Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading from The Complete Drafts

Authors Voices gives writers a platform for reading their work. It’s an honor for me to be able to present poet and literary critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading from her extraordinary long poem, Drafts, which she began in 1986 and completed in 2012.

Now the great Minneapolis-based independent literary publisher Coffee House Press is publishing The Complete Drafts for the first time in a beautiful two-volume boxed edition.

Up to now, only sections of this amazing long poem have been published, including The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007), Drafts. Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis (2004), and Drafts 1-38, Toll (2001). Making the complete version of this long poem available is an important achievement, and thanks are due to Coffee House for their commitment to publishing important books like this one.

In the words of poet and critic Ron Silliman, “DuPlessis’s Drafts begins more with questions than answers, literally in Draft 1 chasing a bird in the bush, sensing that the right answers need to be further questions.”

I love the exploratory, wide ranging nature of the writing in this poem. It’s illuminating, surprising, and inspiring. The language and ideas are as complex and challenging as the poet’s mind.

DePlessis was a professor at Temple University for many years. She is the deserving recipient of many honors and awards. Her most recent work of nonfiction is A Long Essay on the Long Poem: Modern and Contemporary Poetics and Practices.

Praise for The Complete Drafts

“With recourse to an astonishing range of techniques and material devices, formal concern as inclination and qualm, these poems register, lament, react to and wrestle with erosions on multiple fronts–psychic, social, historical, somatic….They affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between.” —Nathaniel Mackey, National Book Award-winning author of Splay Anthem

“Explicitly playful and serious, generative and interpretive, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts are essential writing and reading.” —Catherine Daly, American Book Review

“Drafts claims a place for women in the American epic. It redefines the genre’s history component to include the social, family, sexuality and daily life–as the Annales School has done for historiography in general. A thrilling achievement.” —Rosmarie Waldrop, author of The Nick of Time

Blau is always engaging, whether reading her work, or talking about poetry, poetics, and ideas.

The Complete Drafts, Coffee House Press, 984 pages, 9781566897235, May 20, 2025, $70.

Buy the book from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores (and Writerscast)

Note 1: This reading was recorded in early February, 2025 when the book was scheduled to be published in April. As of this post (May 8, 2025), it is now scheduled for release May 20, 2025.

Note 2: Last week, the Trump regime cancelled or withdrew NEA’s already committed grants to arts organization, including literary presses and magazines, and more or less gutted the NEA’s staff, simultaneously deleting both NEA and NEH in its proposed Federal budget for the next fiscal year. While we do not know at this time what the eventual outcome of any legal challenges or Congressional actions will be, if you support the idea that a healthy literary community is good for democracy and culture, please support efforts to save the NEA and NEH, and make donations to the nonprofit arts and culture organizations and groups that support them.

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Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning: Poets on the Road

Poets on the Road – Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning – City Point Press – 9781947951709 – Paperback – 176 pages – $18 – June 6, 2023 – ebook editions available at lower prices

This is a special book by two very special poets. I know I am biased. They are both friends of mine, and Maureen I have known for almost fifty years. This terrific travelog documents an amazing poetic journey they took in 2019, crossing the country in a small car, with stops for poetry readings, visits with other poets, cheap motels and funky meals from Brooklyn (where Barbara lives), first south, then west all the way to California and back to Denver (where Maureen lives).

It was truly an incredible trip, originally documented in a blog they wrote while traveling. This book collects those stories and features photos of the poets and the people and places they visited along the way.

I loved this story so much, I decided to publish it, and consequently this book is a collaboration of the two poets plus the exceptional book designer, HR Hegnauer and publisher City Point Press.

Here’s an excerpt from Pat Nolan’s wonderful introduction:

Although a road trip across North American calls to mind Jack Kerouac’s youthful meanderings of self-discovery, this reading tour was more in the manner of Bashō’s late life journeys through the backcountry of Japan. . . . The road trip was in a sense a pilgrimage of reengagement with their calling as poets, and a chance to reacquaint with like-minded friends, old and new, in a far-flung landscape of American poetry.

Venues would include upscale bookstores, coffee houses, museums, legendary used bookstores, botanical gardens, university classrooms, art centers, and artist coops—in short, a unique sampling of poetry environments tracing an arc across the Southern States, the Southwest, and up the West Coast before hooking back to the Rockies.

Framed as a personal challenge, the poets hit the road much in the manner of itinerant preachers and musicians, lodging at discount motels, funky hostels, Airbnbs, and with friends along the way. Adding a social media touch, Maureen and Barbara created a blog of their tour so that friends, family, hosts, and fellow poets might also share in their adventure.

It’s always a pleasure to spend any amount of time with Maureen and Barbara, so this conversation was truly special for me, and I hope for all of you as well who will be listening in.

As further full disclosure, let me add that we were also in Tucson when she and Barb came to visit, so I am a participant and contributor to the blog and to the book as well, making it even more fun for me to talk to both Maureen and Barb about it here.

Maureen’s most recent book is let the heart hold down the breakage   Or   the caretaker’s log (Hanging Loose Press)

Barbara’s most recent book is Ferne, A Detroit Story (Spuyten Duyvil)

Maureen’s website

Barbara’s website

Buy Poets on the Road here. (this link is to Bookshop.org, sales will support indie bookstores)

Barbara Henning (photo by Miranda Maher)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning reading in Tucson, Arizona

What a great trip! Starting January 18, 2019, with a reading at McNally Jackson Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, poets Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning, started a cross country journey together (you can view their trip itinerary here).

Appropriately, their story and journey began in Brooklyn, where Barbara lives, and this amazing cross-country jaunt ends in Denver two months later, where Maureen lives.

The two writers have been blogging about their adventure here – their writing is terrific and fun, it is always fresh and lively, truly poets’ reportage, and reading their travel log will make you feel like you are along for the ride with them. They are having alot of fun and meeting and talking with some wonderful people along the way. They are getting to see some beautiful parts of our country too. Their two months on the road will feature 16 public events, and innumerable anecdotes and stories. It’s really fun to follow along with them as they travel, and when they are done, this will make a really interesting book.

I had the good fortune to be in Tucson, Arizona, when the two writers arrived there on February 14. Maureen is an old friend and colleague, so it was wonderful to get together with her, and to meet Barbara for the first time. When I went to hear them read for the POG Poetry reading series at the Steinfeld Warehouse Community Art Center, 101 West 6th Tucson on Saturday, February 16, and I recorded the event for this Authors Voices series here on Writerscast.

Local writer Steve Salmoni introduced the event. Poet and publisher (Chax Press) Charles Alexander introduced Maureen, and artist Cynthia Miller introduced Barbara, who lived in Tucson for a few years and has many friends there still.

It was a great event, and a wonderful opportunity to hear two terrific writers, both of whom engage with their audience and their writing. I’ve known Maureen for a long time, and believe she is one of the best poets of our time. Getting to hear Barbara Henning was a treat for me, as she is also a terrific writer of both poetry and fiction. I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to present this reading here.

Poet Maureen Owen was born in Minnesota, lived and worked in New York City and Connecticut, and has been living in Denver for a number of years, where she has long taught at nearby Naropa University. She was the founder of Telephone magazine and Telephone Books, worked at the Poetry Project in NYC, and is the author of a number of wonderful collections of poems.

Barbara Henning is a poet and fiction writer, born in Detroit, who has lived mostly in New York and Tucson since the early eighties. Aside from being the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, she was also the editor of a book of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. She is professor emeritus at Long Island University, where she taught for many years.

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