Rachel Blau DuPlessis
| Rachel Blau DuPlessis | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 14, 1941 Brooklyn, New York United States |
| Occupation | poet, essayist, critic, professor |
| Education |
Barnard College; Columbia University |
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (born December 14, 1941) is 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 was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941 to Joseph L. and Eleanor Blau; her father was a professor, and her mother was a librarian. She received her BA from Barnard College in 1963, and her MA and PhD 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.
DuPlessis taught literature and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1974-2011; she has been professor emerita since 2011. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visitor at University of Auckland. DuPlessis has also taught at Trenton State College (now known as known as The College of New Jersey), Rutgers University, Columbia University, Université de Lille III (France), 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.
In conjunction with teaching and editing projects, DuPlessis has been writing 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 (Zukofsky's “A”), like The Cantos, like Bev Dahlen’s A Reading, like my own project, as an instance of the latter.
...
Wikipedia