2.04.2009

Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Beverly Dahlen




A Message For and To Beverly Dahlen

The H.D.-ean and Freudian and Duncanesque poetics of significant nodules, verbal accidents, dreams, repeated images as generating interpreted meaning…of entering those dots as through a little hole and trusting that they will open worlds upon worlds for meditation…of the discipline and risk of interpretation as formidable acts of poesis…of constructing an unrolling spool or scroll, never to be completed, a landscape and lang-scape of social, personal, psychological, political, literary, lettristic materials…of articulating a surface and depth both on the surface in a free play of great deliberation and force…this begins to sum up Beverly Dahlen’s work to me. In her practice of writing-the-“reading,” she appears to spin her mind around and through literally everything that can be and can become, nothing foreign, nothing unspeakable, and makes a thread that cannot be broken (although it might be interrupted). This is the hypnotically interesting record, the compelling practices of the mind thinking itself through the world in language. But it’s not only that, but also being inside the thinking itself as a practice of “reading,” which means making, which means representing, which means tracking, which means choosing, which means submitting to, which means risking that one can make this vectored “line” of language that can pulse out of one’s being with a sense of ethical and historical Being, because of, and through thinking itself. This sentence was circular. Precisely. Bev Dahlen’s work, her example, her practice, her risk have meant something tremendous and important to me, and I want to add my word of love and thanks to others’ praise of her achievements.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

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