The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger

Waldrop, Rosmarie

Random House]

These two novels explore the themes of physical and emotional exile and "between-ness." In The Hanky of Pippen's Daughter, a German woman tries to come to terms with her ancestry. What did her parents, two "ordinary people" in Nazi Germany, really stand for? How does their bad marriage resonate in the lives of their daughters? Can we really know the past or its place in our lives?Written as an epic collage, A Form/of Taking/It All measures the subjective experience of the narrator against the historic, scientific, and political discourses that control her personal experiences.

The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter and a Form / of Taking / It All (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

Literature & Fiction

United States

Northwestern University Press

The Reproduction of Profiles

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

New Directions

Poetry

The legacy of cultural imperialism, the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered are themes that combine and comment, one on the other, in Rosmarie Waldrop's remarkable new work, A Key into the Language of America. As "formally adventurous" (A.L. Nielson, Washington Review) as ever, German-born Waldrop has based her new collection on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams's 1643 guide (of the same name) to Narragansett Indian language and lore.

A Key Into the Language of America: Poetry

Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem "dialogues", Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time", says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent, ' but frame the synaptic space between them". Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text". But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging", "Depression", "Desire", and even "The Millennium".Author of over 15 books of poetry, prize-winning translator of Jabes and Celan, teacher, and (with husband Keith Waldrop) publisher of Burning Deck Press, Rosmarie Waldrop keeps re-establishing herself as one of our foremost avant-garde stylists and most original poet-philosophers.

Reluctant Gravities

The latest book of prose poems by one of America's premier philosophical poets. For the title of her newest collection of prose poems, Rosmarie Waldrop adopts a term"blindsight" used by the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio to describe a condition in which a person actually sees more than he or she is consciously aware. "This is one reason," explains Waldrop, "for using collage: joining my fragments to other people's fragments in a dialogue, a net relation that might catch a bit more of the 'world.'" The collectionthe author's fourth with New Directionsis divided into four thematic sections. The first, "HÜlderlin Hybrids," resonates against the German poet's twisted syntax, while using rhythmic punctuation in counterpoint to sense. "'As Were,'" says Waldrop, "began with looking at the secondary occupations of artistsfor example, Mallarme teaching English, Montaigne serving as mayor of Bordeauxbut this soon gave way to playing more generally with particular aspects of historical figures." The title section, "Blindsight," is most consistent in its use of collage, juxtaposing words and images to jolting, epiphanic effect. "Cornell Boxes," in contrast, has a formal unity, inspired by the constructions of Joseph Cornell, each prose poem "box" composed in a structure of fours: four paragraphs of four sentences each, with four footnotes.

Blindsight

Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet as a trilogy and now together in one volume at last. Rosmarie Waldrop's Curves to the Apple brings together three highly praised and influential titles: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities. Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feelingor of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title Curves to the Apple combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."

Curves to the Apple: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities

A new poetry collection of startling beauty and thought by a great American poet.Even in a state of geometrical grace we cannot see time as it is, only as it passes. So the river shows us while softly disfiguring our waterlogged bodies on the way to vast projects of war.―Rosmarie Waldrop Driven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop’s sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, “Sway-Backed Powerlines,” consists of five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction of zero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary money in economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, and written in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop’s most engaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the height of her creative powers.

Driven to Abstraction

An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: “Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives” (Ben Lerner, Jacket)
Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”
Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.

Gap Gardening: Selected Poems

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Waldrop, Rosmarie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Waldrop, Rosmarie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Waldrop, Rosmarie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger

The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter and a Form / of Taking / It All (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

The Reproduction of Profiles

The Reproduction of Profiles

A Key Into the Language of America: Poetry

Reluctant Gravities

Blindsight

Curves to the Apple: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities

Driven to Abstraction

Gap Gardening: Selected Poems