Andrew Joron is the author of The Absolute Letter, a collection of poems published by Flood Editions (2017). Joron’s previous poetry collections include Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010), The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. From the German, he has translated the Literary Essays of Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch (Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Perpetual Motion Machine by the proto-Dada fantasist Paul Scheerbart (Wakefield Press, 2011). As a musician, Joron plays the theremin in various experimental and free-jazz ensembles. Joron teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University. Address: San Francisco, California, United States
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Nov 19, 2020
<p>Surrealism, whose doctrine was originally conceived as an uncanny hybrid of Sigmund Freu... more <p>Surrealism, whose doctrine was originally conceived as an uncanny hybrid of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Arthur Rimbaud, was not easily transplanted from its Parisian hothouse to the wide-open spaces of the United States. Surrealism's materialist dream-logic caught on mainly among the poets and painters of New York City during World War II when war refugees André Breton and his cohort spread their influence there. After the war and the return of the French surrealists to Europe, American surrealism withered until the cultural revolution of the 1960s when it underwent a new and even more vigorous flowering, often blending with left-wing political activism. With the end of postwar economic expansion, paralleled by a more conservative turn in American culture, surrealism as a self-conscious literary movement once again receded to the margins. At the same time, the surrealist image has become broadly disseminated in contemporary American poetry as a readily available and legible trope, used whenever a moment of sublime estrangement is needed in a poem. Surrealism persists in this way as an individualized stylistic flourish, maintaining a dilute yet ubiquitous presence in American literary culture. Yet even as surrealism appears to have been assimilated into and domesticated by the larger culture, a number of more or less marginalized American poets have remained committed to the original vision of surrealism as a revolutionary worldview, as a word- and world-transforming practice.</p> <p>The second wave of surrealist writing in the Untied States broke and bifurcated during the 1950s and 1960s into various channels represented by the New York School, Deep Image, and the orthodox Chicago Surrealist Group. In the first quarter of the 21st century, few American poets claim a purely surrealist identity. Nonetheless, an occulted surrealist practice runs through the dominant trend in contemporary American avant-garde poetry, namely, the synthesis of Language writing and the New York School.</p> <p>American culture in the 21st century, characterized by a more or less complete commodification of the life-world, where desire—another key term in surrealism—has been sublated into consumerism, brings a new set of challenges to the surrealist imperative to achieve utopia by way of profane illumination.</p>
Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, 2008
A study of the influence of Gothic literature and surrealism on the work of New York School poet ... more A study of the influence of Gothic literature and surrealism on the work of New York School poet Barbara Guest
Poets of the past century who sought to overthrow the conventions of bourgeois subjectivity resor... more Poets of the past century who sought to overthrow the conventions of bourgeois subjectivity resorted to two classic forms of "automatic muse," both held capable of subverting the domination of authorial ego: the unconscious, driven by untamed desire, and linguistic formalism, driven by constraints and protocols. The first, associated with surrealism, goes wild with "mad love" (Breton) or "visions of excess" (Bataille); the second, associated with Oulipo, constructs for itself "the very rat-maze that one proposes to escape from" (Queneau). Few innovative poets of this century now practice the "pure psychic automatism" of orthodox surrealism, while many have followed Oulipo's path of "anticipatory plagiarism," processing found texts according to a protocol or imposing some kind of generative constraint upon their writing process.
