Earlier I wrote briefly about
Rachel Blau DuPlessis' new installment of her long poem
Drafts; the new volume is
Torques. A few weeks ago, on
February 5, we celebrated
Torques and Rachel read all of drafts 64 and 88, and portions of 74 and
85. Of course these pieces and the whole reading are available as a sound recording on Rachel's
PennSound page. That night, though, I also had my little Nikon with me and took some
rough video which Mike Van Helder has edited. Click
here and watch Jessica Lowenthal offering some opening remarks, Bob Perelman introducing Rachel, and Rachel reading 88 and 85. Draft 85 is called "Hard Copy."
Slowly the particulars
get scattered to the wind
and one is left
with what is under the surface
trying to come to light
what has not yet
been found nor
been found
out.
Earlier I wrote briefly about Rachel Blau DuPlessis' new installment of her long poem Drafts; the new volume is Torques. A few weeks ago, on February 5, we celebrated Torques and Rachel read all of drafts 64 and 88, and portions of 74 and 85. Of course these pieces and the whole reading are available as a sound recording on Rachel's PennSound page. That night, though, I also had my little Nikon with me and took some rough video which Mike Van Helder has edited. Click here and watch Jessica Lowenthal offering some opening remarks, Bob Perelman introducing Rachel, and Rachel reading 88 and 85. Draft 85 is called "Hard Copy."
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
