"Is An Archive Enough?": Megatextual Debris in The Work of Rachel Blau Duplessis

“Is an Archive Enough?
”:
Megatextual Debris in the Work
of Rachel Blau DuPlessis
bradley j. fest
A feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists. . . .
— Julia Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined”
But the rags, the refuse — these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way
possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
As late as 2009, despite decades of critical writing about the genre of the long
novel, it was still necessary for Mark Greif (2009: 12) to argue, citing feelings of
disapprobation toward the form, “that the ‘big, ambitious novel’ in the contempo-
rary United States does possess a history” (emphasis mine). Critics of the modern
long poem, on the other hand, have felt it firmly established as a category for
some time, at least since Margaret Dickey codified the long poems of Hart Crane,
T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams as a recognizable genre
with a distinct history in her 1986 book, On the Modernist Long Poem.1 There
I presented an early version of this essay at the 2019 American Literature Association Confer-
ence. Thanks to Schuyler Chapman and Racheal Fest for their comments on earlier drafts, participants
in the keyword seminar on length at the 2018 Society for Novel Studies Conference, Joe Milutis for
his help, Rachel Blau DuPlessis for providing some difficult-to-find material, for answering questions
about her work, and for her suggestions, the anonymous reviewer for their helpful and generous com-
ments, and Hartwick College’s interlibrary loan librarian, Dawn Baker, whose efforts were essential
for the composition of this essay during a global pandemic. This work was supported in part through
the Hartwick College Faculty Research Grants Program and the Winifred D. Wandersee Scholar-in-
Residence Program.
1. Though Dickie (1986: 148) claims that “the modernist long poem is not a genre but an aspi-
ration to form,” her work did much to establish the twentieth-century long poem as a genre for
subsequent critics. Four years later, Susan Stanford Friedman ([1990] 1997: 13) writes: “[the long
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14 0 GE N RE
appears to be a similar time lag in scholarship devoted to contemporary long nov-

els written by women. Twenty-three years before the appearance of this special
issue of Genre on “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women,”
which you are currently reading, Women’s Studies published a special issue on
“American Women Poets and the Long Poem” (Crown 1998) and, the year before,
Lynn Keller (1997) published her field-defining work on long poems published
by US women in the 1980s and 1990s, Forms of Expansion (see also Tarlo 1999;
Hinton and Hogue 2002). Is it possible that it has taken the big, ambitious novel
twenty-three years — a generation — to receive critical attention similar to that
paid its literary counterpart, the modern long poem?
Probably not, as such a coincidental parallel is obviously a bit of a convenient
fiction that fails to accurately capture the multivalent landscape of US literary
studies during the past thirty-five years.2 But I do feel that this curious anecdote
highlights a visible critical divergence during this period and that considerations
of the big, ambitious novel in the United States may have benefited from being in
closer conversation with the significant transformations that were taking place in
the study of contemporary poetry and poetics, particularly with regard to gender.
For, even as late as 2009 (and from such a generally conscientious and nuanced
critic), Greif (2009) begins his essay by invoking exclusively male writers —
William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wal-
lace (11) — incipiently perpetuating the familiar masculinist stereotype about the
“big, ambitious novel,” and, over the twenty pages of the essay, he barely men-
tions gender except to ask (and fail to answer), “Why should women authors be
absent from the list? Because there are fewer examples of the form written by
women, or because their contributions are not recognized as examples?” (26).3
Greif concludes his essay by invoking the big, ambitious novel’s “intensive, local
expression . . . to allegorize total knowledge and hidden violence” (30) in the
United States after the Second World War, but his exclusive focus on the novel is
not the whole story. In terms of thinking about totalizing literary efforts, it seems
poem] certainly has ‘currency’ as a new generic category — new, that is, in critical discourse and
not, of course, in poetic praxis.” The long poem is now a firmly established genre: see Keller 1993;
Dewey 2015.
2. Further, such a story would depend on eliding previous scholarship: see, for example, Men-
delson 1976; LeClair 1989, 1996.
3. Until feminist critics challenged its phallocentrism, the long poem had also typically been
framed as a masculinist genre: “Rooted in epic tradition, the twentieth-century ‘long poem’ is an
overdetermined discourse whose size, scope, and authority to define history, metaphysics, religion,
and aesthetics still erects a wall to keep women outside” (Friedman [1990] 1997: 16).

M E GAT E X T UA L DE BR IS 141
like a mistake to ignore the modern long poem and its significant contributions to
allegorizing knowledge and resisting the “capitalist world system’s . . . exposed
violence of its crime and wars” (Greif 2009: 30), particularly the ways that US
women poets took up these efforts in a variety of encyclopedic literary projects
during the post-1945 period. Perhaps a realization that the contemporaries of
maximalist novelists should also include writers of long poems, for example, the
writers Keller discusses in her book — Beverly Dahlen, Sharon Doubiago, Rita
Dove, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker, Susan Howe, and
Marie Osbey, a list to which one could easily add Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn
Forché, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, Harryette Mullen,
Alice Notley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Adrienne Rich, Leslie Scalapino, Anne Wald-
man, and many others currently writing — maybe such intergenre attention might
have produced a different, more expansive and inclusive history of postmodern
literary ambition in the United States.4
So, what would a history of textual enormity in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries look like if we expand our field of inquiry beyond the novel
and take a comparative approach to literary size and scale? Similar to the wall
we often find in English departments between creative writing and literary study,
over which it can be difficult to see or converse, sustained reading into schol-
arship on either the long poem or the long novel will reveal surprisingly little
cross-pollination, to the detriment of both.5 Outlying chimeras exist, certainly,
but their hybridity often condemns them to inattention from either camp.6 This
essay attempts to do some of this comparative work between different genres
and forms, not just by putting the big, ambitious novel and the long poem in
conversation, but by also trying to understand the contemporary long poem as
a participant in a larger twenty-first-century media ecology with a widespread
propensity toward textual enormity.
4. On the ongoing institutional inequities women poets face, see Spahr and Young 2007.
5. There are, of course, numerous exceptions to this statement. Friedman’s work on the long
poem with regard to other genres is particularly notable. She argues that, in the long poems of Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning and H.D., “the novel and the lyric as genres played central parts in their
reconstitution of the epic, roles reflecting not only a general hybridization of genres common to the
nineteenth century, but also gender-specific responses to the genre” (Friedman 1986b: 206). See also
Friedman 1994.
6. Rachel Blau DuPlessis would be one scholar whose insights into the novel have found reso-
nance in her attention to poetry and poetics. See her discussion of narrative closure in Writing beyond
the Ending (1985) and its relevance for her antiteleological poetics. Other prominent critics such as
Joseph M. Conte and Brian McHale have studied both the long poem and the long novel, but generally
not in the same volume: see Conte 1991, 2002; McHale 1987, 1992, 2004.

