“Now is Night.” In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel asks us to imagine writing this sentence, since surely a “truth cannot lose anything by being written down.” But time passes, bringing us to the midday sun. Suddenly our sentence “has become stale,” no longer pointing to a fact about the world.[1] With this simple observation, Hegel remarks a paradox in the most ordinary uses of language, demonstrating the transitive nature of truth, the historicity of writing, and the mediation of words and sensory experience. We might also extrapolate an insight into the dynamics of literary history, as entire genres of written sentences swerve through time, emerging, possessing something essential, only to have their meanings slip away, fading into echoes of the past.
I found myself reminded of this thought experiment while reading Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Complete Drafts, recently put out in a two-volume edition by Coffee House Press. Originally composed and published over a period exceeding twenty-five years (1986–2013), Drafts is a long poem that transforms Hegel’s problematic into a quizzical engine, posing a series of recursive questions across its compositional time: What is now? What is language? What is the language of now? In DuPlessis’s own formulation, her poem is an ongoing dialogue about “itness,” with “it” constituting an open space of signification, comprising both the word and the world to which language points: “Not hero, not polis, not story, but it. / It multiplied. / It engulfing. / It excessive” (1:105). As Jennifer Soong has recently argued, the “lyric it,” which I would say is also true for the “long poem it,” allows for a crossing of subjectivity and objectivity that grounds interpersonal being in a shared but also motile reference; an “it that is committed to external reality represents a poetry that believes in the world.”[2]
A poem that declares “it,” like DuPlessis’s, opens itself beyond language, beyond form, into being’s capacity for reference, into the way we can posit an outside. Such a belief in the world is also a faith in language, since it is language that creates the deictic signifier—a system of pointing, to adapt Gertrude Stein. Nevertheless, this very act of pointing also indicates the nonidentity of language and world, the gap between “Night” and the darkness which surrounds us. That this system of pointing is arbitrary, never complete, and yet—DuPlessis insists—cognitively and ethically necessary for human being is an inexhaustible mystery continuously reanimated by the act of composition.
This movement of historical time through language—when “Now” ceases to be “Night”—is a signature concern of the modernist long poem, a genre in which DuPlessis is both a leading practitioner and academic critic. For the purposes of this review, I am using “long poem” in a restrictive sense. I am not referring to the long lyric (T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” basically any poem by Jorie Graham) or to an extended but bounded serial composition (George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” Danez Smith’s “Summer, Somewhere”). I am also not thinking of epic narrative or argumentative verse (Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette or Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse). Rather, long poems like Drafts are projects of writing that deliberately open a horizon of composition so vast that its boundaries cannot be conceived or predicted at the outset, wagering that their imaginative and formal projects will remain adequate for whatever the future will bring. The literary legacy DuPlessis writes into is thus drawn not only from Stein’s experiments in language but also from a tradition of modernism that desires an open-ended, unfolding, encyclopedic cultural activity of world-making: think Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan’s Passages, Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading, and Nathaniel Mackey’s “Long Song.” In some cases, such as Mackey’s, the long poem is explicitly and deliberately unfinishable, a kind of continuous, ever-extended practice. In the case of Drafts, DuPlessis devises a structure that can be brought to an end but is flexible enough to be, as she puts it, “finished but […] / not complete” (2:438).
The long poem is therefore a literary artifact of ambitious failure, a point DuPlessis has recently explored in detail in her academic study A Long Essay on the Long Poem. Ambitious, in that such works are propelled by the pull of totality, by the faith that it is possible to provide a fulsome account of everything the world may bring; failure, in that the world will always exceed language’s capacity to give such an account. “[Will] any poet have enough time to get this ‘everything’ in?” she asks in A Long Essay on the Long Poem. “The answer, by definition, is no, no matter how old and productive authors manage to be.” This vintage is worth the price: “One doesn’t try for failure; one achieves failure after a very long struggle.”[3] The multitudinous plethora of “everything” creates the preconditions for this achieved impossibility, especially if one remains committed, as does DuPlessis, to an ontology of small particulars. The “House of the soul,” she writes in Drafts, is “filled with little / things, clay vessels, slipped and glazed / all smallness green leaf offering” (1:15). Every little thing, including the tiniest yods and serifs of language, calls for poetic attention; and yet everything is also stubbornly, gloriously outside of language’s domain. It is precisely this tension that Hegel and DuPlessis each ask us to grasp, feelingly.
