The Uncontainable

This past summer, I talked to Rachel Blau DuPlessis at the Kelly Writers House about her long-term engagement with Williams' Paterson particularly, and long-form poetic works in general. Her "life-poem" Drafts, described by Ron Silliman as "one of the major poetic achievements of our time," continues an engagement with and challenge to Williams' aesthetics; numbering close to 100, DuPlessis' Drafts are more open, polysemic, multiple, and provisional than perhaps Williams' could have let himself perform, but which, it seems, he dreamed in his own imperfect way. DuPlessis has also written critically about Williams in her book The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, which, like her poems, challenges generic considerations, and expands what the critical essay can be. (And by the way, listening to audio of her performances, available on PennSound is a really great way to start navigating her work).
I feel like this audio interview will be one of the last I will be collecting before attempting a reconsolidation of the various materials. As you can probably tell, the content for this blog has been steadily petering, with some renewals here and there, but nonetheless on the fade. It has always been a question for me whether any consolidation is worthwhile or advisable, which is why interviews like those below have been kept in as close to their rawest form (with some mild editing) because I have felt it is better to make them available during the process, rather than to wait and wait for an ideal form that never comes. What would be the ideal? There are so many objects that this blog can be translated into (so then, why not keep as blog?) In fact, there is an application now where I can press a few buttons, enter a few passwords, and voilà! the blog is "slurped" into a book. (This application here may be easier, all you have to do is enter the url impossibleobject.blogspot.com and see what it would look like without having to download any software.) Obviously, that option only would be some kind of conceptual parody of blog specificity, although it may be worthwhile as a textual trace--evidence, like performance photos, and ultimately useful in case Blogger decides to suddenly cease operations or their data gets wiped out in an electromagnetic singularity. Nevertheless, there will be at the very least a few more postings, including an interview (text only) with Jennifer Scappetone, before Impossible Object makes a leap into another medium or into the void.
The following interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis took place on June 10, 2010 in Philadelphia.
I heard this was a really bad poem: (4 min. 23. sec)
Nobody cared about Williams (or the long poem): (2 min. 51. sec)
Marcia Nardi and the lost women of the 50s: (7 min. 11 sec.)
This is the thing that can never be contained: (6 min. 02 sec.)
Unicorn versus plethora: (4 min. 42 sec.)
Paterson's opening passage: (3 min. 50 sec.)
Eros and plethora: (4 min. 26 sec.)
The triadic line, eros, rape: (4 min. 28 sec.)
Staggering identification with beautiful thing: (2 min. 45 sec.)
Language poetry and Paterson: (2 min. 51 sec.)
Visiting Paterson: (1 min. 30 sec.)

It's the Economy, Stupid

In Williams’ Embodiment of Knowledge, he talks about the general notion of waste and excess as antithetical to “economy,” widely defined to include notions of the poetic. This assertion might strike those for whom writing poetry today is the closest thing to potlatch as patently silly. Even more silly, as always with Williams, is how he dovetails these insights with a general theory of womanhood:

And it is certain that purity which we require in woman is nothing more nor less either than the beautiful flower of the common plant, economy. And all that is manly—all doing, perseverence, daring, courage, all are nothing else than economy in their reduction, however we glamour them about. It is all: the set value, the single path, concentration of energy, each is economy of purpose which alone makes action beautiful. (187)

He even goes as far as to say that the reason that he stays with Floss, and does not cat around, “is that I am too lazy to go about for others. This is the sole reason.” (187) If laziness prevents him from being “divided by over multiplication,” Paterson eventually gives Floss the horns, since here he does engage multiplicity and challenge the economy of “one.” It makes sense that Paterson becomes a locus for these transgressions, since, as we have discussed earlier, it is the product of Alexander Hamilton’s “new” economy—a planned system that, in its disregard of the contours of natural energies, proved disastrous. And that, in his “elucidation by multiplicity,” he includes the excess of materials from archival sources, representing economies he can’t understand, an intractable “messiness” confounding the poet—finicky at heart, yet challenged by the cosmic imposition of an ontological lassitude. If, as he says earlier in Embodiment of Knowledge “[p]oems must be . . . considered as documents of men” (74), Paterson attempts to break this existential rationale for formal coherence in pursuit of a knowledge not necessarily in his own body. Or is this just his science-fictional sex-poem-fantasy? For, further down in “Waste and Use,” he muses on the possibility that if he were a river he could embrace multiplicity and, thus, manage to get around with more women. Maybe “in the year 1, 011, 000 A. D. we will be river large . . . I think in that case I could be content with a thousand women of proper assortment” (187). . . . a clear case of Passaic envy?