Cagean, plus or minus

Here is the text* of Joan Retallack's poem "Not a Cage." And here is a recording of Joan reading the poem at Buffalo in 1993.

* from How To Do Things with Words, Sun & Moon, 1998.

the reinvention of truth in Madison

In April, Joan Retallack visited Madison, Wisc., to give a lecture and a reading. The lecture was entitled "John Cage's Anarchic Harmony: A Poethical Wager," and the reading, introduced by Lynn Keller, included "Present Tensed," "The Reinvention of Truth," "Bosch Bookshelf," and "The Woman in the Chinese Room." We've made both lecture and reading available on PennSound, ready just yesterday.

alt-poetry, alt-pedagogy

In June '99 I and a hundred or so others (teachers, poets, poet-teachers) gathered at Bard College for a conference on the possible connection between experimental poetry and experimental pedagogy, hosted by Joan Retallack among others.

There must have been about six or seven of us from the Writers House at the conference and on the last morning of the three-day confab (there on the slopes leading down to the eastern side of the Catskills-region Hudson, it did at times feel like summer camp) we presented about the Writers House itself as an alternative learning community focused on poetics.

We promised ourselves we'd do some kind of followup at KWH, and did in early 2001. Joan Retallack came down from Bard, reading some of her own poetry that seemed more relevant to the them (alt-poetry, alt-pedagogy), and then Kerry Sherin, then the KWH Director, described a transition to the next and longer part of the program: a discussion, as a follow-up to Bard, about actual pedagogical issues and practices. There were about forty of us in the room there at the Writers House, in addition to about thirty who were tuning in by live webcast. Louis Cabri, for instance, was in Calgary - and participated by posing some questions.

Just yesterday Jenny Lesser converted the old RealVideo format into audio-only mp3, which of course these days is a much more usable, portable mode.

Here's Kerry Sherin setting up the discussion, by, in part, remembering the Bard conference.

Here's 9 minutes or so on experiential learning.

Here's a discussion of what makes it hard to teach experimental writing.

And here's a link to the whole 2-hour audio mp3, and, for your video fans and users, still, of the Real player, here's a link to the streaming video.