Lecture de poésie : Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Biographie

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic and collagist. Her work includes the notable long poem Drafts (1986- 2012), the related serial books, Traces, with Days (2017-), and collage poems Graphic Novella (2015), NUMBERS (2018) and Life in Handkerchiefs (2023). Her Selected Poems, 1980-2020 was published by CHAX Press in 2022. A Long Essay on the Long Poem from University of Alabama Press. was published in 2023. Expected soon are Daykeeping (Selva Oscura) from Traces, with Days, and Eurydics (Shearsman). Recent work takes a poetic and documentary attitude to social emotions as part of lyricism. In her career as a poet-critic, she has written extensively on gender, poetry and both feminist and objectivist poetics, including essays in The Pink Guitar (1990, 2006), Blue Studios (2006) and Purple Passages (2012). Her work on Objectivist poetry and poetics includes the edited volume The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Her poetry has been translated with books in French, Italian and Russian (forthcoming), and individual works and chapbooks in German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

DuPlessis received her B.A. at Barnard College in 1963, and her PhD at Columbia University in 1970. She is Professor Emerita at Temple University and has received residencies and awards from Fulbright, the Rockefeller Foundation (creative residency at Bellagio), the Pew Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. She is a noted scholar-critic of modern American poetry as well as having a distinctive career in poetry. and she is one of the pioneers of feminist literary study in the university, both as essayist/ scholar and early militant for women’s studies.