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As I argue elsewhere, in the last thirty-five years massive, unreadably large

texts have increasingly appeared across media. Digital technologies have made
it possible for artists and “creators” of all kinds to produce, through computa-
tional and collaborative composition, unprecedentedly mammoth cultural artifacts,
what I call megatexts. Megatexts are “unreadably large yet concrete aesthetic
and rhetorical objects, produced and conceived as singular works, and [which]
depend upon digital technology and collaborative authorship for their production”
(Fest 2017: 255). Such texts — texts that are, quite literally, too big to read — are
ubiquitous in the contemporary media landscape. From experimental conceptual
projects, such as Mark Leach’s seventeen-million-word novel, Marienbad My
Love (2013), Michael Mandiberg’s printing of Wikipedia in 2015, and the 857-
hour film, Logistics (2012), to popular forms, such as immense video game worlds
and transmedia corporate intellectual property (e.g., the Star Wars Expanded
Universe [1977 – 2014]), megatexts abound in the twenty-first century and their
presence in both avant-garde and corporate cultural production signals, I claim,
that the megatext is an emergent form native to the neoliberal era. Megatexts are
also beginning to inflect the work done in novels, poems, and other dominant and
residual forms in a variety of ways.
The appearance of megatexts raises a number of questions regarding textual
accumulation, epistemology, mimesis, limitation, history, totality, and ambition,
questions that long poems such as H.D.’s Trilogy (1944 – 46) and Helen in Egypt
(1961), Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems (1953 – 75), Pound’s Cantos (1925 – 70),
Williams’s Paterson (1946 – 58), and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” (1940 – 78) already
anticipated. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis — regardless of era, one of the most sig-
nificant US practitioners and theorists of the long poem — asks with regard to her
own long poem, Drafts (1987 – 2013),
As I have made clear, Drafts is a large-scale project with several of the monumen-
tal works of modernism haunting the author — a work that might . . . be described,
in Pound’s words, as a “big long, endless poem.” This raises the unsolved —
perhaps insoluble — problem of representation and extent: for Williams, “the
whole knowable world.” Knowing and unknowing clash interestingly in these two
citations, as do termination and the interminable. Both speak of a decisive yearn-
ing to produce an encyclopedic work of grounding that explores sociopolitical
and spiritual forces with collage, heteroglossia, citation, accumulation. No one
could now claim anything resembling this ambition innocently, yet the question is
still fresh after eighty years or more. What to do about the long poem? (DuPlessis
2006: 216)7
7. Ron Silliman (2011) raises this question similarly: “The problem of the longpoem [his term]
is precisely one of finding/defining boundaries. Where is the end of the continent, the ocean, of space

Though DuPlessis asks a rather large number of questions with this simple yet
abstract question, she is clearly and self-reflexively concerned with putting front
and center in her poetics the conflict between the long poem’s encyclopedic ambi-
tion to know and represent the totality of the modern world — an ambition she
shares, if critically (for she is interested in exploring the relations in “the whole
unknowable world” [2006: 240; emphasis mine]) — and the patriarchal, monu-
mental, exclusionary will toward authoritarian mastery and totality — that is, the
dangerous problem of extent — visible in the teleological projects of Pound and
others. In the era of megatextuality, the questions presented by the long poem
about the limits of mimesis and epistemology, about the knowability of history
and totality persist, not only because the megatext exponentially reproduces the
long poem’s contradictions and multiplies its noninnocent ambitions toward total
knowledge, but because the facticity of the megatext self-reflexively doubles these
questions back upon its own form: How can one know and represent a text that
is too big to read? How does one read and discuss a form that, though limited,
terminal, and procedural, in accumulating toward total inclusion and endless-
ness becomes, like the world, unpresentable, interminable, and unknowable in
its totality? What to do about (reading) megatexts?
That the questions modernists confronted continue to beset writers and crit-
ics of the long poem and easily map upon emerging encyclopedic forms should
encourage in us greater catholicity regarding what we include in our canons of
textual enormity and more abundant curiosity regarding the possibilities for
exploring intertextual networks. The emergence of megatexts should also alert
critics of big, ambitious novels and long poems alike to the need for expanding our
conversations even further to include film and television, conceptual art, comics
and graphic novels, video games, and emergent digital, hybrid, and transmedia
forms; to understand textual enormity in the twenty-first century requires that we
let these different forms and genres speak to each other, and restricting ourselves
to any single genre may actually prevent us from seeing its salient features. To
start answering questions about megatexts also requires that we continue to ask
DuPlessis’s question: “What to do about the long poem?” The long poem is not
only an important formal precursor to the megatext, and so can give critics and
or time?” For further discussion of modernism’s persistence, see Perelman 2017; North 2019. On
DuPlessis’s relationship to Pound specifically and modernism more generally, see DuPlessis 2006:
236 – 51; Golding 2011; DuPlessis 2012.

14 4 GE N RE
scholars tools for beginning to think about and study massively unreadable con-
temporary texts as a set of interconnected phenomena; its persistence and efflo-
rescence in the era of megatextuality also provides a compelling and productive
site around which to better pursue intergenre investigations of literary enormity.
One of the peculiar things uniting discussions of the long poem, the big,
ambitious novel, and the megatext is the challenge critics face when they try to
create definitions and taxonomies on the basis of scale (Fest 2019). What makes
any particular poem or novel long or big rather than short? Longer than “normal”
or conventional? In terms of the long poem, Joseph M. Conte’s study of post-
modern poetry, Unending Design (1991), remains hugely useful in understanding
poetry’s transformations after 1945 and for providing critics with a productive
definitional foundation from which to theorize the long poem. When proposing
his taxonomy of postmodern poetry, Conte finds two dominant formal attributes:
serial and procedural. The serial poem is an open form; it “articulates . . . inde-
terminacy and . . . discontinuity”; it “is a combinative form whose arrangements
admit a variegated set of materials” (1991: 19, 21; see also Eco 1989; Hejinian
2000). Procedural poems, on the other hand, are closed forms that set “predeter-
mined and arbitrary constraints . . . to generate the context and direction of the
poem during composition” (3). DuPlessis has written a number of essays during
and after the composition of Drafts theorizing the long poem, often drawing upon
yet frequently departing from Conte. In “After the Long Poem” (2017a: 6), she
distinguishes between two kinds of long poem: “one kind is book-length, gener-
ally ending, taking months or a few years to complete, relatively contained. . . .
The second kind [which is what I am interested in here] takes decades to write,
has multiple-book construction, possibly does not end, and is often excessive: a
life’s work” (see also Silliman 2005; Middleton 2010). DuPlessis outlines addi-
tional (and quite useful) taxonomies of the long poem in her essay “Considering
the Long Poem” (2009), but also acknowledges, drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s
(1980) theorization of genre, the impossibility of doing so. Ultimately, what dis-
tinguishes the long poem from other forms is activity: that “is the fundamental
term. . . . Length is simply a way of wagering/waging against and inside time”
(DuPlessis 2009).8 When locating the defining features of the long poem, DuPles-
8. DuPlessis’s (1990: 172) emphasis on writing as an activity, a practice, can be seen as early as
1990: “Writing not as personality, writing as praxis. For writing is a practice — a practice in which the
author disappears into a process, into a community, into discontinuities, into a desire for discovery.”