The poetics of Drafts arises out of a sense that writing both extends reality and slips away from it. “Nothing is stranger than life,” the poem declares, “Except, maybe, languages. / With words, the world / is more than is the case” (2:347). This Wittgensteinian remix leads DuPlessis to a continuous interpreting, reinterpreting, discussing, attending, and reimagining of the poem’s language and form, a secular reworking of the sacred Jewish tradition of textual commentary.[4] Commentary is a key not only to Drafts’s aesthetics but also to its formal structure, an organization of the poem’s material that allows it to participate in both self- and other-reference. Drafts is composed of individually numbered and titled sections, which can be read sequentially: “Draft 1: It,” “Draft 2: She,” “Draft 3: Of,” all the way to “Draft 114: Exergue and Volta” (there is also, halfway through the text, a “Draft, unnumbered: Précis,” a swerve or exception to the grid, a Gödelian reminder that completeness and truth are not compatible). Cutting across this serial structure, DuPlessis further organizes the poem by creating nineteen groupings of poems she calls “lines.” Each individual Draft can thus be read in two series at once, both as a part of a sequential order and also within its “line” clustering. The “Line of Thirteen,” to take but one example, is comprised of “Draft 13: Haibun,” “Draft 32: Renga,” “Draft 51: Clay Songs,” “Draft LXX: Lexicon,” “Draft 89: Interrogation,” “Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss.” Just as the source and commentary in the Jewish tradition of midrash constitute a form of textual dialogue, so too each poem in a given cluster can be read as a gloss on the other, a speaking back and forth. DuPlessis refers to these relations as folds, evoking the poem as a tapestry, a garment, a textile that pleats itself, joining a singular fabric to make loops, passages, individual yet interconnected. Through the fold, Drafts effectively mediates itself, layering language and experience so that each moment is not just a repetition of the past but also a new relation to those pasts. Every poem is Now, every poem is Night, but both Now and Night are always extended, linked to other temporalities and textualities that thereby thicken time.
What, then, is it like to read Drafts? Daunting, to be sure, as it is to embark on any long poem. The two volumes collectively comprise 948 pages, which include the extensive notes identifying sources for the text’s unmarked quotations and literary interlocutors. But there is something decidedly playful, cunning, always surprising as one reads. The individual voice of a composing mind—in contrast to the experiencing, epiphanic, overheard mind of lyric—is also always present, at times serious, in others playful, often questioning, setting up terms only to then reconsider and write them again. For DuPlessis, “Writing is remembering / and forgetting; it is / beginning and ending” (2:430). And one can begin again with almost anything, from the most traditional of poetic and artistic forms (e.g., “Draft 37: Predelle”; “Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow”; “Draft 40: One Lyric”; “Draft 75: Doggerel”) to the alphabet itself, as in the abecedarian play of “Draft LXX: Lexicon”:
Blasted Bloodwing, fast-flying bitterball,
Bright birdish bleat
it makes, when Blown to the side
its beautiful tree bulldozed.
It and we live, Bested by and
bound to particular plunderers and bandits. (2:93)
Remembering and forgetting occurs through such echoes of Hopkinsian sprung rhythm, exemplifying DuPlessis’s ongoing dialogue with poetic history. But not just poetic history. Drafts weaves in but does not attempt to narrate post-structuralist and feminist discourses of the 1980s, the first Iraq War of the 1990s, the aftermath of 9/11, and the smartphone’s emergence in the 2000s, among many other things. History manifests through a writing that always knows it won’t be enough but nevertheless takes creative pleasure in that difference.
