Quartet

"An elegy to four critical and poetic minds--Bill Berkson, Douglas Crimp, Kevin Killian, Sam Miller--Quartet is also a meditation on ancestors, on how those who are no longer here affect our way of being, of writing, of moving through the world. Poet, novelist, writer of and on performance Claudia La Rocco weaves fragile threads of acquaintanceship and intimacy into a chamber piece of voices, attitudes, and gestures of attention, spurred on by the restless interplay of present, past, and page. Quartet's motifs run unpredictably along our sociality's frayed edges, seeking connections in the questions we're left with after the passing of lives and eras, inescapably edged by legacies of privileged belonging. This pamphlet is part of UDP's 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.