Retallack #5: "Not a Cage"

I love this poem, as well as its origin story. I also appreciate Retallack’s admission that it wasn't completely random, i.e., that there was some amount of selection and modification involved. So much of the beauty of the poem lies in the choices she made regarding the passages and their order (I think).

Still, it’s interesting how some line sequences are particularly evocative (one of my favorites: “In the ordinary of summer/girls were still singing/like a saguaro cactus from which any desert wayfarer can draw”) and others are more what I would expect from a “random” assemblage (“Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective may/see Foot 1957, also Wetermarck 1906, Ch. XIII”).

What I find most interesting, though, is that Retallack succeeded in producing an intriguing work out of what she seemed to find most unintriguing—works she was culling from her own library. Converting trash to treasure, or, if you will, making a gourmet meal out of random ingredients (as in an episode of Chopped). Don’t collagists and found-object artists and commonplace diarists, on the other hand, include things in their works that do interest them (not things that don’t)?

Or maybe even Retallack is saying, “if you think this is amazing, imagine how fantastic would be a poem with lines from the books I’m keeping!”

While I could look up the origins of the lines on Google Books, I’d rather imagine that “I smell fire” came from Fahrenheit 451 and that “God, say your prayers” was straight out of a Clint Eastwood screenplay.

With “Ya se dijeron las cosas mas oscuras/The most obscure things have already been said” I almost wondered why Retallack was getting rid of one of her own books. The lines would have fit perfectly into How to Do Things with Words.

But I am left with questions (and yes, I have been through the ModPo stuff more than once): does it make sense to try to close-read a work that claims to be a random assemblage of bits and pieces of others’ works? How so?

A poem based on my response: I love this poem/How so?

Poetry from remnants of books to be discarded.

Even the marginalised, the stigmatised, the excluded, the disappeared and the invisible have a story to tell.

To your question, adef, "...does it make sense to try to close-read a work that claims to be a random assemblage of bits and pieces of others’ works? How so?", I would answer that it's sensible indeed to close-read a work of this nature, of this form. I say this because I believe that as readers we are encouraged and free to approach a poem, and indeed we always approach poems, with our own experiences, our own understandings, and our (best of all) own lenses that we are both used to and that we might not be as used to. We speak our truths as readers about the poems we are reading as much as we know the poets are speaking their truths. It is fascinating and fun. I'm curious what others think about close-reading the assemblage poem.

I love so many lines in this poem -- or combined lines of beginnings and endings, as Retallack describes in audio, recombined.

"not a building, this earth, not a cage / The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless"

"and wake up deep in the fruit / Did you get the money we sent?"

"girls were still singing / like a saguaro cactus from which any desert wayfarer can draw" 

And those single lines that stand so well for me, like,

"The lights go down, the curtain opens: the first thing we"

Hearing via the audio that Retallack composed this poem out of beginning and endings lines of books made me love this poem a lot more than I had initially. That gesture alone is poetic. To remix starts and finishes, births and deaths. To suggest that these things are closer together, or can be, than we might think. 

I feel refreshed and surprised by her process, and I admire the product, with the own first line of the title "Not a Cage" reflecting a sense of freedom in bar-like horizontal lines, and the final line "The most obscure things have already been said" reflecting, for me now, a sense of her discarding those books she drew upon to write the poem. Of scanning and knowing nothing is new, but can somehow at least be made new, be made fresh, in cutting, excising, undigging, refining.

The first time around I read this introductory work from Joan Retallack's iconoclastic oeuvre for MODPO, 2022, I was intrigued by the coherence of some selective lines and mostly wondered at its randomly wrought skeleton.

But the second time's the charm even after multiple readings of the original text previously in MODPO. Perhaps it has to do with the manner in which Ms. Retallack's words have come to be appreciated by this reader circa January, 2023. Mostly, though, the Dadaist imprint and Tzara-ian style of assemblage here is well-suited to the intertextuality and interdisciplinary nature of her legacy, her portfolio. An innate sense of curiosity is her calling card and the interdisciplinary nature is right at home here, agreeable to the attention spans of our internet age where switching from one beat to another is, if not outright mentally but culturally and psychologically, relevant. The cultural overflow is a corollary of the way she switches gears, in a style that is restrained yet suffused with wordy chaos.


The references discovered anew are even more appealing among this thicket: Finnish philosopher and sociologist Edvard Westermarck gets ticked right at the top while the French herbal liqueur Benedictine and French location of Villandry get placed together, tying their national origin together. Towards the end too,Tubingen, a German university town, and its affinity with a student from Ohio, is a footnote without a concrete backdrop of details. The name Cynthia then floats like a middle prophesy, like a pen-friend whose correspondence has been lost to the mists of Time.


It's like a dream where all the sights and words collated in our memory banks swirl around without any one origin point, the cerebral core filled with what we absorb. Ms. Joan employs an interesting take on such a kind of information overload offset by some stirring lines that look at history( the coup in Spain),sociology, literary frisson( being begotten in a vague war) and poetic thought(the most obscure things have already been said)



I loved the thought on the world being twofold to man, the earth being neither a building nor a cage, implying the multitudinous ethos we accord to it depending on our actions, the artist being a disciple, abundant, restless as also summer being in the way of singing souls, akin to saguaro cacti as well that pithy reference to Roald Dahl's Mr. Fox.

Ms. Retallack's vast bibliophile is spread open like a random tapestry of many-hued reference points sans any definite axis. It's an experimental piece but gets intriguing, darting ahead with childlike glee.