Pleasure, but also a kind of grief. “Anguage” is a recurring portmanteau in the work, evoking a broken language and also the anguish and anger of a broken world, the realization that—in what might be a vernacular rendering of Hegel’s thought experiment—“The future will wonder ‘what the fuck were they thinking’” (2:359). Drafts is never far from the Holocaust, from the ongoing violence of the twentieth century, from ecological collapse, indeed, from cosmological emptiness as such, speeding toward us, leaving us behind: “It is disaster faster / than I’m prepared for” (1:74). Rilke’s angels, who may or may not be listening in on our mortal voices, are a recurring figure of speculative but ultimately secular address in Drafts. There is no one to hear us, but that is precisely why anguage feels so necessary, so ethically urgent. There is no divine order, no transcendental signifier, and so we must write.
Given enough time, of course, we find ourselves to be the ones in the future looking back on our past, wondering what we were doing or, maybe, why we can’t seem to do it again. Reading The Complete Drafts in 2025, almost forty years after the project was begun and twelve years after it was finished, I can’t help but ask if and how Hegel’s Now has changed in literary-historical terms, and what this passage of time means for the open-ended experimentalism of the modernist long poem. One indication of this change: I cannot think of any widely known English language poet under the age of sixty who is attempting to write a similar multivolume, ongoing, questing-into-the-future long poem of this scope and magnitude. DuPlessis’s A Long Essay on the Long Poem is largely silent on younger poets; the poet friends to whom I unsystematically posed this question could not think of anyone; I even asked Google Gemini, one of the technomuses of our time with ostensibly the entire internet at its disposal, and it couldn’t come up with any definitive examples. This generational difference suggests that the world-building long poem in the modernist tradition may have had a specific historical window and that this era is coming to an end, at least for now. The dearth of such projects is even more striking when we consider that the single-volume book-length poem seems to be livelier than ever—think of Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder (2005), M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), or Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony (2020).
I cannot definitively answer why this shift may be occurring, but a clue may be found in Ryan Ruby’s essay-in-verse Context Collapse (2024). That book ends by invoking imploding arctic ice shelves, devastating infernos, and global pandemics of the future, an impending death of the world that renders all writing illegible. This context collapse will be true even for poetry, which, according to Ruby, is always composed in the face of mortality. When the world ends, even the most curious and questing of poetry will, too. DuPlessis’s work, in contrast, always propels itself by way of a kind of futuristic hope, despite her relentless attention to the irredeemable, to grief, pain, and “anguage.” To write a long poem is to presume that there will be time, and writing, even if one knows that, eventually, both time and writing will be no more. This implicit hope empowers the work to keep moving, into decade after decade of composition. Perhaps poets of our time feel that this Now—of no more time, no more writing—is already upon us; the horizon of futurity that the long poem presumes may no longer be palpable.
Perhaps. Yet DuPlessis has anticipated my speculative observation about our literary-historical now and the prospect of no future. “It seems perfectly clear,” she writes, “that we will not outlast the on-earth years of the / dinosaurs. Though this was a longish time—is that consolation? or not? / Unthinkable?” (2:369). For DuPlessis, the ethical answer to such a condition cannot be silence, nor the distractions of aesthetic, formal, or subjective consolation. Instead, only the living act retains a moral urgency. Composition can be one such act, as a testimony of shared existence, as a witness to the continued belief that the “it” of the world exists, even as it wanes. But these moral acts exceed poetry, since the reality of the world also means that we are fully embodied, bound together in our otherness and our frailty: “Rescue children—even if there is no guarantee. Of their future. Of anything” (2:300). For now, whatever night may fall, we have the paradoxical, tender, folding light of Drafts, reminding us that, for a moment, one “lives some paradise in weedy, stumbling places” (1:437).
Notes:
[1] G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), 60.
[2] Jennifer Soong, “The Lyric It,” Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1 (2024): 83.
[3] Rachel Blau DuPlessis, A Long Essay on the Long Poem: Modern and Contemporary Poetics and Practices (University of Alabama Press, 2023), 24.
[4] I’ve discussed DuPlessis’s use of midrash at length in chapter five of Paul Jaussen, Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital” (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 120–43.