Mongrelisme

by Joan Retallack

Poetry. According to Joan Retallack, "Poetry and poetics is for me the lively practice of positioning oneself as imaginative agent in the world. It has been the moving principle of my intellectual and cultural life for the past two decades.... I am searching for a way for my experience of mongrelism (a word that I know can strike the ear with a kind of barren ugliness) to attain a textual transvaluation of values--a reality that arrives on the page out of a practice of writing that is both investigative and meditative, involving longing and humor, attempting to find discernible pattern in complex, intersecting realities."

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First published March 1, 1999