Andrew Joron: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Andrew Joron

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Andrew Joron

Five Poems

VIOLIN VS. VOICE

Reason, the considered motion

            of thought, runs

            ahead of itself, anticipating patterns—

            so absorbing, by every alternative of No

The dark tastes of the body.

            Rippling, alive to

The play of factors, your upside-down visage

            looks like language unmasked—

            I give you voluptuous, voracious today—

& tomorrow beg

You not to enter the archive

            of such acts, such signless touches.

Only maintain

            here the literal, that state of

            unstated need.

One hand in, one hand out

Until the collection is clean.

REVERSE PORTRAITURE

I’m “I am”

—the nude

            sitting sideways, deflected in space—

            All too soon

            I become self-conscious.

Trapped in blood, I yell my head off

            in a million ways, most

            converging on my voice.

Later, without permission, I plan to step out of the frame.

I’ll walk a corridor of simple meanings

—half ghost, half guest—advancing well into

             my mortal series, my extension into points . . .

At the last

I expect to find that, evicted

            of conviction

Light rests easy on the world.

RECOUNT ONE ENCOUNTER

For forever, you, or “you”

            failed to complete a sentence

Without the rest of language swarming over it.

In discourse, in the antiquity of all devices, now

            does we shy away from you?

—the symptom of a law applied to itself.

            Dissolving swims with the current.

Defer, instead to

            stars pour through the throats of utterance.

To hear their on

            & on in dark daylight (sound delayed, sound delight).

To arrive at not (the knot) & never—

You, again & against—you, a gain on gone, gone on.

SACRED SUBSTITUTION

Sin, sin, synonym—

            words, a correspondence of swords.

Then, at origin, sound before light—

            sigh’s size

Or the rise & fall of a perfect vowel.

Blessure of the real: defeat

            of the senses.

Only through curvature does thought achieve its end.

            As if, as in.

Even in oblivion, to believe there is

            witness, vast unto vanishing—

            This mark must stand in its place.

JOTTED IN HASTE

—but I hesitate to start.

The universe is purposeless, so all the more exploratory.

Language renounces body, even in the midst of song.

Language announces only from far away.

One absence, many absences. Between equals, absolutely.

Who’s counting? Too few and too many.

The form of forms, same as formless. Ensouled, entangled.

Say this thing, this thing right here, is where infinity ends.

Call what calls you Logos.

Accession/excision, ruby-red romantic.

“Every mirror shows the same face: the death-mask of Narcissus”

—there it is, my most famous line.

Interview

May 6th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Andrew Joron, Poet, Scholar, Musician

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: If you allow me to be idiosyncratic, I’d love to start with Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” which is rendered into English as “The Task of the Translator.” It’s not for simple amusement that I’d like to begin with a translation about translation, but since you’ve translated Bloch and Scheerbart from the German, I’d like to ask about your approach. The problem in really pinpointing Benjamin’s thought, at least when reading him in English, lies in the word “Aufgabe,” which is rendered as “task,” but it doesn’t tell the whole story, for the former term, in its original, is as much about renunciation, surrender, and abandonment as it is about duty and responsibility. Given this, to what extent do you depart from the original to capture a text’s pure essence in the target language, and can—or should even—a translator ever improve upon the original?

AJ: Mobilizing both senses of “Aufgabe,” we might say the task of the translator is to surrender to the impossibility of translation. And then, to do the impossible and translate anyway. All translation, by the word’s very etymology (from the Latin: “carry across”), is forced to depart from the original by carrying meaning from the source language over to the target language. What happens to meaning as a result of that transfer is the question. In making the transfer, the translator first needs to take into account two different levels of meaning in the source text. In literary texts, there’s a great deal of meaning happening at the level of the signifier; in practical communication, on the other hand, meaning mostly resides at the level of the signified. In the latter case, what is said takes precedence over how it is said; in literary texts, the reverse is often true. And therein lies the difficulty and challenge of translating literary texts. Signifiers have properties that don’t exist at the level of the signified—properties like sound, morphemic and syntactic structure—the activation of which are all-important in a literary text. It’s the activation of those properties that produces the style of a literary text. Yet the literary translator is tasked with attempting to reproduce that style using signifiers with linguistic properties that belong to the target, not to the source, language. The task comes down to resurrecting the meaning of the source in an entirely different body. Effecting, in other words, a literal reincarnation of that meaning. Can the “soul” of the source remain recognizable in a different body? The translator’s readership, lacking knowledge of the source language, is not in a position to make that call. It’s possible that they’re looking at an imposter. But does that even matter, if the translation—always an imposter to some extent—is aesthetically engaging? The play of signifiers in a translated text might prove to be more vivid or intense than in the source text, and so constitute an “improvement” on the original. Any such improvement, of course, would result in infidelity to the original. Which is not necessarily a crime: one can never be absolutely faithful to the source’s linguistic properties, upon which literary style crucially depends. To translate is to betray, as the saying goes. What I like about Benjamin’s notion of a “pure” language, transcending both source and target language, is that it puts both the original and the translation on an equal footing. Each is the completion of the other, bringing us closer to the lost primeval language that, to revert to mythical terms, we shared before the fall of the Tower of Babel.

