So this “now”
now emerges, shadows be-fallen here,
and we debate
how vast the eulogy we need.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Entanglements: a representation”
The zone between the living voice
and the posthumous voice
is poetry.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The moon and modulations of lonely”
I am so very deeply saddened by the passing of Rachel Blau DuPlessis on September 2, 2026.[1] After hearing from her partner, Robert DuPlessis, I found myself weeping in my office for nearly a half hour last week, staggered by the magnitude of losing her. And so I wanted to write a little about how I got to know Rachel and her work, hoping it might provide a small glimpse into just how incredible a person, artist, and scholar/critic she was and the kind of massive positive effect she had on the people around her, even to someone who was only lightly connected to her.
***
Late to the game, as I so frequently am, I am pretty sure I first heard about Rachel’s Drafts (1987–2013) in a keyword seminar on length that I moderated and presented a paper for at the 2018 Society for Novel Studies conference at Cornell University. Much of the conversation after the initial quite short papers were delivered—I believe the seminar gave us over an hour for discussion—revolved around the seemingly intractable and problematic relationship between length and masculinity, how literary length appeared to be largely a province of male writers. Throughout the discussion, however, the wonderful Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado pushed back against this generalization, repeatedly stressing the plethora of women engaged in projects of serious literary magnitude, mentioning Rachel’s work, I believe, among others’.[2] Writing a book at the time about what I call megatexts—twenty-first-century texts that are, like its title, Too Big to Read—because my initial work had focused on novels, I knew I needed to look at other genres and that I would need to account for poetry in the time of megatexts as well.[3] So after a very busy second year of teaching at Hartwick College, I turned to the first volume of Drafts, Drafts 1–38, Toll (2001), and presented a preliminary paper on it at the American Literature Association conference in Boston in May 2019.
After this, my reading of Rachel began in earnest when my spouse spent two weeks at a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at Cornell, which, coming with a stipend for childcare for our then one-year-old, allowed me to hole up in Cornell’s library and read, the kind of reading I rarely get the chance to do anymore, what with the demands of parenthood and a tenure-stream job at an under-resourced small liberal arts college, the kind of reading I hadn’t really done since graduate school. And so I read. I read the majority of Rachel’s then-published poetry and The Pink Guitar (1990), along with H.D.’s Trilogy (1944–46) and Helen in Egypt (1961), Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1953–75), George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (1968), four books from Beverely Dahlen’s A Reading (1985–2006), and Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019). Returning to Oneonta, New York, I continued my reading the rest of the summer until interrupted by the academic year beginning and then later by starting a chapter of Too Big to Read on Mark Leach’s Marienbad My Love (2008; 2nd ed., 2013). And then everything, of course, was interrupted in March of 2020 by the COVID-19 global pandemic.
In reading Rachel for those weeks in Ithaca, I learned and grew in ways I have been trying to get ahold of ever since. Obviously the research I did was beneficial to what would eventually become the fourth chapter of Too Big to Read, an essay published as “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis” in the first of a two-volume special issue of Genre on “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women.”[4] But what is probably not perceptible in my critical writing on Rachel was just how much reading her work was revelatory for my practice as a poet. In Rachel’s work, particularly Drafts and the books following it—I’m thinking particularly of Interstices (2014), Days and Works (2017), and Late Work (2020)—I had stumbled into what I realized I had always been writing from and toward but had never known. My experience with Rachel’s work was uncanny, like finding an extra though very real parent I had never known to exist or a mentor I had studied with for years but had somehow forgotten all about. Like other strange tales of anxiety, influence, whatever, I had discovered a poet who had somehow always been influencing my work and what I thought about poetry but who I had never previously encountered. In discovering and voraciously reading Rachel’s work, I felt cosmically validated, finally feeling like what I had been doing for fifteen odd years (by that point) was on the wavelength of something, someone else, was part of a larger conversation, and I wasn’t just the weirdo in my MFA workshops bringing in poems that no one could figure out what to do with. In reading Rachel, I felt like a poet who wasn’t only (still) futilely sending his work to journals run by graduate students without a hope of ever being accepted.[5]
If reading Rachel’s work had only given me a sense of belonging to an experimental poetry community I hadn’t been aware I was part of until then, that would have been so much, more than enough. Having imbibed and rewritten her modernist forebears, including reenergizing the work of H.D. and many others, all while connecting, if at times obliquely, to her own contemporaries through the refining influence of George Oppen (and so much more), I am certainly in no way alone in thinking that Rachel’s work stands as one of the great achievements in United States poetry of the last fifty years, and it is a very likely possibility that one day we will collectively consider Drafts to be one of the crowning achievements in the long poem ever. But Rachel’s work did not only resonate with my own poetic practice; it opened so many doors for me: onto a serious reading into feminist theory, criticism, poetry, and poetics that continues to this day, onto the US modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary long poem, and onto recommitting myself to being a poet-critic, something to which she so marvelously set the high-bar example of throughout her career. Reading the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis was almost certainly the most important literary encounter I have had in the past decade, something that has shaped everything I have done, written, thought, read, taught, or talked about since.
