The Poethical Wager

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. --university Of California Press. Introduction: Essay As Wager The Poethical Wager Wager As Essay Blue Notes On The Know Ledge Poethics Of The Improbable: Rosmarie Waldrop And The Uses Of Form The Experimental Feminine The Scarlet Aitch: Twenty-six Notes On The Experimental Feminine :re:thinking:literary:feminism: (three Essays Onto Shaky Grounds) The Difficulties Of Gertrude Stein, I & Ii Four On John Cage Geometries Of Attention Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2: John Cage--may 18, 2005 Poethics Of A Complex Realism Uncaged Words: John Cage In Dialogue With Chance Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments And Permissions Index. Joan Retallack. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 259-268) And Index.

In this very coherent collection of essays, Retallack goes a long way toward constructing meaning out of the restlessness and anxiety that characterize postmodern art. The result is a strong affirmation of the imagination—and, in a way, an affirmation of affirmation itself. The book is powerful and beautiful.—Lyn Hejinian

Joan Retallack is a thinker of refreshing clarity, frankness and drive, with a wily, engaged intelligence. This remarkable book of her speculative essays is at once a dynamic conceptual art work and an artistically subtle probing of concepts. Retallack has produced a witty, penetrating work that raises the stakes of poetics with her commitment to a utopian ethics of lucidity, attentiveness, responsibility, and hope.—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of Drafts 1-38, Toll and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice

Joan Retallack shows not why but how poetry matters in these fractal provocations in, around, and through Cage, Stein, Waldrop, Wittgenstein, Winnicott, and a large supporting cast that potentially includes you. Retallack's newsense turns knowledge into nowledge, weaving words into thought's improbable possibilities.—Charles Bernstein, author of Republics of Reality: 1975-1995

Joan Retallack is our supreme theoretician of poetic contingency. With great patience, profundity, and good humor, she lays out a 'poetics of the swerve,' a 'constructive preoccupation with what are unpredictable forms of change.' Whether writing about Gertrude Stein or John Cage, or feeling her way to a more adequate 'feminism'—a feminism that refuses to close off the possibilities of chance and change—Retallack 'essays' toward a 'poethics' that, in Wittgensteinian terms, 'leaves everything as it is' so as to dis-cover what it might be. —Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder

Retallack has a deliciously complicated sense of the world, which combines with superb tact and an unpretentious but imposing sense that she is making a poethical wager at every moment in the writing, especially in her sense of the tension between memory and 'productive conjecture'.This is one of the most cogent and capacious rationales for experimental poetics that I have read.—Charles Altieri, author of Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry and Postmodernisms Now

Acknowledgments......Page 12 INTRODUCTION: Essay as Wager......Page 14 The Poethical Wager......Page 34 Wager as Essay......Page 60 Blue Notes on the Know Ledge......Page 76 Poethics of the Improbable: Rosmarie Waldrop and the Uses of Form......Page 94 The Experimental Feminine......Page 103 The Scarlet Aitch: Twenty-Six Notes on the Experimental Feminine......Page 115 :RE:THINKING: LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds)......Page 123 The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I & II......Page 158 Four on Cage......Page 186 Geometries of Attention......Page 188 Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2: John Cage—May 18, 2005......Page 194 Poethics of a Complex Realism......Page 209 Uncaged Words: John Cage in Dialogue with Chance......Page 235 Notes......Page 256 Bibliography......Page 272 Acknowledgments of Permissions......Page 282 Index......Page 284 Annotation The interrelated essays in this book explore the coming together of ethics and poetics in literatures that engage with their contemporary moments to become wagers on the future of meaning. The central concern of The Poethical Wager is the relation of poetics to agency in a chaotic world