Blog

Announcing the publication of PQRS, by Patrick Durgin.

PQRS is a poets theater script with initials for names and functions for characters. It is about linguistic contagion and statist collusion, the fate of labor and play as literary genre (i.e. “essay”), the utility of public art and site-specificity in the post-medium age, the plasticity of gender, the metaphysics of lyric address, and several other topics. It was written between 1998 and 2012, mostly toward the end of that period.

Patrick Durgin is coauthor of The Route (Atelos, 2008, with Jen Hofer) and has published numerous chapbooks, including Imitation Poems (2006) and Color Music (2002). Durgin is also  editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House and The Early and Clairvoyant Journals of Hannah Weiner. He teaches critical theory, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Patrick Durgin @ Pennsound and @ EPC

With a genuine sweep and suspense, PQRS up-ends and pats down received ideas of genre, putting its principal characters (the eponymous P, Q, R and my own favorite, S) through their paces on an imaginary stage in an imaginary play.  Designed not to be acted or produced, Durgin calls this work a “script,” which I like for its straightfoward modesty.  But as I see it, it’s first cousin to something like the 1930s “essay-novels” of Virginia Woolf, Orlando or The Pargiters—books written simultaneously in two veins, each illuminating the other in unexpected, and here thrilling, ways.  Like aging stars, P, Q, R, and S upstage each other, disconcert each other, all in the interest of presenting as much enlightenment as we can sit for, within the pages of a single book; so they form a serious quartet with comic overtones, like the lovers and mages of Mozart’s “Non ti fidar, O misera.”  Don’t trust him, O sad person!—Kevin Killian

The “performance” “script” Patrick Durgin imagines in PQRS is not so much dramaturgical as sweepingly demiurgical, in the sense that it fashions a world out of the chaos of a twenty-first-century poet’s broad field of experience and association (literary history, music and film, economic theory, sculpture, public art, performance art, and poetics, to name a few examples). This world is inhabitable, if not comfortable: it is a world that resists staging in any conventional sense, but whose very conceptual difficulty supplies a context for new models of dramatic form and provides a vehicle for the kinds of thinking and representing that happen when various avant-garde ideologies collide with the twin crises of postmodern irony and capitalist recuperation. The tidy serialism implied by the title is a feint that dissolves into a frenetic vista of spectacular anxieties and social realities. It would be banal to confine PQRS under the tired rubric of “cross-genre”; rather, it rehearses genre’s continuing usefulness as a category and finds it wanting.—K. Silem Mohammad

Reminiscent of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, albeit in an intensified and wildly fluid twenty-first century context, Patrick Durgin’s essay-as-poetics script releases a discursive energy typically suppressed in theater. This is a theater of compressed time, bursting within the seams of global capital’s themes. A spooky and illuminating work.—Carla Harryman

ISBN: 978-0-9846475-7-6 (2013) $12.95

BUY from SPD / BUY from KENNING EDITIONS / BUY from AMAZON

Read more here…

Archives

2025

2024

Jan / Mar / Jun / Oct

2023

Jan / Feb / Apr / May
Jun / Jul / Aug / Oct
Dec

2022

Jan / Feb / Apr / May
Jun / Aug / Sep / Oct
Nov / Dec

2021

Feb / Apr / May / Jul
Aug / Sep / Oct / Nov
Dec

2020

Jan / Feb / Mar / Apr
May / Jun / Jul / Aug
Sep / Oct / Nov / Dec

2019

Jan / Feb / Mar / May
Jun / Jul / Aug / Sep
Oct / Nov / Dec

2018

Feb / Mar / May / Jun
Jul / Aug / Sep / Oct
Nov / Dec

2017

May / Aug / Sep / Oct
Nov / Dec

2016

Feb / Mar / Jun / Jul
Sep / Oct / Nov / Dec

2015

Feb / Mar / Apr / May
Jun / Jul / Aug / Sep
Nov / Dec

2014

Jan / Feb / Mar / Apr
May / Jun / Jul / Aug
Sep / Oct / Nov / Dec

2013

Jan / Feb / Apr / May
Jul / Aug / Sep / Oct
Nov / Dec

2012

Jan / Feb / Mar / Apr
May / Jul / Aug / Sep
Oct / Nov / Dec

2011

Mar / Apr / Jul / Aug
Sep / Oct / Nov / Dec

2010

Jan / Mar / Apr / May
Nov

2009

Aug / Oct / Nov / Dec

2008

May / Dec

2007

Mar / Sep