But then I continued my reading, finishing all the rest, all the critical books and Late Work (2020) and more during that immiserating, terrifying, lonely, crushing summer of 2020. At its beginning, I would read for a few hours here and there, and then would take care of my two year old (who was very much a two year old) while my partner worked on her projects. And then I turned to writing and wrote “‘Is an Archive Enough?’” And that is how my family spent each day: caring for each other the best we could while writing and taking endless walks.
But there was one book of Rachel’s I couldn’t locate: Poesis, which had supposedly been published by Little Red Leaves Textile Editions in 2016. But I couldn’t find it for the life of me (and still cannot).[6] I was working not only on Drafts (recently published in a gorgeous complete edition by Coffee House Press) for my essay but on her second long poem, Traces, with Days (2015–27), and the thorough hyperarchival research-completionist in me felt it important to be precise in figuring out just what was and was not part of which long poem project(s).[7] So I reached out to Joe Milutis, who had published a review of the book, to see if he knew how to find it.[8] He did not but offered something better: He suggested I reach out to the poet, scholar/critic, collagist herself. Why didn’t I think of that?
Probably because she had become and still is to me a literary giant, someone who has achieved something in both poetry and criticism together that very, very few other writers have ever gotten close to. And so, nervous and locked down, I did reach out. And what started out as a fairly innocent question about the shape and precise makeup of her long poem projects soon turned into a series of questions, and then one or two more, and pretty soon, having already stumbled my way into a couple of other interviews, I realized that I had already begun what would then become my third critical interview, something for which she was more than game. That was published in 2023 as “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”[9] (I should also mention that in May 2020 we also had the wonderful serendipity to both be published in the “Poetics for the More-Than-Human World” anthology that appeared on Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and so found ourselves getting Zoom glimpses of each other in June and July during a number of readings from its contributors, including our own.[10])
I had never corresponded with anyone like Rachel. She answered me quickly, with complex, attentive, thoughtful replies that also displayed deep levels of care for me and my family, people she had never met. And I was continually struck by something really quite simple but something I nonetheless found increasingly profound with each exchange: that is, the quiet power of her signoff: warmly. Everything she wrote, said, thought, each article or interview she sent me, each checkup or update for years after was a missive of warmth. Each email I received was filled with generosity, with attention and care, even if writing in a challenging mode, transmitting to me again and again in the time of coronavirus real warmth over the cold fiberoptic lines of our network society.[11] Rachel could write as critically, as acerbically, as scathingly as anyone (for example, consider her engagement with the Trump regime in Daykeeping [2023]), but I realized that even in those words there is an unflagging, underlying warmth. Yes, of course, “warmly” is a common way of closing an email, but there was a sincerity and purposefulness to Rachel’s valediction that I have read in few others. Corresponding with Rachel thus became a kind of polestar for me during that difficult summer, something to navigate the uncertainties of a global pandemic by, a salvatory experience that tempered the monotonous days and the endless walks and the challenges of getting my daughter to sleep for even just a short nap with poetry and ideas and conversation and connection. I do not say this lightly, but conducting that interview over weeks of email exchange kept me open to the world beyond our increasingly tighter walls and gave me the courage to put on a mask and step back into the classroom as hybrid classes questionably resumed at my college in the fall.[12] Who was I but some yahoo that had come out of the woodwork to ask questions about her writing, questions ultimately for my own gain (i.e., I was writing about her work in a way I have not written about my other interview subjects)? But she nonetheless treated me, as she inscribed in Poetic Realism (2021) when she sent it to me the next year, as a “fellow literary traveler.” If I achieve nothing else than to travel with Rachel on even a tributary or access road to the one she strode down so magnificently for decades, it has been a writing life well spent.
