Joshua Weiner:
Andrew, it may be helpful to begin this conversation with how I come to your writing. I came across the City Lights New and Selected Poems when it came out in 2010 and was struck by the title of that book, Trance Archive, which, I don’t know, just hit me as great. I read a few poems in it, found them compelling and mysterious, totally alive acoustically and intellectually intense; so I took it home with me. It’s fun to make such discoveries! And I’ve been reading your poems since then–most recently in The Absolute Letter (Flood Editions, 2017); your collection of essays, The Cry at Zero (Counterpath, 2007); and some of your translations—of those, I’m most excited by Of Things (Burning Deck, 2015), the book by Michael Donhauser that you translated from German with Nick Hoff. I’m eager to hear more about that.
I was thinking about all of these books this summer as I was putting together a course, “Ecopoetics: A Genealogy,” a graduate seminar I’m teaching this fall at University of Maryland with Jerry Passannante, a Renaissance scholar. Jerry’s first book, The Lucretius Renaissance, is all about the rise of materialism in early modern Europe; and specifically about how ideas that Lucretius explores in On the Nature of Things first emerge in the Renaissance through texts—the recomposition and scattering of writing itself. His new book, coming out soon from Chicago, is called Catastrophizing, and is devoted to thinking about how catastrophe is a state of mind as well as something that happens, I guess you could say, physically, in the world, as an event that hits a lot of people at once.
Well, environmental catastrophes are now so much with us, week to week it seems, that to call them purely “natural” disasters seems a form of dissembling. In your essay “The Emergency” you write, “The privileged site of such an emergency in language is the poem.” Jerry writes in the introduction to his new book, “Catastrophizing is at once something the mind does to itself and a thing that befalls it. It is a way of seeing and feeling beyond the world of the sensible.” It sounds as if an insight that emerges from the ancient world and early modern world is connecting powerfully with an insight that you bring to one of the important elements in modern poetry, the surreal, which is what I think you’re describing in your essay.
You’re very involved in surrealism as an aesthetic and political phenomenon: the historical movement in Europe; its strongest manifestation in the US (by way of your work on Philip Lamantia); and your thinking about how surrealism as compositional act continues to make itself felt in more recent North American poetry. Do you think of yourself as a surrealist, do you think of your work as having a role in that story?
Andrew Joron:
Surrealism, of course, was born out of the catastrophe of World War I, as the practitioners of Dada, having deconstructed the culture that gave rise to that war, sought something positive to put in its place. Many aspects of surrealism are specific to interwar France, so to simply declare oneself a surrealist would be anachronistic at best. Yet I do identify with that movement’s larger aim, namely to revolutionize the relationship between subject and object, mind and body, word and world, in the name of a kind of ontological communism that would overthrow these dualities. Which resonates with Passannante’s concept of catastrophizing as both a mind-action and a world-action.
Anything that’s relevant now has to be relevant to catastrophe. Surrealism wants to make catastrophe speak. Not in order to reduce it to something “meaningful.” Quite the opposite. It’s possible—and surrealism has room for this—that catastrophe can only be truly understood mathematically, or topologically. Fifty years ago, the French mathematician René Thom formalized the way dynamical systems undergo sudden radical transformations, founding the discipline known as “catastrophe theory.” Thom’s topological diagrams illustrate what surrealist leader André Breton called “convulsive beauty.”
So if, as a poet, I identify with surrealism, it’s through science, seeing the way the study of nonlinear dynamical systems—and language is such a system—has confirmed and augmented key surrealist insights into the revolutionary nature of reality. The fact that I come to poetry through science situates me at the “objective” pole of surrealism’s magnetic field, whereas Philip Lamantia, who belonged to the previous generation of American surrealism, placed himself at the “subjective” pole, where “desire” remains the overriding impulse. It’s noteworthy that Will Alexander, an American surrealist poet of my generation, whom I regard as an authentic heir of the poetics of Aimé Césaire, also takes much inspiration from science.
JW:
Before I started reading your work, I think I had a kind of stereotypical idea of what surrealism sounded like (in poetry at least), or maybe of what literary surrealism does: that, in a strictly technical sense, literary surrealism worked by juxtaposing imagistic fragments that were as dissimilar as they were carefully chosen in order to create, in the reader, an experience of radical subjectivity that was, if it worked, uncomfortable and enlightening. Something like satori that, once experienced, created the possibilities of other kinds of change (hence a political art, too). But your poems, in my experience, are not so grounded in the practice of image making; rather the state of mind induced by the poem, I mean your poem, is the result of seeing and hearing language emerge from language itself.