DG: Let’s stay with translation but talk more about it in relation to your own work. Given the origins of language in sound, you have spoken about the auditory element as a primary component of your poetry. Because each language has its own set of homonyms, homophones, heteronyms, and so on, would you say that sound is thus the most difficult thing to “translate?”

AJ: Sound is the first thing that gets left behind in translation. While the words of every language consist of a combination of vowels and/or consonants, the sound that emerges from those combinations is unique to a particular language. Every translation tears the signified apart from its original signifier, most violently in the case of sound. For example, we can translate Baum and Traum as “tree” and “dream,” but those words don’t rhyme in English as they do in German. The more the translator tries to preserve the sonic properties of the original—adhering to the original’s rhyme scheme, for example—the more contortions and distortions occur in the translation at the level of the signified. The extreme case of this is homophonic translation, which closely tracks the sound of the source text but, at the semantic level, more or less deliberately descends into nonsense. Yet creatively induced sonic turbulence can also produce new and unexpected meanings. I consider my own poetry, inasmuch as it’s sound-driven—in effect, trying to recapitulate the origin of language itself from sound—to be largely untranslatable, though it has been translated into French, German, and Italian.

DG: I’m sure readers would want to know a bit more about your personal background, especially in relation to how you picked up the German language. Is it true that your mother was German and that your father was a US Army translator?

AJ: True. And my parents continued speaking German, the language of their courtship, to one another throughout their marriage. As a result, German was ever-present in our household. My father, though, reserved German for speaking with my mother and her friends and relatives, while my mother would often address my sister and me in German. As in many first-generation families, we understood our mother’s mother-tongue but would respond to her in English.

DG: As a creative writing professor what do you think about contemporary poetry, along with how it’s taught? Do you think the genre is doing enough to engage other disciplines such as, science, history, and philosophy, or does it need a more integrative approach, perhaps in the spirit of Novalis, to break the isolation it’s in?

AJ: I think we’re talking about translation again. Novalis wanted to translate poetry into science, and vice versa. Translation is a passage between two worlds, not an integration of those worlds. Despite being translated, each world retains its uniqueness. Disciplines can be encouraged to communicate without dissolving into one another. Indeed, confinement to a poetry box might provide poets with a measure of freedom and autonomy. We might want to isolate or protect our practice from market forces, or from various social and political agendas. Educational institutions offer a space where, ideally, critical and creative practices can flourish without such interference (though all too often, internal groupthink and outside pressure undermine this ideal). In the classroom—which is a laboratory—poetic practice might be isolated in the same way that a scientific experiment is isolated from external factors that could skew the results. I’m happy to let that analogy break down, however, because poetic language is ultimately all about the skew, the slant, the swerve of meaning. Still, the point remains that certain kinds of isolation can promote the free development of a discipline. That’s the upside; the downside is that poets might end up talking only to themselves. And yet the scope of poetry, its engagement with other disciplines, is greater than it’s ever been. Poets today show a wide range of reference in their work, actively drawing upon the disciplines of science (Ronald Johnson’s Ark), history (M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!), and philosophy (Celan’s engagement with Heidegger). Those are the kind of poets who catch my attention. Poets who write only about themselves are less interesting to me, unless they redeem themselves by doing something interesting with language. As a teacher, I’ve noticed that undergraduate poets tend to focus on their private lives (their first love affairs, their first experience with death of grandparents, etc.). Those issues of course are mainstays of the human condition. My goal in the classroom is to help students discover the ways private feelings translate into language, to encounter language as if they were seeing it for the first time, and from there, to understand poetry as transformative language. All language is built to communicate, but what’s special about poetic language is that it brings about a transformation of the language medium. Poetry makes an issue of communication; good poems resist easy consumption. They—along with their makers—don’t fit easily into consumerist society.

