Johanna Drucker: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Johanna Drucker

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Johanna Drucker

Five Poems

In which the Clichés

Familiar insights,

carved in the arc of history,

remain long with us.

Machinations are the stuff of our waking lives

with or without the theory language

to describe them.

Then the bees appear.

Shimmering in their bright titanium waistcoats,

robot whiskers alive to the least amount of sun,

they are under a new command,

brilliant as raindrops in another time

they refract wave motions while they move.

The headline patterns of their well-regulated dance

just miss the verve of the original,

but the whole hive shudders at an occasional disturbance

when a stochastic re-org resets the system.

Parables in a radically altered universe of relations,

particles, that is,

they appear swift as upstream ions

making their way against ever increasing odds of collapse.

Demonstration

The horizontal landscape tilted

bringing the sun up to reach the sky.

At the limit of human vision a train ran along Its rails,

              old remnants of the iron age, cutting a distant swath of action

through the stillness

                separating the heavens and the earth.

The flanged wheels turned

                red hot with friction in memory of an earlier time

                to which they still paid homage by sticking to their route.

The daily pattern of delivery and pick-up eased the pain of habit

                making it slightly better to receive than to give.

But the blood banks over flowed

                and even the smallest, meekest creatures saw their future

                in a grain of sand, sparkling with promise, bright as De Beers,

                but made in our labs and available for a fraction of the price.

Picking his way among the platelets and leaflets, the leader

                of the free market tripped up the stairs.

                on the ruins of the square a false front set had been constructed

                to promote redevelopment.

“Not to worry!” the sign proclaimed, slightly off-center,

causing the windows of one façade

to slip below the comfort level.

Illusory stone sills saluted the stage set cornice along the painted door.

The clouds were sketched artfully, just a few days after the eclipse,

                the drama queen girlfriend staged

                an outrageous party in the streets, smoking violently

                and blowing billows to match the cumulus skyline.

Fresh start! They proclaimed with buoyant spirits.

A thousand mirror-surface balloons grab the glazed smile from her face

                to demonstrate the warm behavior of collective thought

                through which vivid reflections

                streamed a bright world.

News Agency

Signs tough calculus

The more rivals

Penalty

The better

Blast the very best

Painstakingly

Shop

& ban diversity

After battering

Wild snub gets immediately

Handshake attacks of opponent

Families grieve

To master the future of war

A moment

And sacrifice, service, a debt

So much faster

Leaders line up

Day drinking, advice

Re-elected negotiations the reasonable

Middle or give too much?

Won’t shake better ties

And the military alliance

Distorted by the rush

Complicated story

Five takeaways

Tough to beat.

Day of Woman’s 

Celebrated after

the organized international

focal movement annually.

Better achievement

balanced world to run.

Collective story or equality no single

no any one

but who all.

Make your to make difference.

Celebrating call suffragists and further.

Campaigned collectivity accelerating.

Gender prior to group or organization.

Specific. 1909 became

after national some places

protest public and ignored.

Elsewhere observance claims following honoring.

Last protested discrimination in part socialists.

No paraded rights including equal.

For the right and to hold.

Suffrage.

Workers demanding

The strike support mass in streets.

Days later granted women

Second-wave began celebrating

Feel-good rather reforms

Gravest of conflicts

not relent other forms sexual violence.

Countless conflict zones every.

Harass who came to hundreds or stood by.

More action wives and gone missing.

Economic and search.

Information map historic rights.

Message contributions not flight

empowering control over the our world future our.

Recognition honoring. Day of.

Molecular Age

The tight bonds

Dry and loosen

Against distant combat

Electrons drop

A shell

Energy released

Disperses

Boundary conditions still

Unbalanced

the power

Earth its axis shifted

Tilts

Harvest light

Autumn now

Again

But irreversible

That place in time

Become this

Of life

Interview

April 29th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Johanna Drucker, Poet, Scholar, Writer, Artist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Throughout your career you’ve seen writing not simply as a process of imaginative creation alone, but as you’ve stated, an “intellectual conception and material production simultaneously.” The very process of creating books—the material—was and continues to be important for you, very much a part of the book’s message. Its very capability to communicate. How have digital advancements in publishing changed these perspectives and what would we lose in an all-digital book culture?

