poetry and poetics of an impressive array of poets, makes this book zing.”
—Jeanne Heuving, author of The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics

"A Long Essay is a thought-provoking and illuminating exploration of its subject, one that neither this brief review nor a single read can do justice to."
—Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence

"Longing, and agony. I cannot think of better terms to sum up the tensions of the very long poem. DuPlessis does us all a service by making the long poem—that expansive 'site for poetic and social research' (169)—something we might be able to get our heads around at last—so long as we are willing to have the tops of our heads taken off."
—Relentless Messengers

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