Your poems are so heavily imbricated, however irregularly, word by word by word; they are involved, words folded in, and folded in, like a kind of word origami. Such intricate infolding becomes a form of unfolding, of opening up. For me, this seems like a new kind of surrealism, a new revolution of the word, because it is a new kind of revolving, involving action of language. To hear you talk about language as one nonlinear dynamic system among other similar systems really connects to my experience of your poems.
Do you see this kind of poetic objectivity, a poem that is structured and that works in a way that is also analogically connected to scientific ideas, as a kind of response to an art practice that is too saturated in the subjective? Is the subjectivity that your poems maybe turn away from a kind of problem, or connected to a problem, that you see us trying to solve, or correct, or reorient ourselves toward, that is a problem of responding to catastrophe? Is catastrophe the best word right now to connect what’s happening in the nonhuman geo-ecology to the human political ecology?
AJ:
Catastrophe kind of sums it up, doesn’t it? That’s why I think it’s interesting that Passannante turns that noun into a verb. I catastrophize, you catastrophize, it catastrophizes. A verb implies a subject position, an actor. Who or what best occupies that position for the verb catastrophize? We’re used to seeing a verb determine its object. What if there was a verb powerful enough to not only determine its object, but its subject as well? What if I am overwhelmed by am (being = catastrophe), scattered and distributed into the complex outcomes of atoms swerving through the void? Here, the word, as logos, is the connection between the nonhuman and the human. Surrealism is intent on discovering how language is nonhuman, a virus (as Burroughs put it) from outer space, a system that organized itself behind the backs of the early hominin societies that served as its vehicle.
Now, I have nothing against the human subject position—I’ve got one myself. I don’t agree with an anti-humanist like Deleuze, for example, who sees subjectivity as sickness, as a wrong-way energy reflecting back into itself, instead of radiating ecstatically outward. But there’s lots of activity—cosmic activity—that we unwittingly participate in, above and below the stratum of the self. “Pre-Enlightenment” cultures were enlightened enough to know that both language and the body give access to these extrahuman strata. Self, for these cultures as well as for surrealism, was not self-enclosed, not an individual unit rationally maximizing its advantage in an antagonistic world, but something more like an interference pattern generated by the interaction of various Earth-systems. The self constructed by capitalist ideology—the ideology of possessive individualism—is destructive of those larger patterns.
What I want to do in my poetry—I think of it as a laboratory experiment—is listen to language speaking. I don’t consider my approach exclusionary of other approaches, other forms of poetry committed to following, say, the predicaments of a given self attempting to define itself while struggling with the imperatives of love and mortality. Most of the poetry in the official canon does that, and I recognize its greatness. But I hear a different music emanating from the starry night of language, which makes me want to adopt, not a “literary,” but a scientific posture. If the task of poetry is to “make it new,” then any poem must in some way go back to the molten state of language when it first erupted—to recapitulate, in other words, the origin of language.
That moment marked, in the lingo of complexity theory, a “phase transition,” a turbulent passage to a new mode of material interaction that led, in this case, to the production of an archive of past and possible experience for one set of organisms. It’s those moments of phase transition—places where reality breaks through itself, becoming something other than itself—that constitute the transhistorical surreal.
JW:
I’m hearing you bring two things together: the idea of language when it first erupted—which is a kind of mythological moment, the mythos of the logos, or something like that—and the idea of adopting the posture of science, which is typically thought of as the antidote to too much imagination. So, those seem like opposed notions. Is your attempt to resolve that dialectic your own idea of “the Absolute,” the moment when contradictions fuse into each other and become a single truth? I’m not suggesting here that your truth is absolute. It sounds to me totally relational. But I think I’m asking about this fusing of poetic and scientific frames of mind, what we might also call, grossly, the subjective and the objective. Poetry has to be, at the very least, one place where the impossible can happen, where the incommensurate can commence equitable durations. If poetry does seem to you to be that place, or space, what do you think it’s helping us to do, or be, once it puts us in that frame of mind, the third point, you could say, of a poetic antinomy? What is the work?
