Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis was an American poet, essayist, feminist critic, and scholar whose work reshaped how readers approach modernist poetry, gender, and the long poem. Born on 14 December 1941 in Brooklyn, New York, to Joseph L. Blau, a professor, and Eleanor Blau, a librarian, she grew up in a household of books and inquiry. She attended the Ethical Culture School, earned a B.A. from Barnard College in 1963, and took her M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1970) from Columbia University. Her dissertation, The Endless Poem: Paterson of William Carlos Williams and The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound, already pointed toward the serial, unfinished, and historically burdened poem that would define her later art.

Early teaching took her to Rijksuniversiteit-Gent in Belgium and Universite de Lille III in France (about 1970-1972), then Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey), Douglass College at Rutgers, and Columbia preceptorships, before she joined Temple University in Philadelphia in 1974. She rose from assistant to full professor of English, taught literature and creative writing for decades, and retired as professor emerita in 2011. A Temple celebration of her poetry and criticism was held on 21 October 2011. Later appointments included a National Humanities Center fellowship (2008-09), a Distinguished Visitor post at the University of Auckland (2012), a Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio, and a Djerassi artist residency. She held editorial roles with Journal of Modern Literature and helped shape Palgrave Macmillan's Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics series.

As a critic she became one of the foremost feminist voices of her generation. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Indiana University Press, 1985) and H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986) established her as a pioneering reader of women's modernism. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990), later paired with Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (University of Alabama Press, 2006) and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2012), formed a widely cited trilogy on gender and poetics. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and A Long Essay on the Long Poem (University of Alabama Press, 2023) extended that reach. As editor she published The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), coedited Signets: Reading H.D. with Susan Stanford Friedman, The Objectivist Nexus with Peter Quartermain, and The Feminist Memoir Project with Ann Snitow. She described herself in Contemporary Authors as politically left and feminist and religiously a non-practicing Jew, and her poetry often engaged secular Jewish memory, midrashic commentary, and the haunted debris of twentieth-century history.

Her major poetic achievement is Drafts, begun in the mid-1980s and brought to its projected close of 114 canto-like sections (plus an unnumbered Precis) by 2012. Ron Silliman called it a life poem, distinguishing it from a conventional long poem. Structured on a periodicity of nineteen with a fold that lets later drafts answer earlier ones, the work investigates history, gender, mourning, hope, memory, and provisional form. Installments appeared from Wesleyan and Salt Publishing. In May 2025 Coffee House Press issued The Complete Drafts in two volumes. Later books such as Days and Works, Graphic Novella, Daykeeping, Numbers, and collage projects including Secular Ex Votos continued her blend of text and visual art. Full recordings of Drafts are archived on PennSound; her papers are held in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

On 7 September 1968 she married historian Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis, later Isaac H. Clothier Professor Emeritus of History and International Relations at Swarthmore College. They had two children (names not published in sources reviewed for this brief). She died on 2 September 2026 at Penn Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia, aged 84. The Cremation Society of Philadelphia notice stated that services and interment were private. Cause of death was not made public. Peers had long ranked Drafts among major contemporary American long poems; Coffee House Press and Poetry Project events around the 2025 complete edition renewed public attention in her final year.