Rosemarie Waldrop
Rosemarie Waldrop's recent books are Streets Enough to Welcome Snow and The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter (both Station Hill). The poems in this issue are part of The Reproduction of Profiles, forthcoming from New Directions.
Working Notes, Rosemarie Waldrop:
The poems all start with Wittgenstein phrases and do their best to subvert the logic from the inside.
Actually, not just the logic, but the
closure
of the propositional sentence. This was a challenge to me because my previous poems had mostly worked toward opening the boundaries of the sentence by either sliding sentences together or by using fragments. So I tried to work with this challenge, accept the complete sentence (most of the time) and try to subvert it by other means (semantic slidings).
On the thematic level, likewise, I work with the logical syntax (all the "because" and "if"), and with a lot of Wittgenstein phrases directly, but try to subvert the certainty and authority of logic through the body and its desires.
I used Wittgenstein's phrases in a free, unsystematic way, sometimes quoting, sometimes letting it spark what it would, sometimes keeping the syntax, but substituting different nouns (e.g. his famous antimetaphysical statement that "the deepest questions are no questions at all" becomes "You could prove to me that the deepest rivers are, in fact, no rivers at all.").
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