Over the next few years we maintained contact, and I was always honored that she kept me apprised of new books, readings, poems, et cetera. And so, when I began collaborating with members of the Department of English at SUNY Oneonta, my (now former) colleague at Hartwick Tessa Yang, and other members of my local literary community on the Oneonta Literary Festival, to be held in the fall of 2024, I knew that Rachel was at the top of my list of writers to bring to town. And so I finally got to meet her and her partner Robert the night before her reading, double billed with the inimitable Anna Kornbluh, hosting all for a very memorable dinner at our home. Rachel and I got lunch the next day, and it was like we had always known each other, moving easily in and out of conversation, her taking a notable and appreciated interest in my work and career, giving me some good advice and guidance. And then her reading later that night, largely taken from Life in Handkerchiefs (2022), has become for me since the literary highlight of my nine years in Oneonta.[13] At the reception that followed, my students were delighted to meet her—we had just read Drafts 1–38 in my ENGL 312 Intermediate Poetry Workshop class (and my student Sofia Escobar, now an MFA student at Hollins University, had become a bit of an acolyte prior to that as well)—and she was, of course, warm and generous with every one of them, offering advice, paying attention, caring about them.[14] It was a wonderful, important weekend for me, for the Oneonta community, for the people I knew and cared about, and Rachel was a big part of making that happen. The festival has become one of the high points of my entire life and career.
And yes, all this is also to say that I didn’t really know Rachel all that well: I was not one of her students; I only discovered her work relatively recently; I am not necessarily connected to all the other amazing writers and people with whom she has been in such close conversation over the years. But she played such an important, shaping role in my life, thinking, and work and then subsequently in the lives of many people I know because of that influence that I feel an obligation to trace the ripples her profound commitment to poiesis has caused to stir in the world around me, what has been brought into being by her being, what her imagination has made and changed. I know those ripples will keep spreading and forming, and I will hold fast to her memory while doing my best to amplify and carry forward what she began. It is the very least I can do.
I have spent the last week rereading the books of poetry she published since we first started corresponding, and I’ve been struck by much in them but perhaps most by how important Poetic Realism and Daykeeping might be to understanding and resisting our continuing fascist moment (also here). My initial thought in rereading these books was that I would offer up a little reading of something, like of the moment below (one among many!) that I find quite remarkable and apropos. But rather than offer another commentary on her work, I think I will instead simply leave the last word to Rachel:
6.
Glints of cosmic greenglass pierce our rocks
(blackglass! azure arrivals! jewels of song!)
all from drifts of dust.
It’s cosmic dust.
These matter-swirling beauties generate
our astonished empathy, considering
that all this
is innumerable grasps and gasps of cells
where chancy atoms frisk and frost
setting night and day in motion
where we can see their turns.
Does it matter that we can?
We see them now.
This place, these multiples, this time
barely countable, barely accountable
with the numbers we possess—
it’s an unfinished archive, a trace,
a draft, a drift in the knowable,
neither all omnivorous
nor all complete
but present as colors, mixed
and metaphoric,
just like that.
Crystals of small light fall from a compromised sky.
And once you know what you must face,
you try to wake.[15]
Epigraphs drawn from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Entanglements: a representation” (2019), in Poetic Realism (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2021), 48, and “The moon and modulations of lonely,” in Daykeeping (Chicago: selva oscura, 2023), 144.
