Rachel Blau DuPlessis (born December 14, 1941) is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
Early life
DuPlessis was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941 to Joseph L. and Eleanor Blau; her father was a professor, and her mother was a librarian. She received her BA from Barnard College in 1963, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1964 and 1970 respectively. Her dissertation project was titled The Endless Poem: Paterson of William Carlos Williams and The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound.
Career
Teaching
DuPlessis taught literature and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1974 to 2011; she has been professor emerita since 2011. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visitor at University of Auckland. DuPlessis has also taught at Trenton State College (now known as The College of New Jersey), Rutgers University, Columbia University, Université de Lille III (France), and Rijksuniversiteit-Gent (Belgium). She also held an appointment with the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and a residency at Bellagio sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Drafts Project
In conjunction with teaching and editing projects, DuPlessis has been writing her "poem of a life," called "Drafts." Among others, poet Ron Silliman has referred to DuPlessis's poem Drafts as a "life poem":More than any other text, Drafts has made me understand the difference between the longpoem and the life poem, and I read Drafts, like (Zukofsky's “A”), like The Cantos, like Bev Dahlen’s A Reading, like my own project, as an instance of the latter. Since 1985, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been composing this "endless poem" in canto-like sections, grouped in nineteen units. Their themes involve: history, gender, mourning and hope. The first two numbers of Drafts initially appeared in Leland Hickman’s journal, Temblor, two years before being collected into a volume entitled Tabula Rosa, published by Peter Ganick’s Potes & Poets Press.
Since then, DuPlessis's "life poem" project is collected in (as of March 2017): Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (Salt Publishing, 2010), and Surge: Drafts 96-114 (Salt Publishing, 2013).
Personal life
DuPlessis is married to Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis, the Isaac H. Clothier Professor Emeritus of History and International Relations at Swarthmore College, and has two children.
Awards and honors
DuPlessis has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Temple University, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry. In 2002, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in The Arts as well as the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize for lifetime contribution to American poetry and literary scholarship.
Works by DuPlessis
Poetry
Wells, Montemora (New York, NY), 1980
Gypsy/Moth, Coincidence Press (Oakland, CA), 1984
Tabula Rosa, Potes and Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1987
Draft X: Letters, Singing Horse Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1991
Drafts 3-14, Potes and Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1991
Essais: Quatre poèmes, Editions Créaphis (Bar-le-Duc, France), 1996
Drafts 15-XXX, The Fold, Potes and Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1997
Renga: Draft 32, Beautiful Swimmer Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1998
Drafts 1-38, Toll, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2001
Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, Nomados (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2003
Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2004. Torques, Drafts 58-76, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2007 Pitch: Drafts 77-95, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2010 The Collage Poems of Drafts, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2011 Surge: Drafts 96-114, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2013 Interstices, Subpress (Cambridge, MA), 2014 Graphic Novella, Xexoxial Editions (West Lima, WI), 2015 Poesis, Little Red Leaves Textile Editions (Houston: TX), 2016 Days and Works, Ahsahta Press (Boise, ID), 2017