Rachel Blau DuPlessis (; December 14, 1941 – September 2, 2026) was an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized. DuPlessis became an professor emerita of Temple University in 2011.

Early life and education DuPlessis was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 14, 1941 to Joseph L. and Eleanor Blau. Her father was a professor, and her mother was a librarian. She received her BA in English from Barnard College in 1963, and her MA and PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in 1964 and 1970 respectively. Her dissertation project was titled The Endless Poem: Paterson of William Carlos Williams and The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound.

Career

Teaching DuPlessis taught literature and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1974 to 2011; she was professor emerita from 2011. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visitor at University of Auckland. DuPlessis also taught at Trenton State College (now known as The College of New Jersey), Rutgers University, Columbia University, Université de Lille III (France), and Rijksuniversiteit-Gent (Belgium). She also held an appointment with the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and a residency at Bellagio sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Drafts project In conjunction with teaching and editing projects, DuPlessis wrote her "poem of a life", called Drafts. Among others, poet Ron Silliman has referred to DuPlessis's poem Drafts as a "life poem":More than any other text, Drafts has made me understand the difference between the longpoem and the life poem, and I read Drafts, like [Louis Zukofsky's] "A", like The Cantos, like Bev Dahlen's A Reading, like my own project, as an instance of the latter. Since 1985, Rachel Blau DuPlessis was composing this "endless poem" in canto-like sections, grouped in nineteen units. Their themes involve: history, gender, mourning and hope. The first two numbers of Drafts initially appeared in Leland Hickman's journal, Temblor, two years before being collected into a volume entitled Tabula Rosa, published by Peter Ganick's Potes & Poets Press.

Since then, DuPlessis's "life poem" project was collected in (as of March 2017): Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (Salt Publishing, 2010), and Surge: Drafts 96-114 (Salt Publishing, 2013). In 2025, Coffee House Press published The Complete Drafts in a two-volume collection.

Personal life and death DuPlessis married Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis in 1968. He was the Isaac H. Clothier Professor Emeritus of History and International Relations at Swarthmore College. The couple had one daughter. DuPlessis died in Philadelphia on September 2, 2026, at the age of 84.

Awards and honors DuPlessis was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Temple University, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry. In 2002, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in The Arts as well as the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize for lifetime contribution to American poetry and literary scholarship.

Works by DuPlessis Poetry Wells, Montemora (New York, NY), 1980 Gypsy/Moth, Coincidence Press (Oakland, CA), 1984 Tabula Rosa, Potes and Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1987 Draft X: Letters, Singing Horse Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1991 Drafts 3-14, Potes and Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1991 Essais: Quatre poèmes, Editions Créaphis (Bar-le-Duc, France), 1996 Drafts 15-XXX, The Fold, Potes and Poets Press (Elmwood, CT), 1997 Renga: Draft 32, Beautiful Swimmer Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1998 Drafts 1-38, Toll, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2001 Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, Nomados (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2003 Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2004. Torques, Drafts 58-76, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2007 Pitch: Drafts 77-95, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2010 The Collage Poems of Drafts, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2011 Surge: Drafts 96-114, Salt Publishing (Cambridge, England), 2013 Interstices, Subpress (Cambridge, MA), 2014 Graphic Novella, Xexoxial Editions (West Lima, WI), 2015 Poesis, Little Red Leaves Textile Editions (Houston: TX), 2016 Days and Works, Ahsahta Press (Boise, ID), 2017 Numbers, Materialist Press (Cincinnati, OH), 2018 Around the Day in 80 Worlds, BlazeVOX (Buffalo, NY), 2028 Late Work, Black Square Editions, 2020 Poetic Realism, BlazeVOX (Buffalo, NY), 2021 Selected Poems, 1980-2020, CHAX Press (Tucson, AZ), 2022 Daykeeping, Selva Oscura (Chicago, IL), 2023 Life in Handkerchiefs, Materialist Press (Cincinnati, OH), 2023 The Complete Drafts, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2025

Other Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Indiana University Press, 1985) OCLC 230821945 H.D: The Career of that Struggle (The Harvester Press, 1986) OCLC 868376073 Editor, The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990) OCLC 859655652 Editor, with Susan Stanford Friedman, Signets: Reading H.D. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) OCLC 24724278 The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990) OCLC 715473801 Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001) OCLC 958550498 Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (University of Alabama Press, 2006) OCLC 425970102 Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2012) OCLC 754389718 A Long Essay on the Long Poem (University of Alabama Press, 2023)

References

Selected criticism Jaussen, Paul. "The Poetics of Midrash in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts." Contemporary Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, 2012, pp. 114–142. doi:10.1353/cli.2012.0004 Harrington, Joseph. "Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Review). Modernism/modernity", vol. 20, no. 2, 2013, pp. 397–399 doi:10.1353/mod.2013.0043 Jewell, Megan Swihart. "Between Poet and (Self-) Critic: Scholarly Interventionism in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts." Contemporary Women’s Writing 5.1 (2011). 18-35.

External links Author Homepage at EPC Author Homepage

The Gendered Marvelous essay by DuPlessis on Barbara Guest Standing Corporeally in One’s Time essay by DuPlessis on Anne Waldman "Draft 42: Epistle, Studios" poem by DuPlessis at Jacket Magazine Statement for Pores on-line essay by DuPlessis for Pores, a journal which describes itself as AN AVANT-GARDIST JOURNAL OF POETICS RESEARCH Excerpts from Graphic Novella in Cordite Poetry Review Manhood and its Poetic Projects essay at Jacket Magazine, with the subtitle: "The construction of masculinity in the counter-cultural poetry of the U.S. 1950s". DuPlessis Feature at Poetica.net On the Homepage can be found links to biographical information, a poem Tabula Rosa (Chapter II, Drafts) and a brief piece or "aphoristic-essay" titled Working Notes Rachel Blau DuPlessis Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.