Andrew Joron

Poetry. Essays. In THE CRY AT ZERO, Andrew Joron ranges through literature, science, and philosophy as he maps a poetics, and gripping poetic ontology, that responds to the disturbing politics of our time. Confronting postmodern skepticism, Joron begins from the premise that poets are "chained to the impossible," and that the poetic "cry" exceeds specific social crises. Joron teaches us that more than ever before there us a distinct and obvious place for the unsayable, the abysmal, in our poetic practice. Joron's prose works, interwoven here with a series of soaringly lyrical prose poems, are indispensable in our attempts to embrace a creative space that encompasses human experience.

Selected Prose

The Cry at Zero

Paul Scheerbart

In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a "two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination." Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With "toiling wheels" inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machineis an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.

The Story of an Invention

The Perpetual Motion Machine

Since his post-9/11 essay on poetry and politics, "The Emergency," Andrew Joron has been regarded as one of American poetry's most profound practitioners. Trance Archive, Volume 3 in our City Lights Spotlight series, draws on over 20 years of Joron's work, tracing his trajectory from his early days as a science fiction poet to his later fusion of surrealist romanticism and language poetry materialism into what he calls "speculative lyric." Infused with radical politics, Joron's poetry takes inspiration from chaos and complexity theory, and reflects personal associations ranging from anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend to surrealist mystic Philip Lamantia. Featuring long out-of-print work as well as new poems, Trance Archive affirms Joron's place among major contemporary poets. "Andrew Joron is a modern-day alchemist. He's not interested in solipsistic self-enrichment; rather, he practices the art of transformation. Though aligned with the revolutionary impulse behind Surrealism-the conjuring of paradox to expand the possible-he appreciates the movement's aesthetic limitations and has somehow, miraculously, managed to create poetry attuned to materialist critiques of language without abandoning any of the art's mystery and metaphysical inquiry."-Noah Eli Gordon, Bookforum

New and Selected Poems

Trance Archive

Poetry. "To Surrealism's associative leaps, juxtapositions, and kitsch paradoxes, Joron's savage detective lends his background in the philosophy of science, borrowing from non-linear systems theory, linguistic anthropology and speculative narrative for his poetics, which are at once lyrical and emphatic to the point of dissonance: 'Poetry is the self-organized criticality of the cry.' He leans heavily on sound—homophones, alliterations and paronomasias resonantly determine signs and linkages—raiding the stuff of light verse for his serious project. As in a haunted house of the twentieth century ('the people could not be distinguished from deserted buildings'; 'the city, the arc of an abandoned soliloquy'), blurs of consonance, assonance, and letter shapes can seem to do things all by themselves."—David Lau

The Absolute Letter

Will Alexander

"One of the most prolific and original figures in the field of contemporary literature, Will Alexander is known worldwide for his arresting explorations of European and Caribbean surrealism, postcolonial history, twentieth-century philosophy, and contemporary scientific theory. Here, Alexander undertakes nothing less than a redefinition of the essay form itself, opening an "artery of twilight" wherein aesthetic, political, historical, social, cultural, scientific, and theoretical discourses often become indistinguishable elements of a holistic investigation into the composition--or, re-composition--of the physical and metaphysical worlds. Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat is an indispensable record of Alexander's thought, and confirms his reputation as one of the foremost exponents of Afro-futurist modernism."--P.[4] of cover.

Andrew Joron

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