Chapter 7. Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms and Palimpsest Prose
Waldrop’s poetics is one that pitches language against form, which she suspects of alliance with Romantic ideologies and stances, and of implying fixity (metrical form rather than active forming), but she nevertheless insists upon formal transformation, and one poem in prose from Blindsight is read in detail, particularly with respect to her uses and transformations of the work of Joseph Cornell, to whom it acts as homage. Cornell’s collages reach back to radical modernism. Her palimpsestic and collagic manner of textual appropriation is demonstrated to be a variety of what Waldrop does allow herself to call ‘wild form’.
For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries,
here are the places
See some thoughts on Waldrop here, thoughts that began my blogging-cum-thinking that, in many ways, produced this book. It also feels like the revival of this blog(zine), a move from intermittence into serial posting.
