RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS

DRAFT 57: WORKPLACE: NEKUIA This is the place I work This is the workspot, the office a pinhole light blur, tiny orifice a sacred office, scared and/or scarred and/or tiny faces in the tepid arms of film. However, documentary only stretches so far Turn on the work-processer. Insert the bi-mother down the tunnel illegals use to enter the blocked country an inner mist selve carried cavernous that arrays a complex filiated story tension locked with tension of unsorted sorts and shadowy toll. 1 Cannot complete a particular train of interrogation Where does the profit-taking highway go 2 Everything touched is premonitory. The work is waiting for the work. Given a blank space an imaginary page for 19 ways of looking at it why not simplify this what will these intricate layers achieve?

given that the project finding itself out is itself a work more ruthless (restless, rootless) than every before. political, economic, quotidian, shallow, rent, obnoxious. Of the finger pointing look Of debris variously gathered3 Mercury contaminated concrete that someone dumped they grabbed, it looked like fertilizer, luck for their fields. Painful to write and to think such allegory, whose real name is reality.
Story, Herself a mother of sorts. Robert Duncan, The Earth, Passages 19. Cant move em with a cold thing, like economics. Ezra Pound, Canto XIX. 3 the great ritual/ of plenitude and enchainment. Robin Blaser, Image-Nation 19 (the wand.
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Was there a guide? as to normalcy we already know, what is this normalcy? 4 reverse prepay (earnings capture) deal shell corporations off-balance-sheet partnerships Uncertain rain, uncertain harvest the near-starving left still precarious With profit, with profit, even the babies cannot crawl or suck unscathed. The suture occurs on the level of cell, in interiority, so that: Everyone has now been made an orphan. And still no damage yet to the symbolic order? Incentives and subsidies had successfully been offered many industries. And Poetry tries impeded clarities to offer new social symbolism (per Mina Loy) as against the hegemonic joy of war and complacent inequality. Dream of crushed leaves in the gutter water, sodden organic deltas and blockages. Soldiers buried people alive Cannot find words to express our outrage Civilians packed in a building, set aflame for this crime we should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness Pentagon cash for torture tutorials5 Air-sick world ablaze with massacres.

What church/ do you belong to,/ may I ask?/ I sd, none,/ sir. Charles Olson, Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 19. 5 If it is true we must do these things/ We must cut our throats. George Oppen, Of Being Numerous, section 19.

Plus whatevers meant by me6 joined other shivering walkers down, the descent into tangled corridors of strangeness.7 For we travel as doubles, some to the side, some splay: constellations saturated with tensions dialectical shadows in the darkened light threading bemusement, disbelief strands evanescent and heavy, luminosity and ruin, twisted from historical air. Entanglement! Entanglement! yards of line, a wild rope knotting triple crosshatch half shank, scrim shank, overhand loft, snarls caught against the dry-stone walls, broken selvedge, labyrinth.8 One was taking a fourth journey after the great three Two took another journey far past returning home Walkers dazed to breathe the caved-in air holding raggy ropes of carnage to find the way back or forth it was unknown Three got off on a cold track not a station stop but elsewhere Four hid in roots, hid in stones, hid in the unerring pain of being in hiding implacably what happened. One can never look for these. One came back to look for these. 9

swim, from clarity, generative [crystal] turn/ me to this disorder, blunder myself into this field that I/ idiot am already. Armand Schwerner, Tablet XIX. 7 that/ they were there, that events had/ brought them to this. Nathaniel Mackey, Song of the Andoumboulou: 19. 8 A thread, a strand, 72 angels names/ how to go on? H.D, .Sagesse, section 19. 9 Released through bars of sorrow/ as if not a gate had opened but I/ grown intangible had passed through, shadowy, Denise Levertov, Relearning the Alphabet, section R.

