In these highly inventive essays, Joan Retallack, acclaimed poet and essayist, conveys her unique post-utopian vision as she explores the relationship between art and life in today's chaotic world. In the tradition of the essay as complex humanist exploration, she engages ideas from across history: Aristotle's definition of happiness, Epicurus's swerve into unpredictable possibility, Montaigne's essays as an instrument of self-invention, John Cage's redefinition of Silence. Within her unifying rubric of poethics, Retallack gives the reader plenty of surprises with a wonderful range of...
In these highly inventive essays, Joan Retallack, acclaimed poet and essayist, conveys her unique post-utopian vision as she explores the relationship...
Joan Retallack offers a book of forms, like the medieval Book of Hours, intended to draw readers into a meditative experience of time, space, language, the many humors of chance and design, as they intersect and leave their traces on the page. All of civilization to date, all of history is after all aftermath, afterthought, afterimage. The language graphics of AFTERRIMAGES lay claim to the fragility--the gift, the terror, and the whimsy--of the remnant that all images are. Their playful nature is born of the conviction that the present tense--tense, tensile with immanent futurity--must extend...
Joan Retallack offers a book of forms, like the medieval Book of Hours, intended to draw readers into a meditative experience of time, space, language...
"I was obliged to find a radical way to work -- to get at the real, at the root of the matter," John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. His quest for the root of the matter led him beyond the bounds of the conventional in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art -- with its concomitant emphasis on innovation and invention--earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists. Joan Retallack's conversations with Cage represent the first consideration of his artistic...
"I was obliged to find a radical way to work -- to get at the real, at the root of the matter," John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed ju...
Few could deny that the contemporary is the chronic blind spot in most liberal arts curricula. Many "twentieth century lit." courses still don't cover much after the mid-fifties; other disciplines in the humanities don't acknowledge poetry at all as part of the study of the contemporary. The essays collected here suggestively address the possibilities, pleasures, and risks of teaching from the multiplicity of poetries that have proliferated since the sixties. They discuss how to create a lively, investigative poetry classroom and suggest ways to work with cultural implications of poetry in...
Few could deny that the contemporary is the chronic blind spot in most liberal arts curricula. Many "twentieth century lit." courses still don't cover...
