Anarchy: New York City-January 1998
Cage (1912-1992), the internationally renowned and highly influential avant-garde composer, first publicly introduced this collection of 20 "fifty percent mesostics" as a lecture on anarchy in New York City in 1988. Using a computer simulation of I Ching chance techniques, Cage culled 30 quotations from his favorite anarchists, poets and thinkers (Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Walt Whitman, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy) to use as source material for his mesostics, in which a central letter in each line contributes to the spelling out of a source-author's name or a key phrase or passage. (The caps in the quote below spell out a tiny portion of one passage.). The poems are not meant to be understood in terms of literal or linear surfaces, but in terms of sound and a random-by-design reorganization of information: "If nonsense is found intolerable, think of my work as music... We are doing everything we can to make new connections." The poems themselves do create space for rethinking what anarchy and, more immediately, sovereignty can mean in a fully globalized 21st century, despite their resistance of common sense: "neArest/ oNly/ fOr/ To/ perisH/ unitEd/ dominion of Religion/ songs of loyalTy/ yEt/ soiL/ siLence/ thiS mystery every/ hUman/ Simple you/ soldier of The/ wOrks/ repeateD/ tO." Cage's methods, intentions and good will are impeccably rendered on a platform that is at once fiercely inventive and deeply concerned for the collective human freedom within its own governance. (June)Forecast: Cage's Silence (1973) remains the seminal (and frequently assigned) collection of his essays, but his poetry is more frequently encountered in anthologies than in single-author collections, the giant I-VI notwithstanding. This more manageably sized book should fill a need in the classroom for a week's worth of Cage; it also brilliantly highlights the political commitments of his work as a whole.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.