AJ:
Poetry at its best has the effect of a mind-altering drug. Some poems give us a mild buzz like coffee, others stretch our perceptions to the breaking point like LSD. And, like drugs, I suppose that poetry has uses both therapeutic and recreational—especially the latter, in the strong sense of re-creational, making new. But there’s also something irresponsible, even self-destructive, about drug use and poetry “use.” Irresponsible from the point of view of doing the work necessary for survival. Maybe a future utopian society will abolish the antinomy of work and play, but even in such a society the highest (druggiest!) poetry would remain committed to saying the unsayable, thus failing to participate even in a utopian economy of meaning. Of course, the argument that the freedom of art lies in its uselessness has been kicking around ever since the advent of utilitarian capitalism—Kant, for example, defined art as Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck, purposiveness without purpose.
Scientific research—pure research—falls under the same category as poetry here. The value of research is judged in the larger society by whether it results in helpful, useful applications. In a utilitarian civilization, even a socialist one, pure science as well as pure poetry could be considered to contribute nothing to the well-being of citizens.
Play, the irresponsible play of imagination, is nonetheless present in both science and poetry. Thomas Kuhn distinguished between “normal” science—filling in the blanks of an already established paradigm—and “revolutionary” science, in which new paradigms are constructed through poetic leaps of imagination. To me, science, perhaps even more than poetry, is an antidote to having too little imagination, the cure for taking “self-evident” facts of life too much for granted.
Science often reformulates our vision of reality in a way that what was once thought impossible becomes familiar and foundational—starting with Copernicus collapsing the difference between the earthly and the celestial. Such epistemological breakthroughs get us closer to the ontological breakthroughs that reality itself is undergoing. (As Lenin once said to a Romanian poet, “We must learn to be as radical as reality itself.”) The distinction between science and poetry lies here: science leads to epistemological breakthroughs, but poetry embodies an ontological revolution in the being of language. These breakthroughs are manifestations of the Absolute, which can only reveal itself processually, eventually. I think this is what Badiou is getting at in his prioritization of the Event.
I have noticed, in your own work, passages that point toward such breakthroughs, in which a system exceeds its own parameters, following its own logic into the Impossible. In your long poem “Cyclops,” for example, about the system of sight, you write: “Do you wish // to be something / that you are not — / shut your eye // and drop / the measure / of distances / to see—”
As poets, we are seeking the limit-conditions of a given system, hoping to provoke that system into a phase transition to otherness. Is that the work?
JW:
Yes, that sounds like the work. The question is, what is the given system? When I was a boy, and lost in the reverie of play, and my mother called out to me to come do something like a chore, my raw feeling was outrage. And I would call out to her, I am PLAYING, like a doctor might call out, I am doing SURGERY, or like a carpenter might call out, I am BUILDING. I was doing my work. But what was that work? Some would say that I was doing internal work, creating my self; but I was pretending to be other people, in another world. The world we share is one big system, made up of many smaller ecologies, all of which are interdependent. The smallest system I experience, day to day, is the system of myself. And I do think that writing poetry is my own attempt, in a way, to provoke the system of myself into a transition to otherness, as you say.
I think I want to say that the planet’s survival may depend on our ability to make space to do this kind of work. The biologist E. O. Wilson refers to this state of play in his Letters to a Young Scientist, when he’s describing how discoveries are often made by idely wondering what would happen if you put x into y, or introduced one species into the habitat of another, and the like: he’s describing a kind of imaginative play that’s on par with a more theoretical kind of scientific musing. It’s important for us not to limit the idea of what science is to instrumental rationalism; just as it’s important not to limit poetry to a Kantian idea of purposelessness. And I like Kant.
AJ:
There are so many reasons to like Kant—Red Kant, Romantic Kant! His notion of purposelessness is ultimately a moral one: people are purposeless in terms of any larger system. That is, people should not be treated as a means to an end, but only as ends in themselves. Through the play of free will, we should be able to make up our own ends, our own life-purposes. Even as a kid, you were a Kantian, creating your self through play. This moral freedom extends to the making of poems, which should not be treated as a means to an end, but only as ends in themselves. They are prefigurations of a realm of freedom as yet unrealized under capitalism. As such, they can have practical consequences.
The feeling of wholeness that you invoke is a sign that the word has become world. It’s the best answer to the question that we, as poets, are often asked: how do you know, when writing a poem, that the poem is finished? And yet—and this is a point that the utopian Marxist Ernst Bloch, one of my gurus, repeatedly stressed—the world itself is unfinished, always on the way to becoming something other than itself. So the wholeness of a poem, or of the world, is the kind of wholeness that doesn’t embody a state of achieved rest, but instead an ongoing process of making itself, of making meaning. The test of poetry is whether a certain arrangement of words can constantly pour forth new meanings.
