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."

Author City: ANNANDLE-HUDSON, NY USA

Joan Retallack is the author of nine books of poetry, including PROCEDURAL ELEGIES/WESTERN CIV CONT'D/, MEMNOIR, How to Do Things with Words, and Afterimages. She is also the author of Musicage, a volume of conversations she had with John Cage over a three-year period. Her most recent critical works are The Poethical Wager and Gertrude Stein: Selections, for which she wrote an extensive introductory essay. Retallack is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.