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| Rachel Blau DuPlessis | |
|---|---|
| Name | Rachel Blau DuPlessis |
| Birth date | 1941 |
| Birth place | Philadelphia |
| Occupation | Poet, critic, editor, professor |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | The Pink Guitar, The TriPartite, The Queens |
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet, critic, and editor known for a long-form poetic project and contributions to feminist poetics and contemporary verse. Her work intersects with movements and figures across twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, engaging with editors, publishers, and institutions in New York City, Philadelphia, and academia. DuPlessis’s career links to broader networks of poets, scholars, and cultural organizations that shaped American poetry since the 1960s.
DuPlessis was born in Philadelphia and grew up amid the literary cultures connected to University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University. She studied in academic environments influenced by faculty and visiting writers associated with Columbia University, Yale University, and Harvard University. During formative years she encountered work by poets and critics such as T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and contemporaries including Gerald Stern, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Adrienne Rich. Her intellectual milieu included libraries and archives like the Library of Congress and the holdings of the New York Public Library.
DuPlessis’s career spans poetry, critical essays, and editorial projects that intersect with journals and presses such as The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, Fence, Pleiades, University of Pittsburgh Press, University of Georgia Press, Coffee House Press, Feminist Studies, and Oxford University Press. Her major publications engage with poetics debated by figures like Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe. She has contributed essays on poetic form and feminist critique in volumes alongside editors from Cambridge University Press and Routledge. Her poetic sequence dialogues with works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and H.D..
Her ongoing sequence, often published in sections such as The Pink Guitar, engages with traditions traced to Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and modernists including James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The Pink Guitar series references and refracts voices from Sappho to Maya Angelou, invoking poetic ancestors like Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Nâzım Hikmet, and Pablo Neruda. Within this project, The Queens section converses with queens and royal figures from histories and literatures—drawing intertextual lines to Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie Antoinette, and figures represented in art by Frida Kahlo and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. These books have been reviewed in contexts alongside authors such as Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Rita Dove.
DuPlessis’s poetics aligns with experimental and postmodern currents discussed by critics including Frederic Jameson, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Her technique incorporates collage, citation, and lyrical narrative techniques resonant with Gertrude Stein and the Language poets including Bob Perelman and Lynn Hejinian. Thematically she addresses gender and feminist histories in conversation with activists and writers like Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Gloria Steinem, and Alice Walker, while engaging political and ethical concerns linked to events such as the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, Stonewall riots, and debates around reproductive rights that involve institutions like ACLU and National Organization for Women. DuPlessis’s work also dialogues with visual arts and music histories invoking Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Arnold Schoenberg.
Her recognition includes fellowships and grants from organizations similar to the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Ford Foundation, and state arts councils such as the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has been cited in anthologies alongside recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, MacArthur Fellows Program, Bollingen Prize, and PEN America honors. Her work has appeared on prize lists and in scholarly discussions with jurists and award committees connected to Academy of American Poets and university presses.
DuPlessis taught at institutions including Temple University, University of Pennsylvania, and other campuses influenced by networks linking Rutgers University, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and Bryn Mawr College. She has supervised and influenced poets and scholars who later published with HarperCollins, Knopf, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and academic presses. Her critical essays appear in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Modern Philology, PMLA, Signs, and Contemporary Literature, contributing to curricula in departments of English at programs that cross-reference faculty from Columbia University, New York University, and University of California, Berkeley.
DuPlessis’s personal and professional life intersects with literary communities in Philadelphia and New York City, aligning with small press movements like Coffee House Press, New Directions Publishing, and collective efforts such as Small Press Distribution. Her influence is evident in studies of feminist poetics, archival projects at institutions like the Schlesinger Library and the Special Collections Research Center, and in curricula across liberal arts colleges including Barnard College, Smith College, and Hampshire College. Her legacy connects to ongoing dialogues among poets, editors, and scholars—linking to contemporary festivals and conferences such as the Associated Writing Programs conference, PEN World Voices, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Category:American poets Category:Women poets Category:1941 births Category:Living people