sis emphasizes its unique modes of making, the temporal processes involved in
producing textual excess, rather than focusing on the object that emerges from
this activity.
And in terms of sheer activity, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s ongoing work — which
is both serial and procedural, closed and open, book-, multivolume-, and life-
length — readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking about the long poem’s
transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its relationship to
other huge contemporary forms. Since the completion of Drafts in 2012, DuPles-
sis has embarked on a second project: a series of interstitial works that serve as a
bridge to Traces, with Days (2017 – ), a long poem that is simultaneously several
(at least two) poems. Together, Tabula Rosa (1987), which contains the first two
poems from Drafts and the portal poem, “Writing” (1985), the five volumes of
Drafts, her interstitial works — Interstices (2014), Poesis (2016; see Milutis 2019),
and the visual collage-poems “Churning the Ocean of Milk” (2014), Graphic
Novella (2015a; a portal poem to Traces, with Days), and NUMBERS (2018) — and
the published, alternating volumes of Traces, with Days — Days and Works (2017),
Late Work (2020), and Around the Day in 80 Worlds (2018) — these books collec-
tively constitute what DuPlessis (2015b) calls “a triptych of works,” an immense
yet provisional, bounded, discretely realized, and antiteleological lifetime exer-
cise in textual enormity, in variations on the long poem form, which surpasses in
scope and accomplishment the work of even the most ambitious modernist and
postmodernist poets (though “an endless series is a difficult poetics / because you
will die / before you can finish it” [DuPlessis 2018: 24]).9 In a press release no lon-
ger online (because the press folded), DuPlessis frames the publication of Days
and Works as part of this lifetime exploration of long poetic forms: “Finished and
unfinished have nothing to do with this. The operable terms for the long poem
are activity (praxis or poesis — the practice of making) and desire. . . . Funda-
mentally, the long poems, the serial poems, the book length works show a desire
or drive to be endlessly making something ‘all about everything,’ inside poesis
itself ” (quoted in Tabios 2017; emphasis mine). For DuPlessis, the act of writing
9. In email correspondence, DuPlessis described to me some of the (provisional) structure of

her post-Drafts work (to which I owe some of the above description) and emphasized that “once any
serious bunch of poems and texts gets large, becoming a life’s work, it’s all oeuvre, but I have no
need now to declare a super-whole, an over-arching mega-poem (to use your terms) or total poem
out of what I have done” (pers. comm., July 7, 2020). Other texts that are part of DuPlessis’s second
ongoing project but have yet to see full publication include Eurydics, Life in Handkerchiefs, Poetic
Realism, and Storyboard.

14 6 GE N RE
poetry involves an impulse toward endless textual production; inside poiesis itself
is a kernel, a desire, a drive to manifest length and excess, to produce long poems.
And I cannot overstate DuPlessis’s achievements in the form. Ron Silliman
has said that “Drafts is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our
time” (DuPlessis 2004a: back cover), and in 2011, on the occasion of DuPlessis’s
retirement from Temple University, Bob Perelman (2011) suggested that the com-
pletion of Drafts “will . . . mark a major fact in anglophone poetic history.” With-
out hyperbole, DuPlessis’s work in revising, rewriting, and reclaiming the ground
of the modernist long poem for ethically resistant contemporary ends might be
understood as a culminating event in the history of the long poem beyond which
it will be difficult to go. DuPlessis’s work responds, through both serialization
and proceduralism, to the epistemological and mimetic aporias presented by
the “endless dialogue between closed and open” (DuPlessis 2013b: 1), between
trying to capture the whole world and leaving the work open for the unknown
and unknowable, the emergent and the possible. That DuPlessis’s works are also
digitally inflected, collaborative, and massive yet bounded long poems drawing
upon the huge variety of information available to contemporary subjects means,
if they are not a megatext proper (they are readable, after all), then her oeuvre is
something very close, approaching (yet resisting) megatextuality, a work with a
palpable if always oppositional megatextual impulse.10 DuPlessis’s struggle with
and against the accumulatory logics of the neoliberal present also animates her
work in the long poem in a fashion similar to how she suggests H.D.’s career is
animated by a struggle for authority (DuPlessis 1986). If we consider DuPlessis’s
work not only in terms of the postmodern long poem and its navigation of the
form’s conflicts and contradictions, but also understand it as part of a corpus of
twenty-first-century cultural artifacts whose principal form is similarly accumu-
latory, hyperarchival, megatextual, then it offers a striking number of resources
for maneuvering among and struggling against the accumulatory logics of the
present.
DuPlessis’s activity in the long poem over the past thirty-five years high-
lights how the form might inhabit and address the neoliberal era, the era of big
data and financialization, globalization, climate crisis, the forever war, and the
ongoing immiserations of late capitalism. Though Drafts, Traces, with Days, and
10. DuPlessis stated unequivocally to me: “I deliberately did NOT make [Drafts] a megatext.
This was a conscious decision. Almost, but not” (pers. comm., June 8, 2020).

her interstitial work are plainly and often agonistically indebted to their precur-
sors while disavowing at every level of composition a patriarchal will toward
totality, and all of her work displays an ethics of witnessing, returning again and
again to the atrocities of history and the various intersections, complicities, and
potentials for transformation that history shares with modern poetry, DuPles-
sis’s work is also thoroughly contemporary, responding in various ways to the
economic, military, political, social, and environmental upheavals of the twenty-
first century by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris.
Rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumula-
tion without end — the kind of horizonless accumulation visible in everything
from superhero films and reality television to Jonathan Basile’s Library of Babel
(2015) — DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext’s phallogocentric form
against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means — socially, cul-
turally, economically — to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accu-
mulation. In DuPlessis’s hands, the long poem becomes a mode for enacting a
documentary, provisional, self-reflexive, nonteleological, and megatextual ethics
of salvage, for continually reactivating the ongoing feminist project of cultural
transformation.
Drafts as Megatextual Debris

