The Poethical Wager [Paperback]

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 performanceall serve as occasions for inquiry and speculation on the way to her poethics of a complex realism.

Joan Retallackis John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College. She is author ofHow to Do Things with Words(1998),Musicage: Cage Muses on Words Art Music(1996),Afterrimages(1995), andErrata 5uite(1993), among other books.

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 imaginationand, 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 DuPl¢