Open Studios: Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work

An essay’s swerve can make the trip. First sky. Then the waves. Sky. The edge of the water. Sudden breathless teeming immersion. Then sky again and pray you’re not becalmed since the doldrums are an exploration’s true danger. Rachel Blau Duplessis’s striking new collection of essays, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, is at its best when it is roving at a clip, when she’s doing what she says “interesting essays” do, “offering knowledge in passionate and cunning intersections of material, in ways excessive, unsummarizable, and (oddly, gloriously) comforting by virtue of their intransigent embeddedness and their desire, waywardly, to riffle and roam” (37). Duplessis’s is a poetics both of the riffle and of the riff, where an ecstatic, disordering, referential page-flipping and a musical, utopic cat’s-paw play with literary and linguistic surface effects long to disrupt more deeply embedded ideological structures, primarily those of gender. Whether readers will find Duplessis’s essays “comforting” will depend on their finding comfort in some discomfort, particularly in her challenges to familiar forms of subjectivity and writing.
 
With this volume, DuPlessis continues the prose work begun in her first collection of essays, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, and extends the work of her long poem series, Drafts. All of the essays here concern women writers, feminist politics, a feminine poetics, gendered personal and literary histories, or some combination of the above. Many do so in ways that manifest her desire for writing that could be, as DuPlessis writes,
 

a poem, an essay, a meditation, a narrative, an epigram, an autobiography, an anthology of citations, a handbill found on the street, a photograph, marginalia, glossolalia, and here we go here we go here we go again.
 

(210-11)

 
This giddy and densely satisfying mélange of scholarship and melos typifies Duplessis’s best work. Rich hybridity is especially evident in “f-words; An Essay on the Essay,” where she both asserts and performs the inherently transgeneric and transgressive nature of the essay itself. Here Duplessis’s yoking of selves, aesthetic forms, and gendered identities cross-implicates her topics and their discourses. In this essay, more than in any other in the collection, her urgent language and condensed analyses propel us through her text, constantly reminding us of the indissoluble relationships among writing, representation, and thought. “f-words” functions as a kind of ars poetica for much of the volume, certainly for the best of it.
 
Duplessis’s essay is propelled by the partially submerged engines of Theodor Adorno and Virginia Woolf. She moves from Woolf’s claim that the self is “the essayist’s most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool” (38) to Adorno’s statement that the essay’s “structure negates system” (40). Her essay engages at least two different understandings of Woolf’s assertion of the “dangerous” nature of the self as guide and heuristic. First, there is danger in the sense of something fraught with problems, specifically the danger of offering a reified Subject that remains static, a represented self that participates in his or her own cultural constraints rather than cracking through them with the force of linguistic disruptions. There is also the sense of the “dangerous” as a value, a weapon, something that makes the essay powerful by forcing the reader to stand back, to witness an intimate revolt, an explosion, perhaps something akin to Glissant’s disruptive aesthetic of turbulence or chaos (and its gesture toward a contingent ethics).
 
Turning to Adorno’s contention that the essay “negates system,” DuPlessis suggests that the genre itself might be a useful agent in the struggle to undermine rigid and oppressive systems of gender and language. Indeed, one of Duplessis’s major aesthetic, theoretical, and, ultimately, political contributions is to apply to a feminist project Adorno’s understanding of form as sedimented content and his insistence on the critical need for innovative, defamiliarizing, and complex modes of writing to disrupt normative representations of emergent political or ideological problems and thus make them visible. DuPlessis is both keenly aware of and capably performs the contradictions of historical realities and experimental linguistic representations. In the bracketed space between Woolf and Adorno, DuPlessis enacts the idea that “‘subject position’ is ‘language position'” through a mode of writing where “the digression is the subject” (39) and where “Essay is always opposite” (35).
 
Toward the end of “f-words,” DuPlessis swerves to link genre explicitly to écriture feminine:
 

to call nonlinear structures, cross-generic experiment, collage, non-narrative play with subjectivity, temporality, and syntax by the name of feminine follows the French feminism of Cixous and Irigaray.
 