JD: Though I had written extensively before learning to print, my experience as a letterpress printer shaped my understanding of the relationship between visuality, materiality, and meaning. In my artist’s books I was always interested in using typography and graphic scoring (format, organization, layout) to structure the text. Likewise, I understood books in terms of formal features like sequence, development, intertextuality, gutters, and edges. In the digital environment what becomes difficult is that the spatial dimension is absent even if graphic design is present. You can navigate through multiple pathways in digital texts or even virtual environments, but orientation within the whole is far more difficult than when you are holding a book in your hands and know where you are in the volume (pun intended). Each medium has its aesthetic dimensions but I will always, I think, be more fluent in material/physical graphics than digital ones given my background.

DG: You have talked about ambiguity as an unavoidable element of the humanities, mainly because artifacts and information must necessarily be situated in the time and space that defines them. Yet data-centered methods and data science approaches are in many ways part and parcel of the digital humanities field. How do you situate poetry, which not only tolerates what’s ambiguous but in fact entertains it, in relation to the context of your greater work?

JD: Ambiguity takes many forms, of course, but the general principle I think is central to the humanities is hermeneutic engagement. While the natural sciences, and the social sciences that adopt their empirical methods, strive for repeatable and testable results that diminish uncertainty, the humanities give validity to epistemology situated in individual readings and interpretations. We could argue about the interpretative dimensions of empiricism, of course, but in the practice of poetry the commitment to evocative works that offer multiple—even infinitely unique—readings is widespread. Aesthetic experience is meant to open possibilities for experience, offer the opportunity to see differently, perceive afresh. This is very much in the Romantic tradition, but even the most intellectual, conceptual, or literal work of poetics has opted for evocative form over positivist discourse. Data may aspire to empirical certainty, but since they are, as I have written elsewhere, actually “capta,” they are always the outcome of and subject to interpretation.

DG: Despite being a scholar, you have in some ways resisted contemporary academic trends and have written that “I worry that the kind of creative thinking that made Robert Creeley the right person for the Gray Chair in Poetics at Buffalo, or Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein members of that academic community, is now impossible in the academy.” What can universities do to encourage the exploration of complexities situated outside the academy while at the same time maintaining an intellectually rigorous environment within it?

JD: This is a dilemma, to be sure. Sadly I have seen too many creative practice programs turn out doctoral students who don’t know the fundamentals of scholarship just as we have all watched the conformist methods of MFA programs across the arts homogenize creative production. The recent over-proliferation of work in the vein of identity aesthetics provides one vivid example of how this can happen. Universities are sites for the preservation and transmission of peer reviewed knowledge which includes original work in research across disciplines. Committees on hiring and promotion need to assess creative work in terms of emerging national reputation, distinctiveness of contribution, track record of sustained work, and capacity to continue productivity ahead. This is not hard. However, I should note that I never brought my creative work into my academic profile for review or promotion, or even for hiring, because I did not want it to be subject to certain kinds of judgments or assessments. My academic profile was sufficient. But I have done many “crosswalk” letters to assist chairs and deans in decision making. I feel fortunate to have had an academic career since scholarly work fed my creative practice and vice versa. I was always learning about forms and practices of which I had known nothing and they gave me ways to think and create, but I kept the two tracks separate, as I mentioned.

DG: I’m interested in your idea of reenvisioning humanities studies by finding the “right point of entry.” You pinpoint identity as the first, essential element towards this goal. It can be argued that the MFA program is in a similar state of crisis­—at best detached from the concerns of the real world and worst insulated from them. To contrast this with mainland Europe, where there’s only one MFA program, the Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig (DLL), it’s surprising to see how it often gets called out for producing “institute prose,” defined by critics as “a consequence of studying instead of living outside the academy, where many authors find their inspiration.” For a curriculum that began in 1955 and which used to send their students to “work in the coal mines,” all to “keep writers from getting too caught up in the world of fiction and philosophy,” the point is exaggerated but nevertheless clear. Do you see any parallels, then, between the need for an identity-based approach in the creative writing setting as the one you’ve outlined for digital humanities, or is something else needed here?

