from "Graphic Novella"
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
While I am centrally a poet (as well as having a full career as a literary critic), the practice of collage and visual texts has always been compelling to me, as The Collage Poems of Drafts (2010) shows. In “Graphic Novella, ” I continue the collage impulse with a work deliberately unaesthetic and somewhat like a “trash book.” I wanted to be very graphic about some political and historical feelings of what it is like to be in the world now. So there is a sense of the news (a pun involving “novella”) — not seeking the “new” but trying to understand where we all are — the headlines, as it were. The work has many vectors, and tries to map investigations and insights and confrontations with the world as it is. Formally, the work has a page of quasi-collages with poems (a scrapbook mode is alluded to) along with a facing-page gloss of that page. The recto is the “visual/collage poem” page, the verso is the gloss. The dialogic and the edges as things meet and confront each other, doubling or even tripling each other on any set of facing pages, is extremely compelling inside this work. (As a book, “Graphic Novella” is 115 pages long.) People interested in other collage-based works and their poetics might look at an analytic-dialogic collaboration, “Desiring Visual Texts,” that I did with Maria Damon https:// jacket2.org/article/desiring-visual-texts and http://www.alligatorzine.be/pages/101/zine124.html to see my collages and collage poems from 2012.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the author of the long poem Drafts. Surge: Drafts 96–114, from Salt in 2013, folded up that work temporarily. Her newest book is the first “interstitial” work, Interstices published by Subpress Collective in January 2014. Her second “interstitial” work is “Graphic Novella,” from which the pages published here are taken. Also 213 213 213 213 213 213 213 213in 2013, translations of Drafts into Italian and French were published: Dieci Bozze (trans. Morresi) from Vydia editore and Brouillons (trans. Auxeméry) from Corti, respectively. Other volumes include The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), Pitch: Drafts 77–95 (2010), Torques: Drafts 58–76 (2007), and Drafts 39–57, Pledge, with Draft unnumbered: Précis (2004), all from Salt, as well as Drafts 1–38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001).
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1