Writing Through Finnegans Wake
Tulsa, OK: University of Tulsa, 1978. 1st Edition. Small quarto, publisher’s white paper wraps lettered in black.
"Reading Finnegans Wake I notice that though Joyce’s subjects, verbs, and objects are unconventional, their relationships are the ordinary ones…Only the imagination of the reader limits the number of the poem’s possible meanings." Collection of American experimental composer John Cage’s poetry based on James Joyce’s final novel. From the 1940s onward, Cage was interested in Joyce’s work, setting music to his writing as early as 1942. Beginning in 1976, he began generating mesostic treatments from the text of Finnegans Wake in order to dismantle conventional syntax and create new meaning. This volume contains the first 115 poems Cage wrote based on the text from the total 862 he ultimately produced. A group from the collection was adapted into "Roaratorio: An Irish Circus On Finnegans Wake," a musical composition first performed on West German Radio in 1979. Issued as a special supplement to Volume 15 of the James Joyce Quarterly and as Number 16 in the University of Tulsa's Monograph Series. A few ink underlinings to copyright page and first page of text. Some soiling and toning to wraps. Very good. Item #6381
$85.00