millennium mongrelisme contemporary afterrimages

books:

1 review
Joan Retallack

University of California Press, 2004

Beautiful
This book is beautifully written. I have never seen such a positive approach to the chaos of the current cultural environment. Every paragraph is a gem, and takes the reader step by step deeper into a whole new prism of meaning. My heart warms just thinking about it.

Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary

Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

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 ...

MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words * Art * Music

4 reviews
John Cage, Joan Retallack

Wesleyan, 1996

Charming, delightful, thought-provoking
I know nothing about music, but I loved this book! Cage's conversations brim with humor, wisdom, and amazing insights into every subject under the sun. It's an enormous pleasure to spend a few hours "in his company" by reading this book.

Memnoir

1 review
Joan Retallack

The Post-Apollo Press, 2004

More Than Just Sum of the Facts
It may be a little disingenuous to say Memnoir lacks Retallack's usual tricks & word play. Those literary fireworks we have come to expect from her. Memnoir is more fictional-esque than any of her previous books. In a matrix of observations, the reader is treated as/to a pliable text. A prose poetry like none other. A fine read but be warned, you may need to create your own paradigm of ...

Gertrude Stein: Selections (Poets for the Millennium)
Gertrude Stein

University of California Press, 2008

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 ...

How to Do Things With Words (New American Poetry)
Joan Retallack

Sun & Moon Press, 2000

AFTERRIMAGES (Wesleyan Poetry)
Joan Retallack

Wesleyan, 1995

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 -- ...

Mongrelisme
Joan Retallack

Paradigm Pr, 1999

Poetry. "Tr'oublier bluegel horn /ing/ /ed/ in on her death bed D. asks if it is proper in english to refer to one's body as it or It es la sombra del ala sin perfiles in some instances the word which connects the clause is omitted..." MONGRELISME is a dense, multilingual text that advances through puns and wordplay, and rewards readers who possess an openness to the vagaries and "mongrelisms" of language. In the author's words, "I am searching ...

Circumstantial Evidence: Poems

1 review
Joan Retallack

Sultan of Swat Books, 1985

Seriously Dadaist poetry
Joan Retallack's work is full of questions and thinking-about-thinking; her life's work revolves around how and why we mean (also known as rhetorical semantics), and her main subject here seems to be the fragmentation and other uses of language and images, and the various ways in which language and meaning relate. The poems of Circumstantial Evidence represent Retallack's work as published in ...