The difficulty, if not impossibility, of translating poetry can be located precisely here: the poet has created an (ideally) inexhaustible source of meaning in the source-language, by activating word-relations that are uniquely rooted in the dynamics of that source-language—dynamics that don’t necessarily have an equivalent in the target language. Therefore a translation can only ever be a pale paraphrase of the original poem, leaving behind overtones and undertones of meaning that exist only in the source-language.
In your review of a translation of the German poet Ernst Meister, you point out that a particular phrase in Meister’s German poem has “infinite implications,” but “there’s no way to nail it in English; equivalence here is elusive.” Perhaps this elusiveness, which makes a hole in the whole, is a feature of all poetry. (I imagine that holism, as a precept, can have two opposing meanings.) Perhaps all poetry is a translation of world into word. More than any other language art, poetry shows us how language fails, demonstrating, as I put it in my “Emergency” essay, the “speechlessness of words.” Likewise, you conclude your review of the Meister translation by seeing his work as “a way of thinking through the difficulty of needing to speak and not finding the medium of speech adequate to our condition.” This, I feel, is the condition of poetry, an arrival at the limit-condition of language.
JW:
I can hear something like your poetics at work in your thinking here. In fact I can hear it in what I’m saying, that homonymic connection between hear and here, which we could call the intensity of your auditory presence, your particular hear/here.
Puns are often thought of as a form of wit, of intelligence; but in your poems they are one kind of language-play of the greater imagination at work. I hear it, for example, in how much you make of the erasure that creates word out of world: the silencing of an l. In “Reversing River,” a prose poem in your new book, The Absolute Letter, you wonder if “the in-drawn, life-giving breath” is not “a silencing? And the expelled / breath, necessary to voice, a rehearsal of the last breath?” The relation of sound to silence seems like a key notion for you. The idea of the limit-condition suggests habitation at the edge; we can easily imagine the silence at the edge of sound, but what about the silence in the middle? Is silence absence, or is it itself a material, a hidden material, that you’re working with?
AJ:
I wrote a prose poem cycle titled “Citations from Silence,” which appears in my collection The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). That cycle contains a score of aphorisms on silence. Here is a representative sample:
“Silence is the dwelling-place of speech, but speech is not the / dwelling-place of silence.”
“We learn to speak before we learn to be silent.”
“Writing is the silencing of speech.”
“Silence, like poetry, is neither true nor false.”
“The form of silence is also the content of silence.”
“Neither distance nor time can attenuate the broadcast of / silence.”
“There is only one silence.”
And so on. I think that any poet, any musician who prioritizes sound necessarily also prioritizes silence. Each is the limit-condition of the other. Zukofsky famously defined the range of poetry as “upper limit music, lower limit speech,” but above the upper limit and below the lower lies silence. Oh, wait — “silence never lies.” That’s a new aphorism suggested by the previous phrase!
But to discover the silence “in the middle” of sound, we need to shift from the spatial (which lends itself to the visual) to the temporal (which anything auditory needs) in order to witness that mutually defining embrace, the interpenetration of sound and silence, as they wrestle dialectically (antagonistically yet erotically) through time.
JW:
The title of The Sound Mirror is an inventive figure for your poetics, the way that you use homonym and other kinds of acoustic correspondences, semantic adjacencies, shared root derivations, and those cognates called “false friends” that often nonetheless suggest psychic (if not linguistic) connections at speech’s “lower limit.” I sometimes feel that, in writing a poem, I’m translating English into English, or I’m trying to translate this poem into the original, or maybe I’m trying to translate silence into speech. To translate myself out of a kind of psychological silence and into speech.
You’ve done a lot of interesting translation work, from German and French—poetry and speculative prose and philosophical essays. The phrase “sound mirror” seems like a potential figure for this. How did you start translating, and why do you continue to work at it? How has it become part of your thinking about your own poetry, and about the role poetry plays in our lives?
AJ:
My mother was German, and my father, at the time they met, was a US Army translator. German was always the language they used with each other, so I heard that when I was growing up. I didn’t formally learn German until college, but I had the basics in my ear. Growing up in a bilingual environment means you don’t take language for granted; the “transparent familiarity” of the monolingual language-experience easily “clouds up with strangeness.” Defamiliarization is the condition of discovery: through German, I could hear English as a system of sound differences (and vice versa). This is the vestige of surrealist automatic writing in my work: free association of words based on sound, sometimes leading to unexpected meanings, sometimes (on the way to music) leaving meaning behind as an encumbrance. Does the motion of sound, going its own way, mirror the self-organizing motion of the universe? I believe so. The most surprising thing about a mirror is that it allows us to see ourselves; a mirror turns the subject into an object as dismayingly as language does. In translation, two languages are held to mirror one another, and the result, as always with facing mirrors, is a mise-en-abîme where meaning is recessive to infinity. At best, translation practice allows one to transfer the “foreignness” of the source language into the target language, deforming and “de-turning” English into new shapes. As poets, we are forever learning to speak our native language.
