Joan Retallack
February 20–21, 2023
Bio
From New York and Charleston, South Carolina, Joan Retallack is a celebrated poet, critic, biographer, and scholar. She is the author of 8 books of poetry, most recently Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d, an Artforum Best Book of 2010. Her other books include Memnoir (2004), How to Do Things With Words (1998), Afterrimages (1995), and Circumstantial Evidence (1985). Her honors are vast, including a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, and grants from the Lannan Foundation for poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her critical studies, including The Poethical Wager, emphasize imagination and alterity and are playfully philosophical. Retallack's friendship with John Cage led to MUSICAGE (Wesleyan), a volume of their conversations on Cage's music and compositional poethics. Retallack's The Poethical Wager (California) is a sequence of experimental essays on ethics and poetics, as well as the form of the essay itself. She was the director of Language and Thinking Program at Bard College for ten years, and then served as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, teaching courses related to her interests in experimental traditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, poetics, and the philosophy of language. Most recently, her work has included "image-texts" and procedural compositions published in the bilingual PLACE-Revue d'Art/Art Magazine where "Pandora's Chronicle of the Fall of Eve" is just out in the Jan. 2023 issue. Her most recent volume of poetry is BOSCH'D: Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions (Litmus Press, 2020).