C L A Y T O N E S H L E M A N
____________________________________________________A NOTE ON ANDREW JORON
Andrew Joron graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in “History and Philosophy of Science,” and spent the early part of his writing career infusing poetic avant-garde techniques with science fiction. Most of his poems in the 1980s were published in science-fiction magazines and anthologies. With the 1992 collection, Science Fiction, published by the surrealist Pantograph Press, he signaled his leave taking from science fiction. His first mature book, The Removes (Hard Press, 1999) synthesized surrealism and Language poetry. This collection was followed in 2003 by Fathom (Black Square Editions, and beautifully designed by Jeff Clark at Quemadura), which was well received and widely reviewed (it was selected by the Village Voice as one of the “Top 25 Books of 2003”). From 1982 to 1988, Joron published and edited Velocities: A Magazine of Speculative Poetry. Brought up in a German-speaking household in Stuttgart, Germany, he has also translated the German Utopian Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch's Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998).
In Joron's poetry words appear to carry, as if cargo, half-stowed, half-visible, sister and brother words. Discovering such cargo and setting it forth can determine the direction, or spread of a poem. For example (from The Removes):
Enter here
Inter here
--turn among
the torn, the Entire.Or this longer passage from Fathom:
Now, cloak
Approaches clock like a prayer.Hued, as in air; hewed, as in stone.
Where bells of
dissonance are still
Half-submerged in distance.Where the quickening of eyes equals ice.
As a person who has spent many years studying the earliest art of mankind, in particular the Ice Age cave art in southwestern France, I find that Joron's method here evokes one way in which Cro-Magnon hand lamps, some 20,000 years ago, appear to have made certain aspects of wall contours suggest animal and human anatomy. A significant number of engravings, paintings, and wall sculptures employ natural formations. In the way that Joron discovers words possessing word shadows, it may have seemed to these early explorers that animals (and, less often, humans) were partially embedded in, or emerging through, such walls, and that such presences only needed the assistance of some man-made lines to be completely present. If a wall was “with animal,” then some Cro-Magnon midwifery could help it to give birth.
In a way that beautifully parallels the ancient emergence of something from nothing, or an image from no image at all, Joron defines the first mark as “an arc sinking upward, crowded with sensations,” and stone as “curv[ing] thought toward the drinking of its shadow.” His poem “Mazed Interior,” in Fathom, is, in part, an original meditation on what might be called “the construction of the underworld.”
I also want to point out to you the way that Joron's constantly interrupted syntax, and fragmentary clauses, break off where the imaginal density quits. No explanations here, and no narrative in a conventional sense. Rather, reading a Joron poem is like watching an orb-weaving spider weave a web, a labyrinthine process, as he says, “imprisoned in liberties.” His tense, and flexible line breaks and positionings recall the taut yet airy stanzas of the late Gustaf Sobin.
In a recent meditation entitled “Language as a Ghost Condensate,” Joron sets forth the idea of a poetics poised between order and chaos, a position that for a change seems really cutting edge. He writes: “Poetic ‘lines of force' point toward uninhabited wildernesses within language, toward removes of irreducible meaning—so that a poetic impulse will cause the system of language to exceed its own boundary conditions, and to undergo a phase transition toward the Unsayable.”
[ see also ]
DUST OF DUSK: THE ARABESQUES
by Andrew Joron
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