Thread: Perloff
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Unread 05-03-2012, 04:04 PM
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Don Jones Don Jones is offline
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John Cage’s poetry achieved greater expression and recognition in the 70s and 80s. His masterpiece “Empty Words” is from the early 70s. He gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1988-89, in which he read, one for each of the six evenings of lectures, a very long mesostic poem based on his aleatoric assemblage from the multi-volume Journals of Henry David Thoreau. Certainly his poetry is not to everyone’s taste but for me it is one of the few successful attempts in "post-modern" poetry.

As for Perloff, I agree that the first half of the essay is unobjectionable but the poetry of “Interweb” aleatoric pastiche and/or conscious assemblage that she favors is not the most exciting thing going on in poetry today and, besides, no one did it better than Cage, including Jackson Mac Low.

Such an aesthetic can be very trying, even boring (though Cage has much to say about this important and overlooked emotion). At the same time, iambic meter carried to an extreme of consistency over many lines or poem after poem can be just as monotonous and wearying with its utter consistency as can be a poetics of pastiche and assemblage (aleatoric or otherwise).

Cage referred to art in the late 20th century (and by implication the early 21st) as “a river delta.” So many confluences of different schools and practices in all the arts have come together to give us an embarrassment of riches—naturally, one could argue that “embarrassment” is exactly the word!—so that we can choose what aesthetic and model we want.

Last edited by Don Jones; 05-03-2012 at 08:25 PM.
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