Reflections on the long poem: Autobiography of a practice 
(Lectures)
1 March 2012
6.30pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Old Government House
Department of English lecture by Professor Emerita Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University, Philadelphia.
A meditative and analytic lecture by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, one of the practitioners of the contemporary Anglophone long poem. She touches on the questions why someone might choose to write a long poem, what analogue poems and fellow practitioners bring to the understanding of the long poem project, and what are implications in poetics for subjectivity, gender, genre, closure, mastery and scale.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the author of the long poem Drafts, begun in 1986, and collected most recently in two books from Salt Publishing - Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010), along with The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011). Other volumes include Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007) as well as Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan U.P., 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004).
In 2012, Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry will appear from University of Iowa Press, completing a trilogy of works on gender and poetry that includes Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (2006), and the ground-breaking The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice ([1990] 2006) both from University of Alabama Press. She has written several other critical books and co-edited three anthologies as well as doing an edition of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990).
Professor Emerita Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a University of Auckland Distinguished Visitor.
