I’ll be presenting the paper below at the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 in February of 2011.
Title: “Gender, Generativity and the Muse in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis”
In her critical and poetic work, Rachel Blau DuPlessis often critiques the female muse created by poetry. From her early poems, such as “Praxilla’s Silliness” (1987), to her current ongoing serial project Drafts, we see DuPlessis playing with and against the chilling effect of the female muse of poetry. In her critical work, from 1979 to the present, we continually find her assessing the impact of the female muse on poets. For her, this muse, like lyric poetry itself, often puts women in the untenable position of being passive agents or “agents” whose agency may only be expressed through the literary production of men. And a large part of her work is, like that of many of the women poets and critics of her generation, an attempt to recuperate women writers who have been misunderstood or ignored by the literary-critical mainstream.
Though a great deal of DuPlessis critical and poetic work has been produced with an eye to the productions of H.D., she also has significant male mentor figures, most notably Robert Duncan and George Oppen. This is, at times, paradoxical. Oppen, in his correspondence sometimes reveals difficulty relating to the young, female poet DuPlessis, precisely because of her gender. In his own poetry, he at times works through somewhat conventional notions of the feminine. Duncan, too, is problematic. His work, particularly his The H.D. Book, reveals a great deal of sympathy with and understanding of women poets, as well as of the limitations gender has placed upon “man-talking” poets like Pound and Williams. Yet he explicitly appeals to a female muse that possesses qualities both positive and limiting for a woman writer.
My presentation will lay out these issues and explain how DuPlessis addresses them, and her male mentors, through her emphasis on generativity in the poems of Drafts, in both the content and the formal features of this serial poetry.
