Andrew Joron. The Cry at Zero: Selected Prose. Counterpath Press, 2007.

Review by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Andrew Joron’s new collection of writing, Selected Prose, gathers twenty short essays on poetics. Ambitious in scope, and scrupulous in its readings, Joron opens with a gargantuan question: “What good is poetry at a time like this?” and concludes that “Where language fails, poetry begins.”

Dissatisfied with comfortable conclusions and tried responses, Joron’s inquiries are cutting, lyrical, weird, and varied. Surrealism, Breton, Bataille, and Adorno haunt this poetics heavily, but Joron’s specters never obscure him from the task at hand: to probe into, open, and re-imagine the terrain of poetry in the twenty-first century from the zone of a minor literature.

In a letter to Charles Borkhuis, Joron writes that “We need Surrealism to remind us that language is not coextensive with the world—and that the world remakes itself in the throes of convulsive beauty.” While Joron’s particular tact is in what a re-theorization of surrealism can help us towards, one remarkable strength is that the range of what Joron draws on is no less expansive: Hart Crane, Charles Olson, The Magnetic Fields, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Novalis, Pound, Nathaniel Mackey’s reading of Duncan, the death count in Afghanistan, H.D., Heraclitus, Kant, and the WTO protests in Seattle all appear in the first third of the book.

If Joron’s scope is the rich wellspring from which he draws oblique connections, more importantly it is what he does with these prodigious resources. All of the texts, authors, and ideas come to the aid of his variegated questions. And while I’m suspicious of the adjective “readable” (why seek normative forms in the service of new questions and ideas?), Joron’s prose is stark, cogent, clear, and layered. Here are three examples:

From the essay “Terror Conduction,” which centers on Duncan/Mackey:

“In poetry, then, meaning exceeds its limits and becomes, at best, a mode of ‘terror conduction.’…From Romanticism to postmodernism, the poetic act has always conducted language toward this opening.”

From the fragmentary and lyrical “Fate Map”:

“Pulling apart the lips of a white page reveals a curious network of fine bones, like those of an abstract bird, well documented in—”

And a later piece, “A Season Later than Winter,” opens with this bracketed preface:

“[An empty spacesuit stands propped in a corner of the half-ruined Museum of Flight. This note was found clutched in its glove].”

While I admire Guy Davenport’s incalculable range, his central aim was to find the universal links between the ancient and the modern, a foregone conclusion, no matter how staggering the connections are made to appear. Joron’s operations tend toward the singular, and away from the universal; yet it is here that he unearths his strangest, strongest theses and his most prescient questions. Indeed, the essays on Mary Margaret Sloan, Will Alexander, Clark Coolidge, George Sterling, and Philip Lamantia are worth the price of the book alone.

No doubt, Joron’s prose waxes oddly transcendental, for example: one essay concludes that “Language is a self-exceeding system that can never be fully present to itself…As such, it demands a lyric practice capable of (once again) nerving the entangled ontologies of body and sky.” But it is here where Joron takes the risk of collapsing the poetic and the critical into a poetics all his own: one whose resources are unpredictable and whose excesses produce new paths.

These essays never fall prey to mere “applying” a theory to a poet, a body of work, or a text, which is the shortcut to thinking that has replaced criticism as a dominant mode (Look, reader! Bentham’s Panopticon was here in Ashbery’s Three Poems all along!) which tends to corrode the critic’s idea into an operation and spoils its text by reducing it to a banal zone of serving as a merely example of that operation.

Indeed, The Cry at Zero is focused on unearthing, defamiliarizing us from the normative modes that lead us to slack conclusions about what poetry is, what it does, and the connection is wonderfully void of the term “craft,” another uncritical catchword of droll contemporary writing about poetry’s ostensible function. Plus, the political, the social, the history of poetic forms and movements—and the contemporary—are helixed together here with Joron’s signature Neo-Surrealism with formidable expertise.

