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 examples, situations, and texts through which she conducts her exploration. A computer glitch, a passage from Gertrude Stein's favorite detective novelist, the idea of the experimental feminine, a John Cage performance—all serve as occasions for inquiry and speculation on the way to her poethics of a "complex realism."

The Poethical Wager

Retallack, Joan

Arts & Photography

University of California Press

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 examples, situations, and texts through which she conducts her exploration. A computer glitch, a passage from Gertrude Stein's favorite detective novelist, the idea of the experimental feminine, a John Cage performance―all serve as occasions for inquiry and speculation on the way to her poethics of a "complex realism."

This selection of Gertrude Stein's work is taken from the period between 1905 and 1936, when the iconic modernist poet was engaged in an astounding number of still-surprising literary experiments, whose innovations continue to influence all the arts. Editor Joan Retallack has chosen complete texts or selections that lend themselves to a clarified vision of Stein's oeuvre. In her brilliant introduction, Retallack provides the historical and biographical context for Stein's lifelong project of composing a "continuous present," an effort which parallels many of the most important technological and scientific developments of her era―from moving pictures to Einstein's revision of our understanding of space and time. Retallack also addresses persistent questions about Stein's work and the best way to read it in our contemporary moment. In suggesting a performative "reading poesis" for these works, Retallack follows Stein's dictum by arguing that to actively experience the work is to enjoy it, and to enjoy it is to understand it.

Gertrude Stein: Selections (Poets for the Millennium)

Literature & Fiction

STEIN, Gertrude

History & Criticism

Afterrimages (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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 itself toward the unintelligible and unknown. This is the frontier where the image hovers on the edge of its own transfiguration, the threshold where poetry can take place.

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

Retallack's book draws readers into a meditative experience of time, space and 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 production in its entirety, across genres. Informed by the perspective of age, Cage's comments range freely from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. A composer for whom the whole world -- with its brimming silences and anarchic harmonies -- was a source of music, Cage once claimed, "There is no noise, only sounds." As these interviews attest, that penchant for testing traditions reached far beyond his music. His lifelong project, Retallack writes in her comprehensive introduction, was "dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes." Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction -- a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the 20th century.

MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words * Art * Music

Biographies & Memoirs

CAGE, John

Arts & Literature

"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 production in its entirety, across genres. Informed by the perspective of age, Cage's comments range freely from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. A composer for whom the whole world -- with its brimming silences and anarchic harmonies -- was a source of music, Cage once claimed, "There is no noise, only sounds." As these interviews attest, that penchant for testing traditions reached far beyond his music. His lifelong project, Retallack writes in her comprehensive introduction, was "dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes." Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction -- a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the 20th century.

Humor & Entertainment

Circumstantial Evidence: Poems

Sultan of Swat Books

Poetry. MEMNOIR is a high-speed chase through intersections of chance and consciousness in the "experience of experiencing" our lives. Movies and memory swap visceral/visual thrill with mathematics and philosophy as Retallack plays with our reliance on symbols and cultural frames of reference to get "to the point" of a given moment. "Joan Retallack's marvelous Memnoir is so much more than what one can say about it. The unforgettable words she offers look back on 'one of those periods when life seems superficially friendly' or is this the 'hot majestic interlude' of a film version of the same?"--John Ashbery.

Memnoir

The Post-Apollo Press

Poetry. According to Joan Retallack, "Poetry and poetics is for me the lively practice of positioning oneself as imaginative agent in the world. It has been the moving principle of my intellectual and cultural life for the past two decades.... I am searching for a way for my experience of mongrelism (a word that I know can strike the ear with a kind of barren ugliness) to attain a textual transvaluation of values--a reality that arrives on the page out of a practice of writing that is both investigative and meditative, involving longing and humor, attempting to find discernible pattern in complex, intersecting realities."

Mongrelisme

Paradigm Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Retallack, Joan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Retallack, Joan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Retallack, Joan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Poethical Wager

The Poethical Wager

Gertrude Stein: Selections (Poets for the Millennium)

Afterrimages (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Afterrimages (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words * Art * Music

MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words * Art * Music

Circumstantial Evidence: Poems

Memnoir

Mongrelisme