Art History and Culture Talks

Open to the public: FREE admission Wednesday 18th January 2012 at 6.30 pm

John Cages Zen Poetics.

by Dr Peter Jaeger

John Cage with pianist David Tudor

Although John Cage is more widely known as a composer of music, his writing has found a significant place in the canon of formally innovative poetry. This informal talk will investigate the link between what Cage called his experimental poetics and his understanding of Zen Buddhism. The talk will establish Cages relationship to Zen by examining key texts that he read during the 1940s and 50s, including The Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind (a text which was translated by John Blofeld and published by the Buddhist Society in the late 1940s) as well as texts on Zen by D.T.S. Suzuki and Alan Watts. What I do, Cage writes in the 1961 forward to his book Silence, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with ZenI doubt whether I would have done what I have done. What did Zen mean to Cage? How did it influence his writing? And to what extent did his work provide an innovative form of Buddhist teaching, delivered to a particular social and aesthetic context? Dr Peter Jaeger teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Roehampton University. He first tried meditation during the late 1970s and have been a practicing Buddhist for over 15 years. He currently practice with the Sanbo Kyodan Zen group, in the lineage of Haku'un Yasutani, a dharma successor of Harada Daiun Sogaku. To date he has had 4 books and over 60 articles, poems, and reviews published in North American and English journals. His research on John Cage is due to be published as a book by Continuum press in 2013. ___________________________________________________________________________

The Buddhist Society

58 Eccleston Square, London SW1V 1PH (Victoria Station 5 mins. Walk) 020 7834 5858 www.thebuddhistsociety.org
There are also talks and courses on Zen, Tibetan, Pureland and Theravada Buddhism as well as practice and meditation classes

Open to the public: FREE admission