Foreword, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Acknowledgments High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia E... more Foreword, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Acknowledgments High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia Editorial Note Touch of the Marvelous (1943--1949) The Touch of the Marvelous Plumage of Recognition The Islands of Africa I Am Coming Apparition of Charles Baudelaire The Ruins By the Curtain of Architecture There Are Many Pathways to the Garden Automatic World Hermetic Bird Moments of Exile Beneath this bed the caverns gather me like water I am a criminal when your body is bare upon the universe A Civil World Invisible The Enormous Window Mirror and Heart Infernal Landscape A Winter Day Awakened from Sleep The Diabolic Condition Celestial Estrangement Submarine Languor You and I Have Nothing to Fear The Image of Ardor To You Henry Miller of the Orchestra the Mirror the Revolver and of the Stars of Stars From Erotic Poems (1946) Upon the earth eyes opened in wonder You flee into a corridor of stars Scenario From Dark Illusion to Love's Reality I open for you an ancient book Nativity of Love Autumn Poems Answer from a Place of Waiting I am forlorn Sorrow Night Vision Unable to move and hardly breathing Spring's Entry Two Worlds--1946 A Simple Answer to the Enemy Poems 1943--1955 Ages in the Wind Symbols Another Autumn Coming The New Year Revelations of a New Order Break of Day This Room Is My Cosmos Descent Inside the Journey Animal Snared in His Revery Elementals Beneath occidental peripheries From Tau (1955) To see this evil from its core The Owl Shot into the Sun Going Forth by Day Ground grade guard the crucible Out of crystal beginnings In a garden that isn't, but will be Flame gates open to water gongs She sped to me a winter word To the Music Question To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar 18 beings and The Other Broken language hisses Ekstasis (1959) Preface Christ Fragments from an Aeroplane Interior Suck of the Night Iguana iguana Les Langueurs Allongees Sheri What gift to bring Ball Mysterium Mysticus Ecclesia Dead Smoke Deirdre In a grove Confirmation John Hoffman Ah Blessed Virgin Mary Man is in pain As some light fell The Poor Paradoxes Scorpion Bite Our Lady of the Snow The New Evil Boobus PUT DOWN McClure's Favorite Observatory What made tarot cards and fleurs de lis Terror Conduction Intersection It's summer's moment in autumn's hour It was a time I didn't see the beast Binoculars From Narcotica (1959) I Demand Extinction of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs! Bones Opium Cocaine Hemp Opium, Put Down of Laws against Opium! Memoria Poems 1955--1962 Scenes 1. Fud at Foster's 2. Immediate Life For Real Rest in Peace Inscription for the Vanishing Republic Orphic Poem The Call Politics Poem Lava That I burned by the screech owl castle in Berkeley Hills New York Blank Poem New York Cool Apocalypse Apocalypses Blank Poem for Poe Visions The marvelous unveils its face Did I appear in angeltime Last Days of San Francisco 34 Words Six Lines Time Is as Eternity Is: On the White Road: The Muse Witness Advent All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third! A Poem for John Wieners Written on His Paper Shooting down to L.A. in an open car The Juggler in the Desert Scat In every way i am dazzled by you Jet Powered Suicide My Labyrinth Why write about "things"? Chrism Song Make a poem your heart contained in mine It is because i cannot have you i have you Poem for Indians Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene) Rompi Crystals Kosmos Year of Weir Origins of Weir Destroyed Works Typescript (1948--1960) Destroyed Works (1962) Hypodermic Light It's absurd I can't bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire That the total hatred Old after midnight spasm They shot me full of holes U.S.S. San Francisco Immense blank void In camera of sempiternity you walk This World's Beauty Resurrections It is I who create the world and put it to rest A theater of masked actors in a trance I have never made a poem Mantic Notebook Apocamantica Fin del Mundo The poem says the bombs of America went off At the sleeper of inveterate cars The Apocalyptic The gods made a circle A gazelle fixated in clock work Lost in a crowd I've come to the time of brain crashed stars This is the night holding gum Sick of you, owl, talking nonsense in my head Empty visions blur my soul Secret Weapons Table of Visions Opus Magnum Deamin From the Front Still Poems Vacuous Suburbs This is the grey limit There's a mountain of houses upside down The night is a space of white marble There is this distance between me and what I see I have given fair warning Spansule Jeanlu Morning Light Song High Infernal Muses Crab The Bride Front and Back Till the End of Time Peroxide Subway Subconscious Mexico City New York How depressing here I am Parades melt eternally I cut out, I mean there was no proper head to the time A Note on DESTROYED WORKS and later Poems 1963--1964 Song for the Intellect Babbel/Is a lanaguage extending the sonic level Babbel/Ali ben buri de asalium New Babbel J. Weir Mumbles Bloody Neons From My Athens Terrace Ruin Going west east directionless pack to Indis At…
The philosophical notebooks of German Romantic poet Novalis contain the outlines of a radical ont... more The philosophical notebooks of German Romantic poet Novalis contain the outlines of a radical ontology that anticipates contemporary work in speculative realism and complexity theory.
A talk given at the University of Chicago on the Chicago Surrealist Group, the most significant o... more A talk given at the University of Chicago on the Chicago Surrealist Group, the most significant organization of the Surrealist movement in the United States.
The Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine (1931) included a little-noticed "Symposium" by American... more The Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine (1931) included a little-noticed "Symposium" by American Surrealists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler that challenged Louis Zukofsky's Objectivist essay "Sincerity and Objectification" appearing in the same issue. Zukofsky's rebuttal of the "Symposium": was also included in the issue. This paper explores the literary stakes of this unusual interchange.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Nov 19, 2020
<p>Surrealism, whose doctrine was originally conceived as an uncanny hybrid of Sigmund Freu... more <p>Surrealism, whose doctrine was originally conceived as an uncanny hybrid of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Arthur Rimbaud, was not easily transplanted from its Parisian hothouse to the wide-open spaces of the United States. Surrealism's materialist dream-logic caught on mainly among the poets and painters of New York City during World War II when war refugees André Breton and his cohort spread their influence there. After the war and the return of the French surrealists to Europe, American surrealism withered until the cultural revolution of the 1960s when it underwent a new and even more vigorous flowering, often blending with left-wing political activism. With the end of postwar economic expansion, paralleled by a more conservative turn in American culture, surrealism as a self-conscious literary movement once again receded to the margins. At the same time, the surrealist image has become broadly disseminated in contemporary American poetry as a readily available and legible trope, used whenever a moment of sublime estrangement is needed in a poem. Surrealism persists in this way as an individualized stylistic flourish, maintaining a dilute yet ubiquitous presence in American literary culture. Yet even as surrealism appears to have been assimilated into and domesticated by the larger culture, a number of more or less marginalized American poets have remained committed to the original vision of surrealism as a revolutionary worldview, as a word- and world-transforming practice.</p> <p>The second wave of surrealist writing in the Untied States broke and bifurcated during the 1950s and 1960s into various channels represented by the New York School, Deep Image, and the orthodox Chicago Surrealist Group. In the first quarter of the 21st century, few American poets claim a purely surrealist identity. Nonetheless, an occulted surrealist practice runs through the dominant trend in contemporary American avant-garde poetry, namely, the synthesis of Language writing and the New York School.</p> <p>American culture in the 21st century, characterized by a more or less complete commodification of the life-world, where desire—another key term in surrealism—has been sublated into consumerism, brings a new set of challenges to the surrealist imperative to achieve utopia by way of profane illumination.</p>
Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, 2008
A study of the influence of Gothic literature and surrealism on the work of New York School poet ... more A study of the influence of Gothic literature and surrealism on the work of New York School poet Barbara Guest
Poets of the past century who sought to overthrow the conventions of bourgeois subjectivity resor... more Poets of the past century who sought to overthrow the conventions of bourgeois subjectivity resorted to two classic forms of "automatic muse," both held capable of subverting the domination of authorial ego: the unconscious, driven by untamed desire, and linguistic formalism, driven by constraints and protocols. The first, associated with surrealism, goes wild with "mad love" (Breton) or "visions of excess" (Bataille); the second, associated with Oulipo, constructs for itself "the very rat-maze that one proposes to escape from" (Queneau). Few innovative poets of this century now practice the "pure psychic automatism" of orthodox surrealism, while many have followed Oulipo's path of "anticipatory plagiarism," processing found texts according to a protocol or imposing some kind of generative constraint upon their writing process.
