Unfinishing: The Draft Poetics of Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis

My project assesses the drafting process in relation to American avant-garde poetry, from 1970 to 2020.

I identify an undertheorised convergence between textual scholarship and Language Poetry, an experimental group of poets writing in late 1970s San Francisco.

Focusing on Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, I map how drafting became a prominent source of poetic practice and theory, from Howe's radical manuscript poetics, DuPlessis' lifetime Drafts series (1986-2013), and Hejinian's post-publication revisions. This project responds to recent interventions in the contemporary poetry archive.

Mark Byers, Ahren Warner, and Linda Anderson delineate how drafting allows us to read 'poetic texts against an extended timeframe of experimentation, revision and recreation' (9).

Indeed, I will examine Howe, Hejinian, and DuPlessis' drafts at the Beinecke and UCSD, assessing compositional process as well as strategies of drafting in published works.

My methodology blends literary analysis with a branch of textual scholarship committed to written process: genetic criticism.

To both the genetic critic and the Language Poet, the 'draft is no longer a point of departure for the "work" [...] but, rather, a witness to the poetics of writing' itself (Werner 65).

Although Language Poetry is constituted as a late 20th century phenomenon by critics including Marjorie Perloff, Ann Vickery, and Craig Dworkin, key figures of this generation developed their ideas well into the 21st century.

As poets and critics, Howe, Hejinian, and DuPlessis are still experimenting with compositional practice, drawing on theories first explored in the 1970s.

I therefore construct a critical framework for reading the processual tendencies of present-day poetry, up to Howe's 2020 work Concordance. In fact, I contend that the most complex work on drafting emerges in the 21st century. Inherently iterative, drafting holds the process of writing in friction with the finished.