JD: One of the consequences of reading and listening to contemporary poetry for more than fifty years is that you get a kind of bell curve reference frame in your head and so much of what I read (or see in the art world as well) falls into a normative range of well-crafted work that does not seem engaged with either the language or events of our contemporary world. One of the paradoxes I discovered early in teaching studio art is that few things are more generic than “personal” expression, but give a group of students a problem to solve (draw a coat, desk, and chair) and the results are all strikingly specific and revealing. Art is a way of calling things to attention. Poetry has the capacity to expose the historical specificity and cultural location of language. But much mainstream poetry still treats language as transparent, a means to create images, insights, or epiphanic moments (the dreadful pivot punchline). But then we find the exceptions, the amazing moments when someone’s work just takes you away. I had that feeling when I first heard Jos Charles read feeld. It was captivating and exhilarating—and relevant without being documentary.

DG: I’m fascinated by a 2017 article you wrote about distant reading which argues that the practice, despite its algorithmic, computational aspect is in fact nothing more than another mode of interpretation. The distinction between human reading and distant reading seems to be erased when you write that the use of “algorithms to make decisions is, in essence, how the automated text analysis known as distant reading works. Still, no matter how sophisticated the algorithms, they are all based on models designed as interpretative acts.” Given this, I’m curious to know how the distinction between leitmotifs and data patterns might be situated within the discussion. Can we go out on a limb and say that as with human interpretation and distant reading what we’re really talking about is two sides of the same coin?

JD: Well, yes and no, I think because the difference is scale. Distant reading, like the results from AI Assist, synthesizes massive amounts of text-as-data to analyze patterns. I think my argument in the MLA piece was that distant reading is not reading, has no experiential dimension. It is interpretative in the sense that any data modeling privileges certain parameters over others, makes selections, and produces outcomes according to the model. But the distinction I make between data analysis and reading is the difference between counting your pairs of shoes and wearing them.

DG: If I hadn’t done so already, I’d like to get political and talk about your book The General Theory of Social Relativity. The second-to-last chapter, “Cultural Melancholy,” concludes with the following remarks, “These are not yet the darkest times. These are moments when the light is diminishing.” Written in 2018, the work outlines an innovative approach to understanding the world’s social processes by drawing parallels between the radical reorientation of science thanks to general relativity and quantum physics and how it might be time reenvision our understanding of societal relations the same way. In light of events occurring today—events that seem hard to fathom even from the perspective of 2018, what would you add, remove, or change in the book with the passage of eight years?

JD: I still think the observations in that book are accurate and relevant. We continue to live in a phantasmatic state, with non-linear politics, absorbed into fields of forces that work through us in ways that amplify the effects of charismatic figures. I hope the book will eventually get more traction. In terms of the cultural activity I value, which include professional scientific research, responsible preservation and curation of cultural heritage in archives, museums, and public spaces, educational opportunities across diverse populations, freedom of the press, free and fair elections, authoritative medical advice, our role in the global political and economic sphere—I could go on—the current situation has deteriorated rapidly since the new administration. But all of this was coming for a long time and the opportunistic destruction took hold because of many factors that had their origin in the Reagan-Thatcher years—but also in the way the New Left separated from the base of the old Left and its commitments. We could go on at great length about these matters, but anyone surprised by current events has not been paying attention for the last half-century. I think other factors play a role and have changed the social realm such as the rate, intensity, volume, and other multipliers in media communications. More on this below where I describe my current project, Social Physics, which is a more systematic and developed work on the issues I raised in General Theory.

DG: More than ten years ago you developed two distinct models of language that continue to be influential—the diagrammatic and stochastic theories. Though the theories are not binary entities in opposition, they do outline different linguistic parameters for understanding writing. While the former is based on structure and organization, functioning on the intellectual basis of roadmaps, the latter is a more chaotic, unpredictable domain of language. How do you see current poetic trends in relation to these theories? Do you think the rise of AI will eventually favor the stochastic model and cause the diagrammatic one to die out, or could poetry—with its emphasis on form, performance, ambiguity, and unpredictability, seemingly all at the same time—perhaps also cause a string-theory-like fusion into a single language model?

JD: Both diagrammatic and stochastic systems are dynamic. Diagrams are described as images that do work. Stochastic processes are rooted in chaos theory and non-linearity. I think the pull on poetic language will continue to create zones of activity and influence across a varied spectrum of approaches. Precision and attempts at disambiguation will have their place as well works whose dynamics are chaotic, non-linear, and open-ended. These poles do not exhaust poetic possibility, of course, though they provide a convenient heuristic for description. A fundamental question is whether cultural practices evolve continuously or emerge through discrete leaps or state changes. I think aesthetics is stochastic because the number of variables involved in its development are too complex to allow for prediction. Could Marcel Duchamp have been predicted? René Magritte? Jackson Pollock? Frida Kahlo?