I find the most traction when Joron waxes toward the lyrical fragment, as in “Revolution by Night,” which opens: “Control panel oil painting abandoned tenement toy piano votive candles dirty curtains— […] The seven sisters. Milk anemone road map rusty pipe secret meeting—.” For Joron, the critical and the lyrical aren’t opposite poles, and yet nor are they interchangeable. In The Cry at Zero, they constitute varied, overlapping methods of approach. They refract off of one another and constellate a kind of towards, a poetics as invested in new theses and claims as it is in renewed methods of developing the very forms, modes, and approaches.

And it will require a different mode of attention on our behalf, as when Joron writes, “Here, too, is a windowless sunset—its proof scratched out by the charred branches of your eyes.”

Towards an Index of The Cry at Zero

9/11, 3

Abacus, 83

Adorno, Theodor W., 4-5, 30, 37, 52

Afghanistan, 9

Alexander, Will, 72-80

Allah, 39

Aristotle, 73-74

Armstrong, N., 24

Arquilla, John, 34

Auburn, California, 97

Auschwitz, 4-5

Austin, Mary, 95

Bataille, Georges, 25, 30-37, 77, 96, 98, 110

“Battle of Seattle,” 35

Baudelaire, Charles, 98

Beat scene, 94

“Beep” (James Blish), 76-77

Bénabou, Marcel, 89

Bernstein, Charles, 52

Bierce, Ambrose, 94, 96, 97

the Big Bang, 109

the Blakean cry, 53

the blind workings of nature, 68

Blish, James, 76-77

Bloch, Ernst, 43

Blues, 1-10

Boehme, Jacob, 108-109

the Bohemian Club, 93-94, 98

Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux), 18

Borkhuis, Charles, 51-57

bourgeois subjectivization, 80

Breton, André, 19, 42-43, 52, 60, 70, 77, 102

“brown noise,” 90

Bruno, Giordano, 79

Bush, President George W., 38

California Decadence, 97-99

Caples, Garrett, viii

Camazine, S., 43

Cantor, Georg, 64, 85

Carmel, California, 94-95, 97

Catholicism, 54, 106

Chain, 83

Char, René, 74

the Chechen resistance, 35

Chinese ideogram, 19

Cilliers, Paul, 37, 69

Cioran, E.M., 91

The Cloud of Unknowing (anon.), 106

Cold War, 33

Columbia space shuttle, 38

Content’s Dream (Charles Bernstein), 52

Coolidge, Clark, 60-70

Coppa’s restaurant, 94-95

The Cosmopolitan, 95

Crane, Hart, 18

The Critique of Judgment (Immanuel Kant), 36

The Cry at zero, 108

The Crystal Text (Clark Coolidge), 60-70

a damaged star, 81

dandyism, 94

the day of the longest night, 58

De Landa, Manuel, 33, 35, 70

De natura rerum (Lucretius), 79

Derrida, Jacques, 66

Descartes, René, 76, 84, 86

Diderot, Denis, 61

Direct Action Network, 35

Discourse on Method (René Descartes), 84

Dominican Republic, 27

Duncan, Robert, 25-37, 54, 94

Ekstasis (Philip Lamantia), 106

Emergency everlasting, 111

Empedocles, 25

An empty spacesuit, 58

Encyclopedia of Islam, 38

Enlightenment science, 70

Eros, 26

Euler, Leonhard, 88

the eyes of owls, 81

feedback loops, 32

Fenollosa, Ernest, 19

Frank, Manfred, 65

Free Will (Craig Watson), 44-48

Free Will (Gary Watson), 44-48

Freudian unconscious, 55

Gassire, 25-37

Gassire’s Flute, 25-37

ghostly integument, 75

Gödel, Kurt, 84, 85

Goldman, Alan I., 67

Gorky, Arshile, 101

Guest, Barbara, viv, 48

“The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil” (Clark Ashton Smith), 98

