SOURCE: Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Unimpededness and Interpenetration’: The Poetic of John Cage.” In A John Cage Reader: In Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent, pp. 4-16. New York: C. F. Peters, 1982.

In the following essay, Perloff refutes John Hollander's negative assessment of the artistic merit of Cage's work and offers the explanation that Cage's writing—although it has a strict form—actually is about the freedom from conventional form and style.

—One does not then make just any experiment but does what must be done.¹

John Hollander, reviewing Silence for Perspectives of New Music in 1963, complained that, however amusing and inventive Cage's verbal and musical compositions may be, “something seems to be missing”:

Perhaps what Mr. Cage's career as a composer lacks is a certain kind of hard work. Not the unbelievably elaborate effort merely, of planning, arranging, constructing, rationalizing (however playfully or...