Begun in 1986 and completed in 2012, DuPlessis’s Drafts spans the era of ascen-
dant neoliberalism (see Harvey 2005; Mirowski 2013; Brown 2015). Consisting
of 114/115 serial poems collected in five volumes that run to over one thousand
pages (including notes), Drafts is a poem of the archive and of crisis, of neg-
ativity and presentist reinterpretation that collects the debris of modernity in
order to work “with the visceral surges and material densities of language . . .
with excess, to excess” (DuPlessis 2006: 209). Throughout, DuPlessis is con-
spicuously concerned with the past, with memory and loss, with the traumas of
the twentieth century, what she calls in one interview “a century of enormity”
(DuPlessis 2004b: 407). Exploring how “the Holocaust actively shapes the for-
mal presentation of DuPlessis’s long poem,” Walter Kalaidjian argues that “for
DuPlessis[,] the task of bearing ‘witness / after the eclipse of witness’ poses
the urgent, post-Auschwitz question of the ethics of poetic form” (Kalaidjian
2006: 87, 89). The poems in Drafts begin and then begin again with the ongoing
horrors of modernity through formal involvement with the long poems of H.D.,

148 GE N RE
Olson, Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and many others. Rather than try to “repre-
sent” atrocity — DuPlessis frequently claims that her work is antimimetic — she
secularizes the Talmudic method of commentary known as midrash, a mode of
endless scriptural interpretation, in order to read and reread, write and rewrite
the historical archive and the modernist long poem, along with her own work,
in “continuous chains of interpretation,” “doubled and redoubled commentary,
poetry with its own gloss built in . . . ‘otherness inside otherness’ ” (DuPlessis
1990: 162; 2006: 210). As she says in The Pink Guitar (1990): “The practice of
writing is already a reading, of the writing already written, of the saturated page”
(173), and the aim of DuPlessis’s reading and rewriting is nothing less than cul-
tural transformation.
It is this latter point that has so far been somewhat obscured by the nonethe-
less important critical attention paid to DuPlessis’s work and its relationship to
history. For example, in her important early reading in Forms of Expansion, Keller
paves the way for many subsequent critics by primarily focusing on the ways that
Drafts draws upon the tradition of the modernist long poem. Kalaidjian admira-
bly discusses DuPlessis’s work of mourning in relationship to historical trauma
but fails to connect Drafts to its explicit contemporary concerns. And though
Paul Jaussen’s (2012: 121) excellent essay on Drafts’ poetics of midrash observes
that “DuPlessis’s . . . historical sensibility is shaped by the present moment,”
rather than pursue this insight at greater length, he too primarily focuses on her
indebtedness: to the work of George Oppen and how she responds to Theodor
Adorno’s (in)famous declaration about poetry after Auschwitz. This critical focus
on DuPlessis’s midrashic encounter with the archive is commendable and makes
sense as a way to begin discussing a challenging and densely woven text that
assiduously documents the sources upon which it draws. But such a focus does
tend to gloss over DuPlessis’s considerable ambitions as a contemporary poet,
scholar, and essayist speaking to her present world.11
Discussing the ongoing project of feminist criticism, DuPlessis (2006: 31)
writes: “I have felt that feminist re-vision would necessitate the multiple, forceful,
and polyvocal invention of a completely new culture and the critical destabiliz-
ing, indeed the replacement, of the old”; and elsewhere: “I realized . . . that out of
11. Notable recent exceptions to my generalization about historical approaches to Drafts are:
Rifkin 2010; Tarlo 2011. For other approaches to Drafts, see Hatlen 2000; Tarlo 2002; Pritchett 2011;
Carberry 2019.

feminism, all culture would have to be changed” (DuPlessis 2004b: 417).12 (Susan
Stanford Friedman [1986a: 49]: “First deconstruct, then reconstruct the world
of letters.”) DuPlessis says that Drafts’ very “ ‘form’ is ambition” (2006: 217),
and this ambition consists in nothing less than feminist cultural transformation.
Drafts rereads and rewrites the past to change the present, to step away from the
violent trajectory of modernity toward something else, to explore how, referring
to the events of September 11, 2001 and the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003,
“One’s building used as a weapon / leaves a mark,” and so we must find some
way to “begin again . . . / to back away from / where this had been” (DuPlessis
2007: 2, 3), “this” being, as so often happens in DuPlessis’s poetry, so much.
She writes in 2012: “in this difficult historical period of writing. . . . I feel, as
Theodor Adorno once said, ‘migrated into’ by our current realities, infused in
every cell by an on-going world crisis of global plunder, ecological shocks, eco-
nomic depredation, gender wrongs, and national malfeasance. The political world
infuses everything we are. I express it continuously . . . here, now,” this, “that”
(DuPlessis 2013b: 17; 2007: 44 – 47). The immiserating realities of the twenty-first
century are multiple and overwhelming, and as these various crises inflect all
planetary activities, DuPlessis explicitly sees her poetry, including her midrashic
encounter with the archive, as a way of navigating this sense of overwhelmedness
and demonstrating how much we need to remake our world. To fully understand
DuPlessis’s achievement then, we should position her antimonumental “ ‘Gesamt
nichtwerk’ ” (DuPlessis 2001: 29) not only amongst the “Black megaliths of
memory” (DuPlessis 2004a: 194) to which it certainly belongs, the work of Paul
Celan, Robert Duncan, Edmond Jabès, Gertrude Stein, and so many other writers
who inscribe the catastrophes of the twentieth century into their poetry, but also
emphasize its feminist resistance to the hyperarchival impulse of contemporane-
ity and the ongoingness of atrocity in the twenty-first century.
In the opening pages of “Draft 1: It” (1987), DuPlessis’s (2001: 7) ambiguous
speaker asks, “There’s no way to read it?” This question hangs emblematically
over the entire project. Though Drafts and the serial poems that influence it are
difficult, open, untranslatable, and flirt with a sense that, in the absence of human
12. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970: 22) has been particularly important for DuPlessis’s
thinking: “unless we eliminate the most pernicious of our systems of oppression, unless we go to the
very center of the sexual politic and its sick delirium of power and violence, all our efforts at liberation
will only land us again in the same primordial stews.”

