Laura Kuhn speaks tonight with Joan Retallack, an extraordinary American poet, essayist, and scholar who also happens to be her colleague at Bard College. As the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor (Emerita) of Humanities, Joan taught courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts, and she was long the director of Bard’s Language & Thinking Program. She is currently participating in the development of an Arabic Language & Thinking Program at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, Palestine. Joan has read and performed throughout the world, and her work has been translated into six languages. In 2009 her work was the subject of a two-day conference at Cambridge University, where she delivered the Judith E. Wilson Poetics Lecture. In 1996 she received the American Award in Belles-Lettres for her marvelous ,MUSICAGE: Cages Muses on Words * Art * Music: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, which has long been in Kuhn’s top three recommended books on John Cage. Her most recent volume of poetry – Bosch’d: Fables, Moral Tales and Other Awkward Constructions – came out last year from Litmus Press. We listen at the close of tonight’s program to a lengthy excerpt from Cage’s Hymns and Variations (1979), Cage’s beautiful and largest choral work, from Mode Records CD 71 (1998), performed by the extraordinary vocal ensemble Ars Nova, conducted by Tomás Vetö.

All Things Cage is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!

Portrait of Joan Retallack ©Donald Dietz.