This is a sequence valuable not only for its literary appeal but also for its dedication to thought and thinking. For Burton Hatlen, the primary influences behind 5uite are Wittgenstein, Dewey and Cage, given they were and are theoretical sources for Retallack’s challenge to metaphysics.¹ If ‘Truth’ is broken asunder and dispersed, Retallack may not be entirely done with this word, for the reinvention of truth through or past error (this poetry’s challenge to philosophy itself) may have all sorts of political and ethical possibilities, if reinvented.² Most of all, an erring poetics of readership in 5uite reads gender critically. What if philosophy shifted its geometries of attention and answered the challenge from a poetry of the experimental feminine? Wittgenstein told us that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence. In her essay ‘Uncaged Words: John Cage in Dialogue with Chance’ Retallack writes that ‘Cage’s desire to find the silence of zero in what can be said may be even more useful. The silence itself cannot be passed over. (When Wittgenstein read poetry to the positivists of the Vienna Circle, was he attempting to explore an articulation of silence?).’³ Perhaps philosophy needs to answer the challenge from such poetry and (returning to zero) pass through poetry’s silence.

Staves Are Silent

Staves mean much in 5uite. Staves sight, cite and site the social, in silence. The 5-staff follows. At the quilting of each letter-neume’s hook or stroke to each bar, or as they bisect ledger lines, the eye hears each toneme as they dart up and across earlines to rest in language. But these finicky particulars loom larger and mean more. On literary staves one by necessity reads culture critically. A poetics of tonal registers not only catches the slips and missteps of patriarchal philosophers of language or male logicians but also aids whole shifts in our ‘geometries of attention,’ to use Retallack’s own phrase. Discursive registers can (and must) be read differently, simultaneously in 5. As with much citational and curatorial poetics, the presentation and arrangement of lines imbues in the act of reading itself a certain minimal critical capacity. Their paratactic combination and recombination provide the parameters for critical reading and new configurations of thought and thinking. Staves set the stage for logically improbable swerves. Citational and notational poethics also teach radical alterity. How to read beyond the extreme limitations of globalization and the ‘narrowly expressive I-poem’?⁴ The scant information given regarding precise references—publication details are not given, for instance—suggests that readers let lines be taken into new contexts, to be read out of context, or to be read across multiple contexts at once in a kind of through-contextualisation that fast-forwards citationality to knowledge. To ‘readafresh’ (5uite, p. 35). Citationality comes through serious play. Mostly peripherally, paratextually. Readers of citational work are made aware of citationality only insofar as it provides covert knowledge to support a reading process that is minimally cognizant of poetic procedure, as evidence of process surfaces and withdraws from our patterns of attention. A bare stave does notate silence. Zero-point return to potential sound not there (yet). Wager? The experimental feminine scored, read then as this now, and later. Or, in Afterrimages: ‘which planet(s) sang soprano’ (p. 19)?