(45)

For DuPlessis, connecting this work to the word feminine is both necessary and problematic. What follows is a brilliantly nuanced tracing of the term and its valences, a tracing that puts her in a productive dialogue with the work of Joan Retallack. Among the many moments of discovery in this dense unpacking, perhaps the two most salient are 1) that that it might be most useful to “leave the terms feminine and masculine in the category of the to-be-sublated” (that which must be simultaneously preserved and brought to an end) and 2) that “any call for the ‘feminine’ in discourse is only interesting when crossed with a feminist, or otherwise liberatory, critical project” (46).

 
As the sweep of “f-words” comes to a close, DuPlessis names the contents of her now full net as a “collectivity, heterogeneity, positionality, and materiality (although veiled under the terms personal, autobiographical, and feminine)” that
 

buoy the essay–give it the density of texture, the sense of implication, the illusion of completeness–in a form that embodies its own fragmentation. The essay is the mode in which material sociality speaks, in texts forever skeptical, forever alert, forever yearning.
 

(47)

She offers a coda-like paragraph of thirty-nine “f” words (including “fugitive,” “fissured,” “finding,” “freely,” and “fold”) that allows us to linger in a lingual fade-out and lets us make sense in the wake where meanings emerge.

 
Throughout Duplessis’s project of blurring the boundaries between poetry and prose, or between so-called “creative” and critical work, what may look like her greatest fault, a kind of mess that seems, at first, to come from trying to do too much in too many different ways, almost always turns out to be one of her greatest strengths. She offers a diversity of approaches to her subjects that cohere just enough to offer analysis and conclusion as well as space for the reader to drift and decide. Some of the essays are pocked by the eruption of verse, and while these moments are a kind of mar or blemish, the essays would not be more beautiful without them, but less interesting. The same is true for her sometimes vertiginous shifts of topics and discourses from the autobiographical to the aesthetic.
 
Often in these essays, there is a sense of mind as drift, chaos, reach, and failure that is also thematically and affectively present in her poetic work. The second volume of her long poem project Drafts opens with this line from Wallace Stevens:
 

“The confusion and aimlessness of thoughts.”

This reference and its sensibility echo throughout both her serial poems (which also function as critiques and essays) and the essays of Blue Studios. The more one reads of DuPlessis, the more this wandering and wondering begins to loop back on itself, tracing and retracing certain paths. Questions get reworked, issues revisited, references (including self-references) start to pile up, and in this work of the palimpsest, confusion and aimlessness begin to abate. Elsewhere, DuPlessis and her reviewers write on this deliberately midrashic approach in her poetry, but it is evident in the essays as well. In Blue Studios‘ final essay, “From Inside the Middle of a Long Poem,” DuPlessis describes some of the central concerns of her Drafts, which overlap substantially with the paths traced in these essays. She writes of being “haunted by moral nightmare, ambiguities about authority, and the demand for awe . . . haunted by Unitedstatesness, given the compromises, failures, and misuses of that global privilege . . . [and] by the losses of many people in the Holocaust and holocausts of modernity” (237). Duplessis attempts to capture what she calls “the endless / Sense of reality” through a poiesis wherein the musical effect of language known in our bodies is inseparable from both our corporeal sense of the world and our understanding of it through analysis, reason, and abstraction.

 
Duplessis’s wide-ranging work engages the particularities of personal life, world politics, and literature and insistently returns to investigate the structure of gender and its histories. In “Manifests,” another essay in Blue Studios, she writes:
 

“Sometimes I have said that this is the reason I don’t write ‘poetry,’ taking ‘poetry’ polemically to mean the gender fantasy structure” (95). In “Manifests,” she stakes a claim to write “otherhow,” as a “determined walk away from the claustrophobia of some gender narratives” (95).

 
Duplessis’s essays work with multiple, and sometimes contradictory, roots and routes. (She tends to pun, a tactic that occasionally feels a bit coy or clever, but really works when she lets the aural association ring strange.) As for roots, her insistence that “digression is the subject” follows Montaigne’s rhetoric of meandering, of which he wrote, “I like . . . my formless way of speaking, free from rules and in the popular idiom, proceeding without definitions, subdivisions, and conclusions” (724-25). This sense of the struggle to represent the nascent aspects of subjectivity is very much alive in Duplessis’s essays. A more directly engaged route runs through the work of George Oppen, with whom she was friends. Like him, she refuses to seek a totality, a closed, positivist work. But digression and the refusal of closure are very different matters; they can coexist, as they do in DuPlessis, but neither Montaigne’s nor Oppen’s work is characterized by both at once–making for a marked tension with these forerunners.
 
