Tabula Rosa

by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Duplessis, Rachel Blau

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published December 12, 1988

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

H.D.'s ghost everywhere and the beginning of the Drafts.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tabula Rosa is divided into two parts: "from The 'History of Poetry'" and "Drafts". The poems of "from The 'History of Poetry'" are somewhat inconsistent, but it seems to me that they are intentionally inconsistent, intended to represent poetry in all its forms, as if extracted from an anthology or a "history of poetry".

The "Drafts", on the other hand, belong to a longer sequence. In fact, these are the first two of one-hundred and fourteen "drafts", a sequence of poems that spans four decades and five volumes, including: Toll , Pledge , Torques , Pitch , and Surge . Indeed, "Drafts", is a life's work, a magnum opus comparable to Pound's Cantos and Zukofsky's "A" .

from The "History of Poetry"...

I.

Interior of stone is stone of water, water in stone the lichen skein in water, weft Stone interiors are emptiness spaced wide
all that be empty is all wavering full Interior of wood from want, joined of water, woven threads of void Dark over dark, dark
Arm-wings folded round the heart pulse within the heavy pulse within the heavy laden blackness of the long clicking night

II.

Flute flow
follows bluing, to chee
p̈ watery
Bronyx
cackle.
Thrust any
thrushway
feathers its nesting heart in
egg brown speckle
hatched from onyx night when
round down dawn sliver
silvers
rivers
o

III.

Toe tries
to twig
and then when
double double beat
it
flyz hup
One red reed reach
just one red
leaf jest one
red
poep
rd
ha

IV.

Be.
needle's gold outpointing light thru fan-thin lines in leaves
in which reverberates the note hard hit: irradiated
love

whose every single
cell sounds all
as white, as light
the colour chord entire;

each never-rounded
arcing shell
binds birth to ocean hearts
as much as burst with dark.

V.

Blue breath warbles watery fours
gold breath threes on earth
red spot tuneful voice from high
moist and dry
cold and hot

pulls the massy birth along
sequacious of the lyre's
leaf/leaf.

VI.

Swung over by green star-luminous bugs
under hairy leaf under swollen leaf
half-hollow spots of living light
mistaking earth for heaven
so vast the ancient sounding
spheres so loose
the braiding flimsy
shimmer
everlasting you
over and under under.

Black hold among holes hope among holes black
stones green flashy bugs woof
steady in the air that threaded planet plurals;

space, size,
affirm another orb or two;
hums up inside the wires in the neck
a warp dark tree.

Muck heads in the mudrich mulch under
Night-fresh stars celestial sprouting over
specks of itchy antfast journeys
under earth's plain black bleak place and
white beaked over-eager
time:
those
underplayed and thrice displayed
designs,
random,

that untune the sky.
- Ode, pg. 29-31

from Drafts...

Draft #1: It

N.

N.

==

and something spinning in the bushes The past

dismembered sweetest

dizzy chunk of song

one possible: there is a

silver backed as 'stem'; sugar as dirt.
light this
governed being: it? that?

plunges into every object
a word and then some chuck and
pwhee wee
half
tones
have tune's
heft.

==

One day lose him her
One day lose them

then it melts and dusts tomorrow too.
Me long gone dissolutions of
chunk and humming a-
ddress it.

have seen faces of limestone, stone cold piled
unmortered, wandering, dividing the ranges; it
lettered on green up hillside's social lining.
divions and elborations of property, land-
scape striated with historical sentence.
have seen sheep, knolls, pebbled turds in piles.
A mark, a tuft, a makr a/ a\

makes meaning it's
framed marks that make
meaning is, isn't
it? Black

coding inside A
white fold open eye
open a little
slip

==

To what purpose reveal details of fleshy registers one
CAN have, blah blah their charm? It's not
irony (Really); it's awe.
They are what we are, we are
that,
that's it; it's only what we are, we write our bodies
all and only what begin space
(maybe) by talking
the tizzy dizzy spin at the window the
scars; a meaning's point laid lines weather

...

[Zack]

great book!