150 GE N RE
finitude, they would go on endlessly, far beyond the point of readability, none of
these texts is literally unreadable; many people have read every word in them in
a semireasonable amount of time. Though Drafts, like any text, might resist acts
of hermeneutic totalization, we can read it, at least from the first page of Drafts
1 – 38, Toll (2001) to the last page of Surge: Drafts 96 – 114 (2013). Nonetheless,
Drafts is self-consciously aware that, in some ways, it is too big to read: “There’s
no way to read it?” — is there?
Perhaps not, for the “it” the question refers to is ambiguous and multiplicitous.
“It” is, of course, Drafts itself, and the speaker is “Inside the it of it” (DuPlessis
2004a: 68), but “it / is it” (2001: 9): that is, “it” is nothing more than the letters “i”
and “t” on the page, the word it. “It” is, importantly, also “Dahlen’s A Reading . . .
an ‘it,’ a space half-entered” (DuPlessis 1990: 112), a text that already “points
to [(another?)] ‘it,’ ‘it’ [that] takes the place of the ‘infinitely small,’ pointing to
the enigmatic self-similarity of the real, which is . . . impossible to represent in
language” (Dahlen 1989: 218).13 And, of course, “It is [also] the / ‘it’ characteristic
of everything” (DuPlessis 2001: 8), the deictic capacity of the word it to signify,
because syntagmatically indeterminate (in this case), anything, any entity what-
soever. It is
Allegro, largo, presto, dominato, and elegy.
Cifar, naam, vak, datum, klas,
plastic, glass, package, trademark, umbrella,
batteries, pen, leather, reflector shatter,
cellophane, spring spirals, filigree naturewire,
cap nut, square nut, wing nut, lug,
bolts and clamps, telephone listings, bulb sprok,
nails, foil, coins, toys, watch,
tools, trinkets, tickets
and quivering filament.
(DuPlessis 2001: 143)14
“It” is also, according to the first of Drafts’ forty-three pages of notes, the work
of David Hannah, Celan, Marcel Duchamp, Stein, H.D., Oppen, Stephane Mal-
larmé, Paul Auster, Regina Schwartz, Mary Jacobus, Luce Irigaray, Anselm Kiefer,
13. Though I do not have the space for it here, the influence of Dahlen’s work on DuPlessis, par-
ticularly her ongoing long poem, A Reading (1980 – 2006), is considerable and deserves further atten-
tion, including the way Dahlen has explicitly said that she wants to “postpone, or defer, conclusions or
closure perhaps forever” (2013: 61). On Dahlen, see Keller 1997: 253 – 75; Friedlander 2004: 217 – 23;
Jaussen 2010. For an important discussion of deixis and indeterminacy, see Perloff 1999: 3 – 44.
14. As Keller (1997: 292 – 301) has pointed out, this list contains many of the materials included
in the sculpture of the anonymous outsider artist dubbed the “Philadelphia Wireman,” whose sculp-
tures appear on the cover of Pledge, the second volume of Drafts.

Sharon Friedler, Annette B. Weiner, Kurt Schwitters, Emily Dickinson, Reme-

dios Varo, the Audubon Society, and James Scully (DuPlessis 2001: 269). “It”
is the whole hyperarchive of culture DuPlessis draws upon, the enormity of the
dictionary, and everything to which the words found therein refer. The poem, in
beginning with “it,” admits the poet’s own textual oversaturation and projects the
largest totality possible — all things that “it” might refer to, that is: everything:
“the universe, the earth, our history and politics, the sense of the past, and the
more febrile sense of the future: in short, plethora, hyper-stimulation, an over-
whelmedness to which one responds” (quoted in Tabios 2017).
DuPlessis responds to plethora with plethora, with an unbound encyclope-
dic poiesis of assemblage and emergence, multiplying the connections between
constellations of diverse if often unknowable material that she then reassembles
in new ways, creating something else. In this, Drafts participates in what I have
elsewhere called the hyperarchival impulse of contemporaneity, which I define
as the drive to gather together as many documents, texts, artifacts, and data as
possible, regardless of content or purpose (Fest 2018). Such hyperarchivalism is
concomitant with the economic, ideological, and technological regime of neo-
liberalism, a regime that depends for its perpetuation upon an informatic and
algorithmic global impulse toward “big data” accumulation in order to prop up
its insistence that the market’s drive for individual profit makes it a kind of super-
computer for organizing all aspects of human life amidst the unknowable trans-
finite enormity of connections that make up our world. The National Security
Agency’s mass collection of US citizens’ metadata, the extractivism producing
a climate crisis that endangers all life on earth, and the obscene accumulation of
wealth by the one percent all display the hyperarchive fever of contemporaneity.
We live in hyperarchival times, and Drafts is an explicitly hyperarchival poem.
But for DuPlessis (2006: 247), importantly, the experience of hyperarchival-
ism, the “position of being swamped with too many stimuli,” is explicitly “femi-
nine.” She desires to “write a lot of women’s words” and notes how Dorothy Rich-
ardson, Stein, “Notley and . . . Howe have also indicated the need for a cultural
responsibility to women by creating large and encompassing structures with a
female signature” (DuPlessis 2004b: 403, 404; see also DuPlessis 2005a). Length,
excess, size — in DuPlessis’s work, literary magnitude is not a mark of masculin-
ity, of a phallic preoccupation with bulk. Rather, the size and hyperarchivalism
of Drafts stand as resistant bulwarks to hegemonic, patriarchal power. DuPlessis
has been vocal about her ambivalent relation to the lyric (2006: 221 – 23; 2013a;

