Most people know John Cage as the somewhat cheeky, avant-garde composer of 4’33”, but fewer people know the significant contribution he made to poetry and poetics, recorded over several collections including M: Writings ’67–’72 (1973), Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (1979), and X: Writings ’79–’82 (1983). Cage was a pioneer of procedural, constraint-based and algorithmically generated poetics: a kind of…

Ferlinghetti’s iconic 1958 collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, remains one of the bestselling poetry collections.  (link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/aug/19/revisitingconeyislandofthe) .  It is a masterwork of lyricism and realism which weaves together motifs of music and the clothes-pegged, telegraph-wire strewn cityscape.  In many ways, this collection is about lines: telegraph lines, poetic lines and musical lines reaching…

A week before my fortieth birthday—feeling more than a little late for the party—and in order to dredge what remains of my wellbeing through this ceaseless pandemic dirge—I have determined to start a blog. So much of how I love to work is social. In these times where orchestras have stopped, theatres have closed, and…