Author of eight books of poetry—most recently Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d, an Artforum Best Book of 2010—and numerous critical studies, including the introduction to the Yale edition of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (2012), Gertrude Stein: Selections (2008), Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (2006), The Poethical Wager (2003), and MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack (1996), which won the America Award in Belles-Lettres. Other awards are a Lannan Foundation Poetry Grant (1998–99), National Endowment for the Arts partial funding for an artist’s book (1995–96), and the Columbia Book Award for Errata 5uite (1994). B.A., University of Illinois, Urbana; M.A., Georgetown University. At Bard since 2000.

Interests:

Research Interests: Experimental traditions of 20th and 21st centuries; poethics; philosophy of language; John Cage, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein; the essay as experimental humanist form

Teaching Interests: Poetry and society; investigative poetics; poethics; polylingual poetics; experiments in form

Other Interests: Philosophy of science

Contact:

Phone: 845-758-7398
E-mail: retallac@bard.edu