Joan Retallack

Joan Retallack
Born October 13, 1941
Manhattan, New York
Occupation Poet, scholar
Nationality United States
Citizenship United States
Alma mater B.A., University of Illinois, Urbana; M.A., Georgetown University.
Genre poetry, essay
Literary movement Postmodern
Notable works 'The Poethical Wager, "Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d", "Memnoir," "How To Do Things With Words," "Afterrimages," "Errata 5uite"
Notable awards Columbia Book Award (2010), Lannan Foundation Poetry Award (1998–99), America Award in Belles-Lettres, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Joan Retallack (born October 13, 1941) is an American poet, critic, biographer, and multi-disciplinary scholar.[1] She is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts. Retallack directed the Language & Thinking Program at Bard for ten years and is currently participating in the development of an Arabic Language & Thinking Program at Al-Quds University, the Palestinian university in Jerusalem. Retallack has read and performed her poetry, lectured, and participated in conferences, festivals, and invited residencies in Canada, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Her work has been translated into six languages. In 2009, she delivered the Judith E. Wilson Poetics Lecture at Cambridge University, which hosted a two-day conference on her work. Her interests in poetics include polylingualism, ecopoetics, and the poethics of alterity.[2]

Life and work

Born in Manhattan October 13, 1941, she grew up in Chelsea, the Bronx, and Charleston S.C., spending time in the mid-West before moving in the sixties to Washington D.C. where she was active in arts, antiwar, and civil rights groups based at the Institute for Policy Studies. She took part in many socio- political actions during that time, including the education project for Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign. Her collage-constructions were exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Rental Gallery, and she was part of a community of D.C. experimental poets [3] before moving to her present home in the Hudson Valley.[4]

Joan Retallack received her B.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana and her M.A. from Georgetown University. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, winning many awards including the Columbia Book Award, a Lannan Foundation Poetry Award (1998–99), the America Award in Belles-Lettres, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Retallack is the author of many critical studies, including The Poethical Wager (2003), and a study of Gertrude Stein (2008).

The editors of the anthology Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America note that Retallack is "well known for her important intervention in and contribution to feminist criticism, 'Re: Thinking: Literary: Feminism,' [in her book The Poethical Wager] in which she rejects several feminist literary models, proffering instead a multiple, unintelligible, polylingual 'experimental feminine' that can 'exercise the power of the feminine' as construct, 'aesthetic behavior' and not as the 'expression of female experience (author’s italics). She calls for a literary feminism that reflects the 'disruptively audible—if not immediately intelligible—swerve or real gender/genre trouble [that] is possible only if we recognize what has been the continual constituting of feminine forms in language.' "[5]

Awards and Honors

Selected publications

Critical

Poetry

Artist Books

Exhibitions

Critical Works on Retallack's Writing

References

  1. Madison Welcomes Joan Retallack
  2. "Joan Retallack: Bio/List of Publications" (PDF). Electronic Poetry Center, SUNY Buffalo. Retrieved 28 January 2014.
  3. Retallack, Joan (August–September 1988). "About Mass Transit: The Dupont Circle Circle". Washington Review 14 (2). Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  4. "Joan Retallack: Bio/List of Publications" (PDF). Electronic Poetry Center, SUNY Buffalo. Retrieved 28 January 2014.
  5. Rankine, Claudia (2012). Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0819572357.
  6. "Joan Retallack | Bio". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  7. "Joan Retallack | Bio". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  8. "Joan Retallack | Bio". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  9. "Joan Retallack | Bio". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  10. "Joan Retallack | Bio". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 1 February 2014.
  11. "Joan Retallack | Bio". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 1 February 2014.

External links