Rosmarie Waldrop



reluctant gravities (1999)

I must only collect one word or two words with mutual gravity. What do I mean by this, mutual gravity? It becomes relevant when I read, very early in Reluctant Gravities,

_____________________________________________________fall draft

and this I refract through the title Reluctant Gravities, and I think of falling and the fall and this draft and the second draft but I desist and resist from this list, this explaining and I list, I am listfull:

fall draft
works projects
featherbed __________________(I think of bedlock Waldrop On Marriage)
Gap gardening
legible_____________________________often it is the last word of a block that lingers
breed content
spongy nature
vanishing air
wide-open_______________________________a verb
fathoms_______________________________________last word
invisible burns
my years
sliding sidelong
print, lakes
grass gh
lark's soar
yesterday's gravity
even doubt
deep honey
a me
Sicklied o'er
pale cast
red wheelbarrow
fabled beasts
alien rock
manifest destiny
worry pivots_______________________later God is matter between noun and verb
screeching brake
cockadoodledoo
rawest thoughts
self-gravity
higher math
torn fragments
clogged highway
floating heat
tiny point
carrying blood
beginning skater
gap visible
roadbed
foothold
texts salt
slice breath
sprung reason
tight fit
fine fickleness
inherent wear
without shore
smallest gesture
common nucleus
double-binds

these are from the beginning but I would also note the final word of the last conversation, CONVERSATION ON THE MILLENIUM:

intestate

and back to explaining and listing I think of inter state and intestate is reluctant or is it indifferent as in _________________________________________________________So to slide down, so unutterably, so indifferent.

1 comment:

  1. "A motion of the mind, as to enable. I have it to do. The progeny of a single parental cell, as a tumor is thought to be, by genetically symmetrical cell divisions. Good morning. The same river is missing."

    From Rosmarie Waldrop: http://www.durationpress.com/authors/rwaldrop/cosmogony.html


    The sentence: “The tension of line and sentence. But especially the sentences. Erosion of their borders. Sliding them together, towards a larger (total?) connectedness.” From Thinking of Follows.

    This it makes me consider the sentence and how we read it and how we process it and in theoretical thought how the sentence should reflect what it is in dialogue with. Your reading of Waldrop then, extends further her investigation of the sentence and the tension within it. This piece is full of a tension which is unsettled and full of potential. This potential is a potential which breaks the sentence. It is the potential which fragments this work.

    There are beautiful images in the list, which runs this piece. This list “slides down” the screen. Your last line “_________________________________________________________So to slide down, so unutterably, so indifferent.” You are not indifferent though, you are different and dealing with difference. This response and engagement is interesting to me as are all the pieces you have made here. I have been thinking about poetic theory and what it is and what these kinds of “translations” of work do. What happens when a text is engaged with poetically? What happens to the text? What happens to the translation? I wonder about the status of these texts and what purpose they hold.

    This text is dialogically very interesting as it slides and slips in and out of its engagement with Waldrop. It is as much a communication of her theory as it is a dialogue with her practice.

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