Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Abstract

This interview with poet, essayist, literary critic, and collagist Rachel Blau DuPlessis was conducted via email correspondence between June 11 and August 29, 2020. Author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and half a dozen books in modernist studies, poetics, and feminist criticism, DuPlessis reflects broadly on her career in this interview. She discusses the ongoing role of feminism in her writing and thought, the forms of the fold and the fragment, the relationship between her poetry and criticism, her work in and on the long poem, and her post-Drafts poetry, including her (at the time) most recent book, Late Work (2020). The interview concludes with a conversation about the relationship between poetry and theorizing practices and a meditation on writing during a global pandemic.