In these essays, DuPlessis moves away from the writers she names as mentors and influences, particularly Oppen. Clearly, she maintains an allegiance to what Stephen Cope calls Oppen’s “poetics of veracity,” and she has taken to heart Oppen’s personal injunction to her to work investigatively or, as she paraphrases him, to “make poems of thinking. Use poems to think with” (191). Her desire to stay close to Oppen’s focus on a suturing of ethics and a “saturated realism” is evident when she writes, “there is always a documentary aspect to my poetics. Trying to live in historical time and give some testimony, to bear some (direct or indirect) witness.”
 
And yet her method and aesthetics are significantly different from Oppen’s. Whereas Oppen saw words as “the enemy” and both stopped writing literally and sought to stop down, or to reduce, the aperture in his process of editing and winnowing out anything extraneous, Duplessis’s work is infatuated with words and her writing tends more toward a kind of combinatoire (but without surrealism). She relates how Oppen’s early influence reduced her writing, for a while, to “the tiniest seedlike works” (193), but many of her essays now, as with her Drafts, are an explosion of seeds from the pod, a cattail detonation of thoughts.
 
Analogously, DuPlessis diverges from Loraine Niedecker, another objectivist in her pantheon and subject of an essay in Blue Studios. Niedecker’s urge to “concentrate / compress / condense,” to put words through her “condensary,” stands starkly against Duplessis’s “expansery,” where her most interesting work flowers. This is not to say that her work is chaotic, but rather that while she might condense or spin down to a thread, she then lets the thread spool out, a line of sound and thought sent out to test the void. For example, in the title essay, “Blue Studio,” after walking us through 14 “Arcades” on “gender and poetry and poetics” (948), she offers a bulleted list of definitions of “feminist poet” that includes twenty-nine possibilities that scroll down for nearly three pages and includes:

• • Feminist poet = angry woman, writing poetry.
• • Feminist poet = [woman] poet who is “disobedient” (Alice Notley’s term for herself); transgressive (like Carla Harryman); “resistant” (my term about myself); imbuing knowing with its investigative situatedness (like Lyn Henjinian’s “La Faustienne”) in full knowledge of gender normativities (Notley 2001; Harryman 1995; Hejinian 2000).
• • Feminist poet = poet making antipatriarchal analyses of culture when much of culture is patriarchal; that is, a poet throwing herself/himself into the abyss.

The list is complex and can be read as central to this collection. The essays in Blue Studios that take a more traditional approach (the ones on Ezra Pound and on Barbara Guest in particular) feel competent, useful, but thinner, more predictable. These examples, including all of the “Urrealism” section, contribute to literary analyses of gender, power, and the work of Guest, Niedecker, and Oppen, but they do so without the powerfully estranging language and structures of the other essays in the collection, and thus undermine, to some degree, the project she undertakes in the more experimental essays. Given her significant disruptions in the innovative essays–disruptions that seem to avow that language makes meaning and that when it is used unreflexively it simply remakes the power structures one might seek to reveal and critique–her use of normative language as referential, descriptive, and transparent in the “Urrealism” essays feels like a failure to participate in her own critique and its praxis.

 
Throughout the collection, DuPlessis weaves together autobiographical or biographical anecdotes with expositions of aesthetics and poetics in a way that turns the second-wave feminist dictum that the personal is the political into an epistemology of polyvalent discourses. She examines her ambivalence about the uses of the personal, as in the opening lines of the first essay, “Reader, I married me: Becoming a Feminist Critic”:
 

no innocence in the autobiographical. What with its questions of saying “I” and the issue of “what I” and how that “I” negotiates with various “selves”; and the question of how much (a lot) is unsaid or repressed. With resistance to the cheerful myths of disclosure; with suspicion of narrative in the first place, and no self-justifying memories to legitimate “me” rather than anyone else.
 

(15)

Her subsequent move to a fairly straight autobiography provokes some queasy negotiations, but once she gets to her engagement with feminist politics of the 1960s and 1970s, her assertion that “this is a historical exercise, not a confessional one” is compelling.

DuPlessis also points out the particular pull towards the autobiographical engendered by texts that are themselves oeuvres, collections, or ongoing works. In “On Drafts,” one of three essays that look explicitly at her own work, DuPlessis writes that
 

after a while an ongoing long poem will be read as a kind of “Bildung” as “the growth of the poet’s mind” and so latches onto autobiographical readings or calls forth the body and life of the poet even more than a discrete series of books might.
 

