SOURCE: Cage, John, and Richard Kostelanetz. “Talking about Writings through Finnegans Wake.” TriQuarterly 54 (spring 1982): 208-16.

In the following interview, Cage explains his use of mesostics (aligning letters within a text to spell out words vertically), clarifies the formulas for picking the words and letters in his mesostics, and discusses his decision to rework James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in this style.

In the 1960s, John Cage wrote poetry, initially in a series of notational “Diary” pieces that I regard as a rich extension of Black Mountain poetics. More recently, he has been rewriting poetry—to be precise, rewriting someone else's poetry. His principal literary project of the early 1970s was based upon the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Our conversation about it appeared first in the New York Arts Journal, 19 (November 1980) and then in the recent collection of my essays on poetry, The Old Poetries and the New (Ann...