JW:
Translation work is really another kind of limit-condition, in which you dig into your own language, which is also never your own, never fully in your possession. Language is like time, one has it and does not have it; and poetry is a time-art, it unfolds in time, even as it makes spatial relationships, and creates something like a verbal space, where we can go, to find refuge, a dwelling place. Where are you headed now, in your work? What’s on the horizon for you?
AJ:
Maybe it’s a matter of growing older, returning to my roots, but I’m getting back into writing science fiction. That’s where I started out as a young writer, before I morphed into a poet. Teaching a graduate seminar in speculative fiction, as I’ve been doing for the past few years, also helped push me in that direction. In a spiral motion, I’m coming back to science fiction at a different level than before, bringing everything I’ve learned about the poetic remaking of language. For me, language is already an alternate reality. So the world-building I’m doing in my science-fiction stories comes across, on a metafictional level, as word-building. As I put it in one of my poems, “I am a creature from another word.” Nonetheless, I want to commit myself to the art of fiction, creating characters and plots that are recognizable as such. To that extent, my fiction is perhaps less “radical” than my poetry. I’m using language in the service of a narrative. Still, I’m hoping to create science-fictional scenarios that are allusive and elusive in their unfolding. And so far all of my characters have been posthuman.
JW:
Since you’ve turned to the subject of writing prose fiction, and your return to narrative world-building in a sense through a practice of poetic word-building, I’d like to turn to one of the shortest and most lyrically condensed poems in your new book.
The Answer Is No
Possessive of
what
whispering space—
No thought is thought: a ware aware
Of the value of air.
After yes, Law’s
Walls falls, reason risen too heavy to heaven.
Here & here, the sore series rests—
as thought without
thing wears the ring.
This is not only an intense poetry, but an intentional poetry; and unlike many other poems that present and perform personality, I feel connected in your work to a person thinking through a set of pressing problems about existence that I’m only barely aware of when I’m not inside the poem. To be in contact with that process is one of the reasons I go back.
Why is narrative fiction calling you now? It strikes me as a human need to think past the human, to the time when evolution leads the species to its next step. Another human need has been to speed up that process, to put that process in the hands of humans, to remove it from the processes of Nature—this has led us to some dangerous practices, medically and ethically—eugenics, for example. Is science fiction a mode of thinking past the human that can remain humane?
AJ:
I regard science fiction as the new realism—we’re living in a science-fictional world. The future has collapsed into the present.
To create a narrative is to play with time, to reconstruct the relations between past, present, and future.
When a society or a person comes to the end of its life, the future is closed. I grew up in the sixties, a future-soaked decade overflowing with social revolutionary and technological aspirations toward a better world to come. Somewhere between then and now, the future died, along with hope for a better world. Our inability to believe in—to imagine the plausibility of—a utopian future is a sign that this form of society—capitalism—has reached the end of its life. Social aspiration has become regressive, toward a fantasized utopian past. Yet the attainment of a future-oriented, sustainable society remains within reach, needing “only” a catastrophizing change of consciousness, resulting in mass action, to bring it about. All of our personal lives are now set against this backdrop of epochal change, and all of our actions—even if we fail to act—have vaster consequences than before.
“Posthuman” can be a useful term for trying to think beyond human domination of the planet, toward a condition where consciousness is no longer posed individualistically against the world, but instead is caught up in, distributed among and expressive of, the world’s complex systems. The universe is looking at itself through us.
Language is one such complex system that exists through, and at the same time beyond, individual consciousness. I feel that there’s a social utopia waiting to be discovered within the very operations of language. That’s why the word “no” interests me: it occupies, with one exception, all syntactic positions—interjection (“no!”), adverb (“no more”), adjective (“no answer”), even noun (“do I hear a ‘no’?”). But it has no verb form except “know.” Sound play takes us toward a possible word that has yet to be, that may never be uttered.
JW:
Enough said! Andrew, thank you so much.
July 2018. Interview in October 2017.