Bio
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic, and collagist, who was educated at the Ethical Culture School, Barnard Collage, and Columbia University, receiving her Ph.D. in 1970. DuPlessis has had a distinctive artistic career in poetry, and is also known as an essayist, and as a generative scholar-critic of modern American poetry.
Her notable long poem, the complete Drafts is forthcoming in two volumes from Coffee House Press in April 2025. From 1986 until 2012, DuPlessis was engaged in this multi-volume long poem. A striking set of the cantos of this long work appeared in the CHAX Press 2022 presentation of DuPlessis’s Selected Poems, 1980-2020. Drafts is the subject of several book chapters, critical articles and an on-line colloquium and set of essays published in Jacket2 in December 2011. Recent poetry (books like Daykeeping, 2022) answer to sense of contemporary crises.
In her career as a poet-critic, she has written extensively on gender, poetry and both feminist and objectivist poetics. Her notable Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and A Long Essay on the Long Poem (University of Alabama Press, 2023) join such earlier works as Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985) and H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986).
Her Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2012) is part of a feminist trilogy of works about gender and poetics that includes The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice and Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work, both from University of Alabama Press in 2006. DuPlessis is one of the pioneers of feminist literary study, both as essayist/ scholar, as a long member of the collective editing the journal Feminist Studies, and as an early contributor to analytic gender studies in the university. Her considerable work on Objectivist poetry and poetics includes her editing of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), helping to begin serious study of that poet.
Collage works by DuPlessis (such as Life in Handkerchiefs) have appeared in several book-length collections, often intertwined with her poetry.
DuPlessis spent most of her career at Temple University (now as Professior Emerita). In 2012, DuPlessis was a Distinguished Visitor in the English Department at the University of Auckland. DuPlessis received a fellowship to National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 2008-09. She was awarded a residency for poetry at Bellagio, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation; she also held an artist's residency at Djerassi. Her work was supported by a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry (1990) and a residency at Le Centre de Poésie et Traductions de la Fondation Royaumont for a French translation of some poems (1992). She also received an award from Temple University for Creative Achievement (1999) In 2002, she received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts; also in 2002, she was awarded the third Roy Harvey Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize.
Poetry by DuPlessis in translation includes books in French, Italian and Russian, and individual works and chapbooks appearing in German, Portuguese and Spanish. For the ten years from about 2005-2016, DuPlessis was affiliated editorially with jml (Journal of Modern Literature). For the same ten years, she was the founding editor and the scholarly and acquisitions editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s series in “Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.”
Websites: epc.buffalo.edu/authors/duplessis/