Foreword, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Acknowledgments High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia E... more Foreword, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Acknowledgments High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia Editorial Note Touch of the Marvelous (1943--1949) The Touch of the Marvelous Plumage of Recognition The Islands of Africa I Am Coming Apparition of Charles Baudelaire The Ruins By the Curtain of Architecture There Are Many Pathways to the Garden Automatic World Hermetic Bird Moments of Exile Beneath this bed the caverns gather me like water I am a criminal when your body is bare upon the universe A Civil World Invisible The Enormous Window Mirror and Heart Infernal Landscape A Winter Day Awakened from Sleep The Diabolic Condition Celestial Estrangement Submarine Languor You and I Have Nothing to Fear The Image of Ardor To You Henry Miller of the Orchestra the Mirror the Revolver and of the Stars of Stars From Erotic Poems (1946) Upon the earth eyes opened in wonder You flee into a corridor of stars Scenario From Dark Illusion to Love's Reality I open for you an ancient book Nativity of Love Autumn Poems Answer from a Place of Waiting I am forlorn Sorrow Night Vision Unable to move and hardly breathing Spring's Entry Two Worlds--1946 A Simple Answer to the Enemy Poems 1943--1955 Ages in the Wind Symbols Another Autumn Coming The New Year Revelations of a New Order Break of Day This Room Is My Cosmos Descent Inside the Journey Animal Snared in His Revery Elementals Beneath occidental peripheries From Tau (1955) To see this evil from its core The Owl Shot into the Sun Going Forth by Day Ground grade guard the crucible Out of crystal beginnings In a garden that isn't, but will be Flame gates open to water gongs She sped to me a winter word To the Music Question To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar 18 beings and The Other Broken language hisses Ekstasis (1959) Preface Christ Fragments from an Aeroplane Interior Suck of the Night Iguana iguana Les Langueurs Allongees Sheri What gift to bring Ball Mysterium Mysticus Ecclesia Dead Smoke Deirdre In a grove Confirmation John Hoffman Ah Blessed Virgin Mary Man is in pain As some light fell The Poor Paradoxes Scorpion Bite Our Lady of the Snow The New Evil Boobus PUT DOWN McClure's Favorite Observatory What made tarot cards and fleurs de lis Terror Conduction Intersection It's summer's moment in autumn's hour It was a time I didn't see the beast Binoculars From Narcotica (1959) I Demand Extinction of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs! Bones Opium Cocaine Hemp Opium, Put Down of Laws against Opium! Memoria Poems 1955--1962 Scenes 1. Fud at Foster's 2. Immediate Life For Real Rest in Peace Inscription for the Vanishing Republic Orphic Poem The Call Politics Poem Lava That I burned by the screech owl castle in Berkeley Hills New York Blank Poem New York Cool Apocalypse Apocalypses Blank Poem for Poe Visions The marvelous unveils its face Did I appear in angeltime Last Days of San Francisco 34 Words Six Lines Time Is as Eternity Is: On the White Road: The Muse Witness Advent All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third! A Poem for John Wieners Written on His Paper Shooting down to L.A. in an open car The Juggler in the Desert Scat In every way i am dazzled by you Jet Powered Suicide My Labyrinth Why write about "things"? Chrism Song Make a poem your heart contained in mine It is because i cannot have you i have you Poem for Indians Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene) Rompi Crystals Kosmos Year of Weir Origins of Weir Destroyed Works Typescript (1948--1960) Destroyed Works (1962) Hypodermic Light It's absurd I can't bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire That the total hatred Old after midnight spasm They shot me full of holes U.S.S. San Francisco Immense blank void In camera of sempiternity you walk This World's Beauty Resurrections It is I who create the world and put it to rest A theater of masked actors in a trance I have never made a poem Mantic Notebook Apocamantica Fin del Mundo The poem says the bombs of America went off At the sleeper of inveterate cars The Apocalyptic The gods made a circle A gazelle fixated in clock work Lost in a crowd I've come to the time of brain crashed stars This is the night holding gum Sick of you, owl, talking nonsense in my head Empty visions blur my soul Secret Weapons Table of Visions Opus Magnum Deamin From the Front Still Poems Vacuous Suburbs This is the grey limit There's a mountain of houses upside down The night is a space of white marble There is this distance between me and what I see I have given fair warning Spansule Jeanlu Morning Light Song High Infernal Muses Crab The Bride Front and Back Till the End of Time Peroxide Subway Subconscious Mexico City New York How depressing here I am Parades melt eternally I cut out, I mean there was no proper head to the time A Note on DESTROYED WORKS and later Poems 1963--1964 Song for the Intellect Babbel/Is a lanaguage extending the sonic level Babbel/Ali ben buri de asalium New Babbel J. Weir Mumbles Bloody Neons From My Athens Terrace Ruin Going west east directionless pack to Indis At…
The philosophical notebooks of German Romantic poet Novalis contain the outlines of a radical ont... more The philosophical notebooks of German Romantic poet Novalis contain the outlines of a radical ontology that anticipates contemporary work in speculative realism and complexity theory.
A talk given at the University of Chicago on the Chicago Surrealist Group, the most significant o... more A talk given at the University of Chicago on the Chicago Surrealist Group, the most significant organization of the Surrealist movement in the United States.
The Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine (1931) included a little-noticed "Symposium" by American... more The Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine (1931) included a little-noticed "Symposium" by American Surrealists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler that challenged Louis Zukofsky's Objectivist essay "Sincerity and Objectification" appearing in the same issue. Zukofsky's rebuttal of the "Symposium": was also included in the issue. This paper explores the literary stakes of this unusual interchange.
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