152 GE N RE
2005b). And so her long poem, in contrast to shorter, lyrical forms, is a produc-
tive act of negativity, feminist revision, and critical resistance to the modern-
ist long poem through rewriting, reinterpretation, destruction, appropriation,
and, ultimately, “a way of starting poetry all over again, differently” (DuPlessis
2013a: 47).
So, is there any way to read it, to read Drafts? DuPlessis’s project is an exer-
cise in an ethics of salvage, an “ethics of debris” (DuPlessis 2019a: 106), reading
and writing hyperarchivally not in order to produce some phallic, masculinist
totality, but instead to “See also debris” (DuPlessis 2001: 70; see also Golding
2018; Williams 2011). To quote at length in the spirit of further active midrashic
recombination: Drafts is littered with debris, with a “house . . . built on a dump”
(DuPlessis 2001: 37), “junk subdued, junk exaggerated” (2001: 68) “in broken,
unrecoverable objects” (2001: 80) “even erasure is erased” (2001:81); it assembles
“particles. shards” (2004a: 25), “ash and flake” (2004a: 65), “data or dada . . .
compulsions of rubble” (2004a: 81), “nomadic pieces in the workshop of abyss”
(2004a: 138), “blackened, barred-out lines” (2004a: 148) — “ ‘All culture, / after
Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, / is garbage’ ” (2004a: 153) — “refuse,
shit” (2004a: 153), “scraps re-collected / in tranquiddity” (2004a: 178), “the piles
of / pleading bones and rotting bodies” (2004a: 2019), “a sludge-filled ditch”
(2007: 40), “fractal fragments firm” (2007: 82), “gleaning” (2007: 83), “people
smashed into pieces” (2007: 115), “luminosity and ruin” (2007: 120), “this ran-
dom pile of stuff” (2007: 129), “the typos of excess as loss” (2010b: 87), “monu-
mentality / broken and scattered” (2010b: 92), “ ‘stony rubbish’?” (2013: 101),
“that is a fragment. Like everything else” (2007: 47), “a theory of debris” (2007:
133): “How can time be made demonstrable except by its debris?” (2001: 73).
With Drafts’ assemblage of historical and contemporary debris, DuPlessis
tries to make demonstrable the enormity of the twentieth century and the political
situation of the twenty-first, to make a new analytic, temporal, and poetic constel-
lation form. Writing in 2003, she directly addresses the US invasion of Iraq: “It
is a terrible moment, a fearsome moment, in which poetry may question itself,
testing its complicity with a world turning very bad, very damaging” (2006: 238).
Against the neoliberal realities and desolations of US empire, Drafts offers no
redemptive vision of organic wholeness. DuPlessis’s working with excess, then,
differs from the modernist long poem in an important way. Though Paterson or
“A” projects endlessness, they do not take the archive of the long poem as their
starting point. Drafts is a latecomer; it begins with hyperarchivalism, struggling

with and against megatextual debris. The modernist long poem in DuPlessis’s
hands, though a genre of textual enormity and accumulation, is a scrap, a shard
of a catastrophic century. By hyperarchivally assembling the debris of the long
poem en masse through midrashic accumulation, Drafts seeks to transform the
long poem and its history, to turn from a century of enormity toward an ethics
of salvage and cultural reconfiguration that can address and attempt to halt the
ongoingness of catastrophe in contemporaneity. Drafts’ palimpsestic multiplicity,
which layers and folds in upon itself again and again, seeks to undo and over-
whelm by accumulation the work of the Eliots and Pounds of the world, to raze
monuments of patriarchal, racist, misogynist, fascist totality, pick through their
rubble, and reuse whatever small speck it might find for rather different ends.
Drafts is thus a postmodern inheritor of the modernist long poem and a
work that participates in a speculative twenty-first-century megatextuality, for
DuPlessis’s “actual text” consists of material well beyond Drafts’ five volumes:
it spreads connections collaboratively throughout the literary archive, projecting
as its provisional, antiteleological, folded, and multiplied horizon the absolutely
unreadable hyperarchive of twentieth-and twenty-first-century poetry and poet-
ics: “The whole archive is an argument” (2007: 52; see Jewell 2011). DuPlessis
importantly resists, however, the sense that the magnitude of a long form is a
mark of its quality. DuPlessis’s project is
To vow to write so that
if, in some aftermath, a few shard words
chancily rendered, the potchked scrap of the human
speck
washed up out of the torn debris, to write
so that
if your shard emerged from the shard pile
people would cry, and cry aloud “look! look!”
If yours were the only poem
the only fragment
left [to] those who came after
(DuPlessis 2001: 92)
DuPlessis is clear: everything from Drafts except a piece of debris might be

destroyed, lost, forgotten, ignored in history’s burning archive, but if one shard
of it remains, and if there is someone around to dialogically cocreate that scrap
in the aftermath, the writing has been worthwhile. Drafts positions itself as a
bulwark against the destructive realities of history. The bigger something is, the
likelier a piece of it will survive, and so DuPlessis also paradoxically uses Drafts’

154 GE N RE
size as a way of eventually (inevitably) returning to smallness, partiality, debris.15

Drafts is a very long poem, but it does not have to be: it can do its work of poten-
tial futurity in fragments, in miniature, and its value both arises from and resides
in any small detail it might assemble — in a yod: “I figure this dot, imagined
as the smallest Hebrew letter, ‘yod,’ as a pinhole through which ‘it’ all enters”
(DuPlessis 2010a: 211). Rewriting and revisiting the modernist long poem allows
DuPlessis to interrogate what it means to make massive texts today and what it
means to read them and participate in their cocreative, midrashic dialogue for
tomorrow. Which means that Drafts takes on, struggles with, hypertrophically
works through, and, by instantiating an ethical poiesis of activity and salvage,
offers a mode of resisting the megatextuality and hyperarchivalism that are defin-
ing features of the neoliberal era. “There’s no way to read it?” Yes, there is, but
only if we continue actively transforming what it is and what it might be.
“Is an Archive Enough?”: Traces, with Days

Since the publication of Drafts’ final volume, DuPlessis has not ceased transform-
ing what it is and might be. In “Draft 98: Canzone” (2012), the poem’s speaker
speculates:
Afterward, I could perhaps write interstitial poem after interstitial poem, filling
gaps that have opened and that exist (have in fact always existed) between every
single word, obliterating the work until it is one over-w ritten, unreadable, but
theoretically conceptual and thus critically consumable textual object whose laws
and rules have, over time, become superstructure. Or I could refuse to. Afterward,
I could begin again backwards, moving from the end to the beginning. (DuPlessis
2013b: 36)
Just as Drafts ends but does not end, completes its work by turning toward some-
thing else — its final line: “Volta! Volta!” (160) — DuPlessis’s subsequent work
begins (and continues) by exploring Drafts’ interstices while simultaneously
unworking it to “unbegin / ungain,” “an undoing as a doing” (DuPlessis 2014:
2; 2020: 50).
Drafts is most immediately followed in 2014 by Interstices, which, like
DuPlessis’s other post-Drafts books, midrashically revisits many of Drafts’ key
terms and concepts: debris, indeterminate deixis (“it”), folds, turns, “illegible
dots,” and much else: “the light of syntax, which is condensed here. // The whole
15. I owe this insight to Racheal Fest (pers. comm., July 2, 2020).