DG: In addition to teaching, you have also worked as a science librarian. The term would seem to be self-explanatory, but perhaps not so much. Could you describe the specific responsibilities you had in relation to some of the general duties which this role requires?

AJ: Every poet needs a day job, unless they’re independently wealthy. Poetry is the least remunerative of the arts! I’ve had various day jobs over the course of my life, coming to teaching rather late in my career. Working in a science library suited my love of libraries and my poetic interest  in science (à la Novalis). But the job itself was menial, photocopying articles (before the advent of the Internet) from scientific journals for delivery to offsite patrons. I also worked in the publishing industry for a while, composing indexes for, and sometimes proofreading, books in the humanities and social sciences.

DG: San Francisco is a fascinating city to be living and working in. What do you love most about it and what are the challenges?

AJ: I came of age in the early seventies and was irresistibly drawn to San Francisco as a hot spot of the counterculture. I attended Berkeley (graduating with a degree in the history and philosophy of science); since then, I’ve continued to reside in the East Bay. There’s always been a lively literary scene in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, and I was soon caught up in that. The political progressivism of the Bay Area is also something I embrace. By now, I’ve put down deep roots in this place. The challenges of living here (high cost of living, most of all) are compensated, as far as I’m concerned, by the cultural (and climatic!) benefits.

DG: In San Francisco, you knew Philip Lamantia and even co-edited a volume of his collected poems, published in 2013. In addition to talking about how the project came together, could you speak about how you met and what inspires you most about his work?

AJ: I mentioned getting caught up in the San Francisco literary scene; in doing so, I learned that there was not just one scene of activity, but a constellation of different schools, tribes, cliques, and coteries, some in competition with one another, others content to maintain their insularity. As I struggled to find my place among them, the two camps that most attracted me—Language poetry and surrealism—were often in contention; I was naïve or idealistic enough to think that I could build a bridge between them. I loved the visionary worlds that surrealism opened up; at the same time, I was impressed by the Language poets’ radical dismantling of meaning. I tried to incorporate both tendencies in my own work; this juncture is reflected in my early collection The Removes. I made connections with other poets who were also working in this interzone, such as John Yau, Barbara Guest, and Will Alexander. As I slowly gained entry into the scene, I approached Barrett Watten, a leader of the Language poets, and Philip Lamantia, a leader of the surrealists, and found them both to be difficult, rather unwelcoming personalities. Watten hired me as proofreader of Poetics Journal and Representations, two magazines that he was editing, but he took no cognizance of my poetry, which I suppose exhibited too much romanticism for his liking. I was finally admitted to Lamantia’s circle, though, after being recommended by our mutual friend Will Alexander. It turned out that Lamantia had already picked up on some of my published work; at some point, he began to treat me as a friend. Lamantia’s circle also included Garrett Caples, a poet and PhD student at Berkeley who was interested in surrealism. Unlike me, Garrett had the stamina to listen to Lamantia’s manic all-night monologues in the latter’s North Beach apartment. By the time Lamantia died in 2005, Garrett and I had become close friends; we collaborated, along with Lamantia’s wife Nancy Peters, on collecting his poems in a single volume. The resulting Collected Poems was published by University of California Press and featured a lengthy introduction co-written by Garrett, myself, and Nancy. Lamantia was an uncompromising visionary who lived his art in a way that made life difficult for himself and those around him. While I was excited by the radical theories of the Language poets, their poems read, for the most part, like bloodless diagrams of those ideas; Lamantia’s work, on the other hand, reached out and grabbed me with its ferocious and vertiginous imagery.

DG: I’m fascinated by your essay “The Theremin in My Life” because it contrasts, in many ways, Williams’s idea of the poem as a machine, which, despite its emphasis on precision, always seemed a bit impersonal to me. Your essay, however—though it does give an apparatus quality to verse—does far more to give poetry an instrumental nature, which you connect to the theremin, a specific instrument, rather than a general machine, as he describes: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” Yet we don’t know, in concrete terms, exactly what he’s talking about. But your essay makes it very clear: “A true poem then must be a strange device—at once a philosophical tool and a musical instrument. Such a device may be easier to manufacture in periods of social revolution, when objects as well as people move from their assigned places.” Could you talk more about how you discovered the theremin, how difficult it is to play, and perhaps also, apart from poetry, to what extent you have used the instrument in other contexts?