DG: Your writing has been translated into various languages, including Chinese, Spanish, French, and many others, but I’m more curious about your own work on the theory of typographic translation, which you have described as a “performance of poetry on the page.” What are the challenges associated with this mode of rendering text from one language to another and how do you maintain communicative impact in relation to visual form when it comes to languages that are wildly divergent like Chinese which is a tonal language and English which is not?

JD: One of my favorite translations of my work is a version of Diagrammatic Writing translated into Finnish. The text has so many “t’s” and ‘l’s” and “h’s” that it looks like a forest in winter, bare spikes outlined against the white page. I find it intriguing that the graphical aspect of a language I can’t read makes such an impression. The Korean version of that book is, by contrast, completely opaque to me even visually. A collection of works done as “typo-translations” that I curated for Asymptote journal has just appeared (April 2026). I invited eight other poets/artists to create versions of John Keats’s “When I have fears that I may cease to be […]” to accompany my own “translation” into a typewriter font about ten years ago. I had lots of fun changing vocabulary and syntax to give the text a Beat tone. I have no idea what a translator working with that version of the poem would do in shifting it into another language but I think “Jack Keats” would be amused. But a work like The Word Made Flesh (1989) or Through Light and the Alphabet (1976) would be difficult to translate because they are composed at the level of the letter, not just the word.

DG: On a lighter note, I’d like to mention that you’re probably the only person I’ve interviewed whose last name corresponds so well to what they do. Drucker, of course, is a word of Dutch/German origin which indicates a profession in the printing or someone who operates a printing press. How often do people point this out and how amused are you by it?

JD: I’ve always been very happy about this coincidence, but the one time this served me well was in Amsterdam in 1978 when I wanted to print a book at the Drukhuis, a facility then sponsored by the state to provide a community workshop for letterpress. I went, introduced myself, and asked if I could use the shop. The gentleman who was in charge looked me over—I was quite young—and commented, “We don’t teach people to print here.” I replied that I knew how to print. He said I had to bring something to show him to prove this. I assented, but as I was leaving he asked my name so he would remember. When I said, “Johanna Drucker” he burst into laughter and added that I did not have to bring a specimen, he believed me.

DG: What book have you read recently that really inspired you?

JD: Right now I am immersed in Steven Strogatz’s Synch (2003) which is a study of self-organizing systems and the synchronicity of oscillations in natural systems. This is absolutely dead on for the work I have been doing the last few years, as is Ervin Laszlo’s Creative Cosmos (1993). I’ve been reading lots of work in the area of what is called “general resonance theory” which I find very useful, but I also recently read Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey, re-read Jane Eyre for the first time since my teens, and also the superb manuscript of Louis Armand’s forthcoming book on Erasurism. All super.

DG: What are you working on these days?

JD: Many things including critical fictions about contemporary culture, dense poetic texts that continue my approach to writing as an algorithm. Mainly I am focused on finishing Social Physics, a creative textbook introduction to the study of the social as a medium that distills the insights from the General Theory of Social Relativity into a more systematic, comprehensive, but also poetic presentation. Won’t be for everyone, but I have enjoyed writing quizzes and study questions as well as a glossary while designing the book to look like a geek-y standard college textbook. I’ve got a handful of articles on different topics from typopoiesis, to the quanta of social systems, and a summary of work on temporal modeling in process. I continue my SubStack and the “Memory Life of Things” series of personal recollections and paintings of the objects that prompt them. But I should also mention the “Re-Declaration Project,” commissioned as the only contemporary work included in the American Philosophical Society’s exhibit, “These Truths,” commemorating the 250th anniversary. The piece consists of a hand drawn frame of updated iconography and a letterpress broadside with the text edited using erasure as a strategy to eliminate historical references (all mention of a king) and bring forward the principles of the document for now and the future.

Author Bio:

Johanna Drucker is an artist, writer, and critic whose work has been published by various small presses, journals, and in limited edition artist’s books that are in special collections throughout North America and beyond. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies and is internationally known for her scholarship in visual poetry, history of writing, visual epistemology, and digital humanities. For more information: www.johannadrucker.net