Hearst, William Randolph, 96

Heraclitus, 25, 36

H.D., 26

Hölderlin, Friedrich, 6, 18

Iraq, U.S. invasion of, 40, 48

Israel, 38

jouissance, 52

Kainz, Howard, 64

Kant, Immanuel, 36, 61

L’amour fou (Breton), 42

Lamantia, Philip, viii, viv, 94, 101, 102, 106, 108

Langton, Christopher, 7, 87

Language poetry, 17, 52-57

Last Year at Marienbad, 85

Lautrémont, Comte de, 56

Les paradis artificiels (Charles Baudelaire), 98-99

Leibniz, Gottfried, 88

l’hasard objectif (Breton), 43

Library of Alexandria, 80

London, Jack, 94, 97

Lovecraft, H.P., 91, 98

L.S.D. (Littérature Semi-Définitionnelle), 89

Lucretius, 79

Luhmann, Niklas, 69

Mackey, Nathaniel, 25-37

Magloire-Saint-Aude, 102

The Magnetic Fields, 19

Mandelbrot, Benoit, 87-88

Martin Eden (Jack London), 94

Marx, Karl, 102

Mayan glyph, 19

Mayan Letters (Charles Olson), 19

medieval Arabic mathematics, 92

Medusa, 93

Mees, Ignaz, 38

Mexico, 34, 97

Milk anemone, 103

the Moon, 23-24, 104

more-than-human-waters, 57

Motherwell, Robert, 101

Museum of Flight, 58

Nadja (Breton), 42

the National Bureau of Standards, 67

“the nebular hypothesis,” 93

Neoplatonic disembodiment, 99

the New York School, 17

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25

non-Euclidean geometries, 85

Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 18

Novum, 7, 43, 102

Oakland, California, 94

Olson, Charles, 19, 54

“On Method” (Mary Margaret Sloan), 83-90

Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Pontentielle, 89

Paris, 51

Pascal’s Triangle, 89

Penrose, Roger, 67-68

Perec, Georges, 89

Péret, Benjamin, 102

philosophy of the Infinite Cage, 50

Piedmont, California, 94

Plato, 29

“pink noise,” 90

Pollock, Jackson, 101

Pont Mirabeau, 57

Pound, Ezra, 19

Prigogine, Ilya, 31, 33

Proclus, 29

Protestants, 54

protests, (the U.S. attack on Iraq), 48

ragged holes in the firmament, 82

the Rand Corporation, 34

The reddening of the landscape, 49

Redgrove, Peter, 57

Rees, Martin, 42

Resnais, Alain, 85

Reverdy, Pierre, 102

Riemann, Bernhard, 85

Rimbaud, Arthur, 102

Roman Empire, the decline of, 23

Ronfeldt, David, 34

rooms of interlocking narrative, 50

Roussel, Raymond, 102

Rue du Dragon, 51

San Francisco, 48, 54, 93-100

San Francisco Renaissance, 94

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 65

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 56

Scientific American, 110

Seattle, Washington, 35

Sewing Machine, the sign of the, 56, 81

Sinclair, Upton, 93

Sloan, Mary Margaret, 83-90

the slowest possible music, 91

Smith, Clark Ashton, 97-99

social constructivism, 19

the society of the spectacle, 101

Soupault, Philippe, 19

Spilled script, 103

star-gripped paralysis, 49

The Star-Treader and Other Poems (Clark Ashton Smith), 97

Stein, Gertrude, 55

Stengers, Isabelle, 31

Stephens, Peter W., 67

Sterling, George, 93-100

The story of civilization is screened nightly, 71

Surrealism, 1-111

Tau (Philip Lamantia), viii, 106, 108

Testimony of the Suns (George Sterling), 95

Texas, 39

Thanatos, 26

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Manuel D Landa), 33

Timaeus (Plato), 29

Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (Will Alexander), 72-80

To live underwater, 104

to steal the fire of its birth, 72

the traditional lyric, 53

Trilogy (H.D.), 26

Tryon, Edward P., 109

Tyler, Parker, 102

Umbrella, the sign of the, 56, 81

Utopia, 37, 49

Vekony, Rose, viii

via negative, 105

von Baeyer, Hans C., 67

Wagadu, 27, 37

Watson, Craig, 44-48

Watson, Gary, 44-48

Weierstrass, Karl, 87

when mirrors turn molten, 78

“white noise,” 90

Wilde, Oscar, 95

“A Wine of Wizardry” (George Sterling), 95, 97

World Trade Organization, Anti-, 35

Writing and Difference (Jacques Derrida), 66

Yates, Frances, 79-80

Zapatistas, 34

Zeno, 48

Zukofsky, Louis, 55