language / . . . compressed in this bundle” (2014: 44, 78). But Interstices’ speaker
also asserts their revisionary antagonism to Drafts in the book’s opening lines:
“So / I dismantled it,” declaring, “It has been ‘finished’ / but has barely begun. /
It has been collected / but then has disappeared” (1, 3). In DuPlessis’s (2015a: 6)
next book, Graphic Novella, again the poem’s speaker declares a “ ‘Rerouting,
rewiring, rewriting.’ . . . re as ‘again’ or re as ‘new’ ” while simultaneously ask-
ing its readers to speculate about the obliteration of (the generic taxonomies of)
modern literature: “drop the modern, / drop the novel, / drop the poetry. / What’s
left?” (67). DuPlessis’s poetics of practice and action, along with the career-long
scope and multivolume outline of her different long poem projects, are continu-
ally revised, refreshed, and rearticulated through the dialectical play between
interstitial midrashic revision and creative unraveling and unmaking, between
the gaps still to be explored in the long poem and the pressing need for cultural
revision at odds with what exists, between the open and the closed, the long and
short, the serial and procedural. Rather than writing a single gigantic long poem
with a coherent title (e.g., The Maximus Poems or even Drafts), DuPlessis’s poetic
oeuvre is a multiply realized albeit unified exploration of the long poem as a form
that can be divided further into innumerable smaller units, with “contradictions,
fissures, openings that don’t fit” (DuPlessis, pers. comm., July 7, 2020), with no
ultimate, teleological aim, no vision of completion, closure, or totality — end-
less midrashic accumulation and revision: inside poiesis itself, a life’s discretely
enacted and assembled (self-)reflexive emergent processes. For DuPlessis, the
ontology of a long poem is not located solely in its final destination as a text or
artifact or object; it is a practice, a process, an exercise in ongoingness, and,
importantly, an activity that is increasingly digital.
At the end of his own discussion of the long poem, Silliman (2005) concludes
that “in an age that could coin the phrase ‘internet time,’ the longpoem stands
both as an intervention and an investigation.” Jaussen (2011), meditating on
DuPlessis’s The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), notes that “DuPlessis’s work has
evolved alongside the digital revolution” and argues that Drafts should be under-
stood as a digital life poem that embraces a new “textual ontology” of “multiple
languages, infinite signs, and global networks.” In Drafts, and then quite explic-
itly in her work from the 2010s, a digital presence in DuPlessis’s poetry becomes
progressively more visible. Her recent poems reflect in a variety of ways on their
material instantiation through word processing. Her collages and collage poems,
though stubbornly analog in terms of their materials, visibly depend on the exis-

156 GE N RE
tence of digital images for their scanning, reproduction, reprinting, and (online)
distribution. And though her poetry maintains a dedication to the materiality of
print, in Days and Works, DuPlessis (2017b: 10, 30) frequently invokes how dras-
tically digital technology has transformed consciousness and knowledge in the
twenty-first century: “hypertext externalizes the cultural brain. . . . Then some-
one usefully thought to use the cloud beyond the brain to store the collective —
but still selective brain. The brain of the world, indicating its abundance with the
numerology of googol, and then, in addition, with its re-spelled brand name.”
DuPlessis’s most recent collection, ironically titled Late Work and pub-
lished in April 2020 amidst the global pandemic resulting from the spread of
COVID-19, reflects throughout on the multiplying accumulation of overabundant
digital information and asks, in a poem titled “Everyday Life” (2012), “is an
archive enough?” (DuPlessis 2020: 53). In Late Work, as in Drafts, the archive of
twentieth-century atrocity haunts the present’s poiesis: “On August 7, 2014, the
day I read on BBC News of the conviction of two Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes
against humanity, one day after the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb
dropped on populations, and three days after one hundred years from the begin-
ning of World War I, I made this sentence” (47). The speaker of Late Work knows
that their “everyday” writing, the incremental unit of inhabiting and recording a
day, inescapably connects them to the violent enormity of the twentieth century,
and they appear to increasingly question their midrashic endeavor, concerned
that poetic activity may be complicit with and perpetuate the violence of a his-
tory in which they are inextricably caught. For these and other questions, Walter
Benjamin’s work is an important touchstone for DuPlessis. In “On the Concept
of History” (1950), he famously writes: “There is no document of culture which
is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is
never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmit-
ted from one hand to another” (Benjamin 2006: 392). In Late Work, the present’s
poiesis, depending as it does in DuPlessis’s poetics on reassembling and rewriting
the archive, is acknowledged throughout as a site of potential and transforming
danger. The archive’s existence rests upon racism, white supremacy, colonial-
ism, patriarchalism, and homophobia, and “Summer Poem” (2017), for example,
acknowledges that the horrors inscribed into its preservation and transmission
continue apace with “failed justice and political deaths. . . . Failed justice / and
murderous deaths” (DuPlessis 2020: 99; referring to the ongoing police brutality
in the United States). The speaker of Late Work, in asking “is an archive enough?”

acknowledges that perhaps it is not, that it might be missing something, that it

lacks a utopian kernel and offers insufficient tools for the task of “brush[ing]
history against the grain” (Benjamin 2006: 392): “I’d gone down / that path / and
couldn’t stop without destruction” (DuPlessis 2020: 106).
In “Angelus Novus” (2019), a remarkable meditation on Benjamin’s famous
angel of history after a career gleaning from and reassembling modernity’s debris,
DuPlessis reflects again on the impasse of contemporary witness amid the over-
abundance of the archive.16 The poem begins by imagining “A Strange Angel! / A
NEW & improved angel!” (DuPlessis 2020: 88), a commodified, rebranded digi-
tal angel, a hyperarchival angel of internet time — the brain of the world. After
reimagining this angelofhistory2.0 as a chimeric twenty-first-century hybrid in
uncharacteristically rhymed lines — a kind of formal debris — in the second sec-
tion of the poem DuPlessis quotes in full the passage from “On the Concept of
History” in which the angel “sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage” (Benjamin 2006: 392). The poem then turns toward
Benjamin’s distinction between what we see and what the angel sees — “We proj-
ect narrative linkage. It perceives ‘catastrophe’ ” — only to transform the angel
once more: “ripped from its root . . . deep flung across the place once home. . . .
It got worn, raggedy and frightened, / and so it looked / like us”; it becomes
us, “Angel-Us. / Yes, / spell / it / out” (DuPlessis 2020: 91, 96). If it perhaps
once required imagining some privileged angelic position outside of (a progres-
sive sense of) history from which to see the violent reality of the past, history’s
advancing debris, the catastrophe of capitalist modernity, such a perspective is
available to everyone in DuPlessis’s collective vision of contemporaneity. To
inhabit the digital hyperarchive of the twenty-first-century is to “live among quo-
tations”: “We stare at the plethora of texts” and “We live amid documents / a new
batch every day” (97, 98, 95). Hyperarchivalism is one of the fundamental condi-
tions undergirding our present historical existence and so it is this condition —
the struggle of “the trace” — that poetry must confront: “not to read disvalidates
whatever the mark might give” (97). Even though there is so much, this, that, all
of it, nonetheless, it is
16. Benjamin’s essay on history is a frequent touchstone for DuPlessis. For example, the notes to
Toll (2001: 274) tell us that both “Draft 24: Gap” (1995) and “Draft 12: Diasporas” (1991) cite Benja-
min’s “On the Concept of History.” For further discussion of Benjamin, including of the epigraph to
this essay, see Damon and DuPlessis 2013; DuPlessis 2019b. For another important recent reappraisal
of Benjamin and the angel of history that appeared after the composition of this essay, see Bové 2021.

