Postmodernist Poetry’s “Blue Period”

Abstract

If one wanted to make such distinctions in the face o f a collection that flaunts its cross-generic status, one m ight note that R achel Blau DuPlessis has distinguished herself in at least three types o f writing. She is a celebrated academic literary scholar, author of Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers; H.D.:The Career of That Struggle; and Genders, Races, and Religious. Cultures in Modern American Poetry. She is an innovative poet working in a postmodernist idiom, her most notable work surely the ongoing serial poem Drafts, three volumes of which are now in print: Drafts 1—38, Toll; Drcfts. Drafts 39—51, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Precis; and Torque: Drcfts 58—76. And she has writ­ ten many pieces that she calls essays, nonfictional critical and analytical writings that incorporate the formal strategies of her poetry, and in which she never shies away from the first person.The oft-cited “For the Etrus­ cans,” a breakthrough text for DuPlessis, is the best known of these essays, first collected in 1990 in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Blue Studios, then, is a sequel to The Pink Guitar, a new collection of essays in the etymological sense offorays or attempts—twelve attempts at definition and clarification that themselves resist any definitional or pigeonholing impulses the reader might bring to them. The University of Alabama Press, in conjunction with the publica­ tion o f Blue Studios, has reissued The Pink Guitar as well. Both books are included in the press’s M odern and Contemporary Poetics series, which in the 10 years since its inception in 1998 has issued works of conven­ tional literary criticism and scholarship as well as the collected occasional prose o f such poets as Rosmarie Waldrop, Lorenzo Thomas, and Jerome Rothenberg, anthologies of avant-garde Southern and African American poetry, and a wide range of writing that falls under the rubric o f poet­ ics. Save for the anthology, there’s a little bit o f each o f these genres in Blue Studios. The pieces are grouped into four sections: “Attitudes and