AJ: The theremin is the world’s oldest electronic musical instrument, invented over a hundred years ago in the midst of the Russian Revolution and named after its inventor, Leon Theremin. The theremin is played without touch. Instead, the performer moves hands and/or body between a pitch antenna and a volume antenna to create notes. The sound of the theremin is usually described as “spooky” or “ethereal,” but its range of sonic possibility is much greater than that. I’ve always been passionate about music; indeed, I consider poetry as an art that pushes language toward the condition of music. But, aside from playing bass in a middle-school band, I never attempted to master a musical instrument until my friends bought me a theremin (they were responding to the fact that I’d written a long poem, “Constellations for Theremin,” which appears in my book Fathom). After several years of frustrating practice, I finally attained a level of proficiency that allowed me to play with other musicians (in dark-ambient and free-jazz contexts). It’s an instrument that’s hard to master because your fingers have to pluck notes out of thin air—you have to find exactly where the notes are floating between the two antennas. These days, I devote almost as much energy to playing theremin as I do to writing.

DG: On many occasions you have spoken about science as a gateway, or entry point, if you will, to your poetry. If we understand the role of science in some of its contexts, it’s to grasp the universe when we speak of physics, or to provide a remedy when we speak of pharmacy. I’m also curious about how this relates to the Ancient Greek tradition of the pharmakon, and how it was recontextualized by Derrida. But leaving remedy/poison binary aside, do you see the poet’s role as a sort of physicist and pharmacist in one person—the being who both heals and understands, and understands even if he can’t heal, as neither science nor medicine have all the answers (yet)?

AJ: “All the answers” will never be forthcoming in a processual, self-transforming reality ceaselessly undergoing unpredictable and spontaneous ontological emergencies. Word and world can’t keep up with each other. Even the foundations of math and logic have crumbled; every axiomatic system is poised over an abyss (Gödel). Poets are especially well adapted to this “rift habitat” (as I titled one of my poems). Poets might assume the role of healer in some contexts, that of destroyer in others. Or both at the same time. Yet poetic practice, by its very nature, will eventually undermine any ascribed role for poets. We are translators of what lies beyond words. Thus a word like pharmakon, which defies simple translation because it contains its own contradiction (poison/remedy), stands as emblematic of reality itself.

DG: In the aftermath of 9/11, you published an essay called “The Emergency of Poetry,” which starts with a question: “What good is poetry at a time like this?” I’m not so much interested in that question as I’m fascinated by your contextualization of America’s foreign policy in relation to the blues and postmodern poetics. The most interesting sentence for me is that “Poetry, before taking action, listens to the speechlessness of words.” It seems we are once again at a turning point in American history and I wanted to ask how you situate not only that statement but the entire essay within the current context of events?

AJ: The main points of my 9/11 essay still hold in the present moment, even with the rise of the AI slop version of fascism. To reiterate those points: Every culture has its own way of coming to terms with the inevitability of suffering and death. Thus, the “deep blues” is a transhistorical aspect of culture. The blues expresses both an acceptance of, and a protest against, suffering; this dialectical tension is the source of its power. Any form of expression, including poetry, that doesn’t partake of the blues on some level is disarmed in the fight against social injustice. Even so, words simply cannot do justice to social inequality, war, and genocide. It is the special vocation of poets to give voice to the inexpressibility of suffering, to become conduits for the vast lament that underlies language. The gathering force of that lament can signal a prelude to revolution.

DG: What is the last book you read and what did you think of it?

AJ: Like many voracious readers, I’m constantly reading many books at once. My desk is piled high with the books that are currently in play. On any given day, I’m finishing one book and picking up another. These books most often fall into the following categories; philosophy, poetry, popular science, and speculative fiction. Recently I’ve been quite taken with the poet Andrew Zawacki’s new collection These Late Eclipses; by the physicist Paul Davies’s new book on quantum mechanics, Quantum 2.0, which features the most accessible non-technical explanation of quantum entanglement that I’ve yet encountered; and the science-fiction writer (who’s also a scientist) Alastair Reynolds’s new novel Halcyon Years.

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

AJ: I’m working on a translation of Novalis’s scientific notebooks and putting the finishing touches on a new collection of poetry. My essay collection The Exponential Stone has just been published, and a novel of speculative fiction, Lunagrad, will be released later this year.

Author Bio:

Andrew Joron is a poet, essayist, and speculative fiction writer. His poetry collections include The Absolute Letter (Flood Editions (2017), Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010), The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Removes (Hard Press, 1999). His work of speculative fiction, O0, was published by Black Square Editions in 2022. 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.