Somewhere between daisies, poppies and lead sometimes between book and grid, bronze solidity and light10 between pink grey lavender yellow white and mackerel streaky patch flattened cumulus thunderhead and fuzz ratios pile into a flaxen eye. 1 1 60 over 19 works out as circa pi. The page squares the circle. One lives some paradise in weedy, stumbling places. Textures of incipience, vibration and call. The light strikes; we read the shine struck like a clear bell. Again and Again. Struck. Such wavering overtones as never quite resolve but sound. Even the rests. The whole music shines its no and yes. And more: even our grief shines whether ripped cloth or hollow ring of bone. There was no solution but continuing to want and to go to, foraging some claim or hope of claim to glimpse, not see but half-see half-turned, hope turned not to fix this desire, but to aim. For the book is never whole no matter how it fills or why it makes those claims.1 2 Restless and open, desire touches even pages ripped and crossed out, tarred and tattered, X-ed over and cut from, desire stokes the pages odd, multiplied in implication. If the full page folds, if another page comes loose as loss, if corners of things rip,
I could go on with this. Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, Part IV, section XIX (in toto). I am a shard, signifying isolationhere I am thinking aloud of my affinity for the separate fragment taken under scrutiny. Yet that was only a coincidence. Lyn Hejinian, My Life [section 19]. 12 What book?/ what book? Entire enough/ perfect enough/ to take/ the place/ of all/ the books/ and of/ the world itself. Louis Zukofsky, A-19.
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if tuckered margins flicker while lines cast off, cast forth bleed and tear into estranged notation, If all this there is still unfinished syntax, the clause to come: Then What?1 3 Blunt baffled continuous wonder that speaks in (and for) the convergence of quirks to produce of moving masses whose shape is unnamable statement, counter-statement, and huge sections that dont settle anywhere, errant, nomadic, intricate. A Gesamtnichtswerk. Imperfectly fluent, crushed, and then implacably thrown.

August 2001-June 2002 to whomever wants it

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Then even to have/ been a witness becomes a summary of the/ event. Barrett Watten, Conduit, XIX.

Notes to Draft 57: Workplace: Nekuia. Nekuia is the term for the mid-book journey underground in epics. Sources for the footnotes of nineteens in order of first appearance. Robert Duncan, Passages 19 from Bending the Bow. Ezra Pound, Canto XIX, The Cantos. Robin Blaser, Image-Nation 19 (the wand, The Holy Forest. Charles Olson, Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 19 (A Pastoral Letter), The Maximus Poems. George Oppen, Of Being Numerous, section 19, from New Collected Poems. Armand Schwerner, Tablet XIX, from The Tablets I-XXVI. Nathaniel Mackey, Song of the Andoumboulou: 19 from Whatsaid Serif. H.D., Sagesse, section 19, in Hermetic Definition. Denise Levertov, Relearning the Alphabet, R, (actually section 16; the letter U is her section 19). Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, Part IV, Section XIX. Lyn Hejinian, [section 19] from My Life. Louis Zukofsky, A, A-19. Barrett Watten, Conduit XIX from Frame (1971-1990). The work is waiting for the work, Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, 351. Allusion to the book on translation and evaluation, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz. Newspaper articles and journalists descriptors mainly from International Herald Tribune, August 2001. Cannot find words to express, Chinas Foreign Ministry, cited August 14, 2001. For this crime, we should beg, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, on Jedwabne, World War II massacre of Jews, cited August 23, 2001. Reverse prepay (earnings capture) deal and the next pieces of contemporary capitalist vocabulary from Enron Offered Management Aid to Companies, story by David Barboza, New York Times, April 10, 2002. Near-starving people dependent on an uncertain rain for an uncertain harvest that will leave them still precarious. Story by David Gonzalez, International Herald Tribune, Central Americans Scavenge for Something to Eat, citing Francisco Roque Castro, United Nations World Food Program in Latin America, August 29, 2001. Mina Loy, International PsychoDemocracy, 1918. The Appeal of Psycho-Democracy for the conscious direction of evolution is the appeal to the thinker, the scientist, the philosopher, the writer, the artist, the mechanic, the worker, to join intelligent forces in a concerted effort to evolve and establish a new social symbolism, a new social rhythm, a new social snobbism [sic] with a human psychological significance of equal value to that of militarism. The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover, Jargon Society, 1982, 282. Constellations saturated with tension on the dialectical image, from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, 1999, 475.Statement, counter-statement, and huge sections that dont rest anywhere is a muted quotation from Charles Rosen, lecture on sonata form, Temple University, April 2001. A Gesamtkunstwerk is Richard Wagners term for a total work of art, combining visual, musical, theatrical, literary arts into a whole. Donor drafts are Draft 19: Working Conditions and Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow.