John Cage Uncaged Is Still Cagey

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. The two texts that make up this book originated as talks Antin gave in honor of John Cage's seventy-seventh birthday. Using Cage's poem "Composition as Process" as a point of departure, Antin explores a way of understanding how structure in art and life provides us not with a rigid blueprint for determining behavior but with the ability "to attend to no matter what eventuality" with spontaneity and grace. As Kenneth Goldsmith reminds us, "From Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, passing through O'Hara and Ginsberg, Antin has played a major role in what Cage, writing in Silence, refers to as an awakening of the senses."