158 GE N RE
vital
to document something
of what we are seeing.
Hence a poetry not solely
“poetry” — do I have to spell
this out?
In “Angelus Novus,” DuPlessis is explicit in her Objectivist poetics: even in the

face of the avalanche of data and information produced by hyperarchivalism,
poetry’s role is to document the world differently, to be a conduit for the small
moments in which “the past can be seized . . . as an image that flashes up” — a
“caesura in the movement of thought” (Benjamin 2006: 390; 1999: 475) — and
that work is vital for understanding and navigating the present. (Benjamin [1999:
461]: “to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most pre-
cisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual
moment the crystal of the total event.”) If her poetic mentor, George Oppen, once
famously retreated from poetry to do the work of politics, DuPlessis perceives in
documentation a poetics and a politics.
The time of now is palpable; it is the source
Tense and restless, twisted lot and cowed,
is it possible to vow?
To gather up our nothingness as force,
to enter the dark tunnel of our time once more.
Written between 2013 and 2016 and revised in 2018, “Angelus Novus” confronts
the darkening tunnel of the twenty-first century: a world of climate change —
“Ecologies fucked. / Or ‘challenged’ to breaking” (98) — resurgent authoritarianism
and white supremacy in the United States and abroad, and now a global pandemic
which, as of this writing, has killed over half a million people with cases still
increasing in the United States and globally. In the face of the catastrophe of the
status quo, DuPlessis takes the risk of recommitting to poetry, to vow to write the
now, to understand and realize the poet — along with the rest of us! — as secular
angels with nothing for power other than an ability to bear witness, to document,
and then, maybe, to gather up and exercise as a force this nothingness, the force of
our reassembling, making, poiesis. To both the question, “is an archive enough?”
and the question, “What is the form of my search?” DuPlessis’s answer is the
same: “The overflowing of the poem” (52, 53). An archive is enough, research is
enough, and documentation is enough if they then turn into the activity of poetry,

into the ongoing practice of overflowing writing, the process of reading, writing,
making, rewriting, rereading, remaking, again: this, that, it.
DuPlessis’s work demonstrates again and again that a hyperarchival culture
requires a hyperarchival poetics and, just as the masculinist long poem striving
for totality requires resistant, provisional work in the long poem, so too does the
emergent neoliberal form of the megatext require a resistant, critical megatextual-
ity. This is not easy work. To participate in textual enormity without perpetuat-
ing the sense of totality concomitant with patriarchal late capitalist modernity,
to drive toward poetic excess while simultaneously resisting a “monothetic . . .
structure of feeling” (DuPlessis, pers. comm., July 7, 2020), requires of DuPlessis
a vigilant ethics of debris, a poetics of documentation, and an unwavering lifelong
commitment to theorizing her own poetry, to understanding, exploring, and (re)
activating the immense nexus of interconnected nodes constellating that life’s
work — questioning those texts, challenging their perpetuation, and midrashi-
cally, democratically reading and writing again and again. Further, Drafts and
DuPlessis’s subsequent work indicate that when the long poem comes into contact
with digital media, its encyclopedic impulse to include everything quite easily
becomes megatextual. (I might even go so far as to say that the long poem’s
transformations in the twenty-first century speculatively suggest that the form
was simply waiting for computers so that it could fully realize its [perhaps still]
latent megatextuality.) DuPlessis’s work also reveals, however, that when the long
poem (and, by proxy, the novel) enters the twenty-first century, it does not need
to become just another huge patriarchal monument, but that we would do well
to understand the long poem’s resistant, ethical horizon as megatextual process,
as a site for struggling with and against the neoliberal logics of contemporane-
ity. Rather than view the emergence of massive texts across media as monu-
mental artifacts requiring the unquestioning supplication of the fanatic, what
if we approached twenty-first-century textual enormity as DuPlessis does the
long poem? The statues and monuments of the West’s racist, colonialist, slave-
holding past have been toppling every day I have been writing this essay. People
across the world are right now imagining what might result from resisting the
entwined totality of monumentality and the violence of systemic racism. When
artists, readers, and critics treat megatextuality as a process, as it is in DuPles-
sis’s poetics, rather than an object, a process of ongoingness and a site of active
struggle rather than a teleological, already established and foreclosed goal, a text

16 0 GE N RE
to cocreate rather than an icon to bow down before, the overflowing of poetry can
stretch out from the archive toward new formations, new possibilities, difference,
change — toppling the past and holding open the question, at least for today, what
it to put in its place.
Bradley J. Fest is assistant professor of English at Hartwick College and is cur-

rently working on a book about massively unreadable twenty-first-century mega-
texts. His work on contemporary literature and culture has appeared in boundary
2, CounterText, Critique, Scale in Literature and Culture (2017), The Silence of
Fallout (2013), Wide Screen, Studies in the Novel, and elsewhere. He is also the
author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (2015) and The Shape of
Things (2017). More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.
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“Is an Archive Enough?

Genre, Vol. 54, No. 1 April 2021

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appears to be a similar time lag in scholarship devoted to contemporary long nov-

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As I argue elsewhere, in the last thirty-­five years massive, unreadably large

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9. In email correspondence, DuPlessis described to me some of the (provisional) structure of

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Drafts as Megatextual Debris

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Sharon Friedler, Annette B. Weiner, Kurt Schwitters, Emily Dickinson, Reme-

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DuPlessis is clear: everything from Drafts except a piece of debris might be

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size as a way of eventually (inevitably) returning to smallness, partiality, debris.15

“Is an Archive Enough?”: Traces, with Days

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acknowledges that perhaps it is not, that it might be missing something, that it

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In “Angelus Novus,” DuPlessis is explicit in her Objectivist poetics: even in the

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Bradley J. Fest is assistant professor of English at Hartwick College and is cur-

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Tarlo, Harriet. 1999. “Provisional Pleasures: The Challenge of Contemporary Experi-

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As I argue elsewhere, in the last thirty-five years massive, unreadably large