John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics John Cage and the Performance of Nature [Hardcover]

John Cage was among the first wave of post-war American artists and intellectuals to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and it was an influence that led him to become profoundly engaged with our current ecological crisis. InJohn Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger asks: what did Buddhism mean to Cage? And how did his understanding of Buddhist philosophy impact on his representation of nature? Following Cage's own creative innovations in the poem-essay form and his use of the ancient Chinese text, theI Chingto shape his music and writing, this book outlines a new critical language that reconfigures writing and silence.

Interrogating Cage's ???green-Zen' in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and cultural critique as well as his own later turn towards anarchist politics, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics provides readers with a critically performative site for the Zen-inspired nothing which resides at the heart of Cage's poetics, and which so clearly intersects with his ecological writing.

Series Editors Introduction \ Preface: The Buddhist Quilting Point \ Cage - Scalapino - Davies \ Reading New Buddhist Poetry \ Further Reading \ Index

Peter Jaegeris Reader in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Roehampton University, UK.