[1] For DuPlessis’s current and previous website, see https://www.rachelblauduplessis.net/ and https://rachelblauduplessis.com/, respectively.
[2] Unfortunately, my notes from this seminar do not match my memory, so it might also be possible that Racheal Fest may have initially introduced me to DuPlessis’s work prior to May 2018.
[3] See Bradley J. Fest, Too Big to Read: The Megatext in the Twenty-First Century (currently under peer review).
[4] See Bradley J. Fest, “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” in “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women, Part 1,” ed. Courtney Jacobs and James Zeigler, special issue, Genre 54, no. 1 (April 2021): 139–65, https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-8911550.
[5] For one instance among many of a poem of mine that would never see the light of day in a State-Name (or Other Abstract Locality) Review, perhaps see Bradley J. Fest, “Postrock,” Always Crashing, August 19, 2025, http://alwayscrashing.com/current/2025/8/19/bradley-j-fest-postrock. I am so happy I was able to share this work with Rachel before she passed, though its influences are clearly otherwise. For poems explicitly engaging with Rachel’s poetry, see Bradley J. Fest, Fest, “Blason IV,” Version (9) Magazine 1, no. 1 (Summer 2021): 18–22, https://version9magazine.com/edition-1-volume-1-summer-2021/, 21–22, “2019.03,” Pine Hills Review, July 8, 2020, https://pinehillsreview.com/2020/07/08/bradleyjfest/, and “2020.04,” Always Crashing, December 22, 2020, https://www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2020/12/17/bradley-j-fest-6-sonnets.
[6] Even after trying to was the impetus to correspond with Rachel in the first place!
[7] Appending what I said about Traces, with Days in “‘Is an Archive Enough?,” it appears that DuPlessis subsequently included Graphic Novella (2015) as the project’s opening book (DuPlessis, Daykeeping, 163), Poetic Realism and Daykeeping as its fifth and sixth books, and Blazes (forthcoming 2027) as its concluding seventh book, though its may not be titled Traces, with Days any longer but may now merely be “a grouping of seven recent books.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Secular Ex Votos (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2026), last page. Also see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Other poetry, Books and Chapbooks,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, n.d., https://www.rachelblauduplessis.net/new-page.
[8] See Joe Milutis, “Three Unbooks: DuPlessis, Scutenaire, Scappettone,” 3AM Magazine, August 1, 2019,https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/three-unbooks-duplessis-scutenaire-scappettone/.
[9] See Bradley J. Fest and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” boundary 2 50, no. 2 (May 2023): 1–30, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300579. I had previously interviewed J. Hillis Miller and Jonathan Arac, and have subsequently interviewed Robert T. Tally Jr., Anna Kornbluh, and Paul A. Bové (interview conducted; transcription and editing in progress).
[10] See CHAX: poetry & fine press, “ECOPOETICS series,” YouTube, June 25–September 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI3QGeRLw5mBzMSKcNCly4V2e0wDQPpQI. Here is Rachel’s reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqN1nnsnBqc&list=PLI3QGeRLw5mBzMSKcNCly4V2e0wDQPpQI&index=10, and mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqyHtYGBdzA&list=PLI3QGeRLw5mBzMSKcNCly4V2e0wDQPpQI&index=11. The Dispatches from the Poetry Wars special issue has been published as a book. See Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan, eds., Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary (Brooklyn, NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2021).
[11] For her sustained meditation on gratitude, see DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, Secular Ex Votos (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2026).
[12] Rachel insisted on doing the interview in writing; my others have all been verbal conversations, either in person or via video chat.
[13] To hear DuPlessis read her work, including a complete reading of Drafts, see “Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” PennSound, n.d., https://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/DuPlessis.php.
[14] See Sofia Escobar, Sky Scorpion (Dancing Girl Press, 2026).
[15] Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Cosmos, a Nocturne” (2019), in Poetic Realism (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2021), 16–17.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 