(216)

In some sense then, Blue Studios might be more productively titled Open Studios in that it offers a peek into the messy workshop where we experience the voyeuristic lure of seeing the artist at work even as reader and author distrust the shift of focus from painting to painter, from form to individual, from public to personal, from product to producer. An open studio might also, here, be a boundless one, not limited by a single genre, or subject, or subjectivity, a single history or understanding of history. An open studio could be a place where, as DuPlessis writes, “the test of the essay is whether it opens a space for the reader, rather than closing one” (39-40). An open studio is a utopic space of invention where we see DuPlessis exploring aesthetics, politics, and language.

 
Beginning with her groundbreaking book, The Pink Guitar, and continuing here in Blue Studios, DuPlessis offers a major contribution to a tradition of creative/critical and innovative work that pays equal attention to cultural critique and to literary form, a tradition that includes Theodor Adorno, Hélène Cixous, Denise Riley, Eve Sedgwick, and most of the Language poets, among others. In particular, Blue Studios shares a space, and I find myself tempted to say a faith, with Nathaniel Mackey’s recent Paracritical Hinge. In the title essay, Mackey quotes himself on “the emancipatory potential of ‘discrepant engagement,’ . . . ‘practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity” (207). Mackey describes his project of discrepant engagement as a “critique and a complication” of categorization, as availing itself of “aspects of conventional as well as experimental narrative, essayistic analysis and reflection, diaristic and anecdotal elements,” as well as literary-critical techniques (210).
 
Although Mackey and DuPlessis seem to be engaged in related aesthetic endeavors, they hardly end up sounding alike, and their attendant political projects, while related, are distinct. Mackey’s “emancipatory potential” deals more with questions of inclusion and reception primarily in relation to racial and ethnic minorities (also important to DuPlessis vis-à-vis feminist women’s writing) than with the structural, conceptual, and ideological shifts through linguistic experiment that DuPlessis yearns for and that I hear in Bruce Andrews’s claim that
 

the political dimension of writing isn’t just based on the idea of challenging specific problems or mobilizing specific groups to challenge specific problems, it’s based on the notion of a systemic group–not of language described as a fixed system but of language as a kind of agenda or system of capabilities and uses.

It is hard at this point in history not to be skeptical about the social and political efficacy of innovative writing, but I am attracted to these claims, to these longings. It helps that DuPlessis is fully aware that the literary is only one site in any struggle for social transformation. (Remember her insistence that “any call for the ‘feminine’ in discourse is only interesting when crossed with a feminist, or otherwise liberatory, critical project; rhetorical choices are only part of a politics” [46].) But I suspect I am also being seduced a bit by some sense of engagement as optimism in Duplessis’s writing that moves her away from Adorno’s thorny double binds (despite her frequent invocations of him) and away from Mackey’s more guarded sense of what he terms a “post-expectant futurity,” which he writes, “stands accused of harboring hope” but where hope is clearly suspect, toward a more Blochian, utopian recovery of hope.

 
The crux here seems to me to be not whether experimental writing can be shown to be liberatory, but how DuPlessis’s versions represent a particularly optimistic, reformist, political poetics. This sense of yearning for change, if not revolution, distinguishes DuPlessis from more ironized poetic movements such as the contemporary Google-based Flarf school where the paratactic pasting of discourse appropriations offers a related linguistic disruption and cultural critique–one that uses what Jacques Rancière in The Future of the Image calls “dialectical montage” to “invest chaotic power in the creation of little machines of the heterogeneous,” where “what is involved is revealing one world behind another: the far-off conflict behind home comforts” (56-57). Flarf and certain other post-avant writings often lean toward the knowing shrug or wink; weaned as they are on cynicism, they no longer retain despair’s normative posture of the fetal crouch, and, in fact, might be said to retain only a primal optimism, one to keep going, participating in neither abjection nor optimism. Theirs is a poetics perhaps more comfortable with Mackey’s “post-expectant futurity,” while Duplessis’s essays maintain some attachment to expectancy, although it is hardly naïve. What DuPlessis does throughout her writing is keep the reader focused on moments of (not to get too recursive about it) possibility’s possibility.