Description: For his Norton lectures, Cage continued writing mesostics; but to the earlier collection of ten key epithets, he has added five more: variable structure, nonunderstanding, contingency, inconsistency, performance. Instead of writing out of his own head (or drawing upon a single literary source), he now selects words from several disparate sources: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller's followers, daily newspapers during the summer of 1988... The result is a more expansive text that not only befits Cage's taste for heady ideas...but encompasses the whole world, in part because it draws upon writings with global range, its theme thus becoming meditations on a scale at once personal and sociopolitical... Very much like Finnegans Wake , Cage's I-VI is at once unreadable and rereadable... I-VI is his finest poem, a major poem in a unique style, surely among the best American epic poems of the post-World War II period.

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