Andrew Mossin: Drafts for Shelley

"A radically original unoriginal book by Andrew Mossin in collaboration with Percy Bysshe Shelley. A brilliant hinge-work that gathers Mossin’s earlier poetic actions and points toward the writing that will follow. This work, after being set aside for quite a few years, resurfaces with an immediacy and intensity forging its own unusual present moment. Not a de-ciphering of Shelley’s handwritten manuscript, but a re-ciphering, hand-in-hand, at once a fusion and the determining of a new direction. A peculiarly rich meditation, and a visually beautiful text, combining images of Shelley’s handwriting with Mossin’s exquisite sense of a new lyricism of the page as a unit of composition. For Mossin, this encounter with Shelley makes a way for Mossin, in Robert Creeley’s words, to join the great company. “A shape of / Insistent indwelling.”  Like this book’s significant predecessor, Ronald Johnson’s RADIOS, Mossin’s book is a channeling (of Shelley as received by Mossin), and it is equally the making of a new, deep channel – the pathway for the 30+ years of Mossin’s writing to follow. If “Every text is an orphan” “And every landscape a potential home,” Mossin’s text is at once a home and a crucial adoption in the poet’s literary career. Shelley as inspiration and guide, showing the way. I urge you, dear readers, to attune to this book at once."

Hank Lazer

"What many often fail to realize is that poetry, even or especially lyric poetry, engages in dialogue with multiple voices, past, present and future. In Drafts for Shelley, Andrew Mossin has created a remarkable tapestry of citations and silences in response to Shelley’s poems and archival materials. Both homage and intervention, the work celebrates Shelley’s radiant, youthful “lyric intellect,” while incorporating the hesitancies and surges of the poetic process into a music that is Mossin’s own."

Michael Palmer

"Drafts for Shelley is a book of loss and erasure reinscribed with a surprising and generous love. Composed over a half a lifetime in relation to the beginnings of both life and becoming a writer, it is a compelling, suspenseful narrative of a journey in thought and in the world to a place, Greece, that is the imagined cradle of Western Civilization, while being a real place of ghosts, personal abandonment, and, finally, discovery. The adventurous sorrow of this tale is rendered in fragments of Shelley’s language which flow in and out of Mossin’s own lines that explain nothing while rendering (rending) everything about identity and difference. The movement is word to word sourcing archives, documents, many other writers, memories, and dreams of those. “A trail of matter/ A root of rime”. There is an achievement of maturity in work and life that causes this experience not to be a tragedy but a kind of heroic and patient mourning. It is, however, the intense pleasure of reading Drafts for Shelley that is the central experience of this book. Though broken, dissonant, even anguished, it assembles itself before the eyes of the reader in an incredibly satisfying display of beauty. Like the writer, you want to keep going and do, finding “There is no/ End to the journey—/ For you and I have recovered the meaning/ Of Song”."

Laura Moriarty

"

“I sit so close to him [Shelley],” wrote Barbara Guest, one of many prominent 20th-century innovative poets (Oppen, O’Hara, Duncan, Robert Kelly, and Alan Halsey) who have felt not just influence from the prematurely deceased Romantic visionary poet but an unexpected intimacy with him. The breathing unfinshedness of Shelley’s notebook manuscripts further opened up his poetry and his bodily act of feeling, thinking, and writing to the works of Gregory Corso and Susan Howe, igniting “ashes and sparks” into their new conflagrations. Andrew Mossin takes a comparably intimate encounter with Shelley’s manuscripts to an unsurpassed level of serious concentration and expansion in Drafts for Shelley. A “recursive [autobiographical] tale of birth and abandonment” wondrously sifted through the notebooks of Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen and Laon and Cythna catapults into Mossin’s own elegiac free verse of loss and precarious recovery, a “chasm of light and winged Form.” Drafts for Shelley uniquely and memorably updates the vital history of Romantic interanimations with contemporary avant-gardes."

Jeffrey Robinson