The Cry
at Zero
by Andrew Joron
Counterpath Press, Denver, CO, 2007
120 pp. Paper, $14.95
ISBN: 978-1933996-02-8.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
In a 2007 interview in the magazine Rain
Taxi, Andrew Joron admitted this book
of selected prose "has no form",
and that the "taxonomic disorder
of the pieces makes the book resemble
a surrealist collage more than a consciously
architectured edifice". This
reader finds less formlessness in it than
an intuitive gathering of work that crosses
genres, yet is linked by the authors
sensibility, passions and interests.
Though Andrew Joron has published poetry,
literary criticism, and translation, this
reviewer knew him from an anthology titled
Terminal Velocities. That 1993
publication was the final issue of
Velocities: a Journal of Speculative Poetry
that he edited from 1982 to 1988. Its
centerpiece was a long poem "The
Sunday Gift" by Adam Cornford, and
having previously read Animations (City
Lights, 1988), I was open to more of that
Anglo-San Franciscan poet and poetics
educator. Speculative and science fiction
poetry seems to be a rara avis;
besides that volume, I know only of Uncommon
Places: Poems on the Fantastic, edited
by Judith Kerman and Don Riggs (Mayapple
Press, 2000).
The first essay in The Cry at Zero
is "The Emergency," an angry
response in late 2001 to the drums of
war across America after the attack on
September 11. He calls for a poetry of
"self-organized criticality"
in defense of languages integrity,
as war rushes to distort it. And poetic
language, in its relation to the world,
can be at best little more than "a
ghost condensate." Thoughtful essays
follow on poets Philip Lamantia, Mary
Margaret Sloan, and San Francisco decadent
and clubman George Sterling. Though critical
of the Language poets, Joron praises Clark
Coolidge, whom many Languagistas (like
Ron Silliman) certainly count as their
own. The dark, sweet essays are separatedlike
white filling in an Oreo cookiewith
Jorons prose poems, some brief and
collage-like.
In an essay "Terror Conduction",
Joron links Robert Duncans attentiveness
to poetry and war, Georges Batailles
neo-Sadeian pursuits, and political philosopher
Miguel DeLanda. The "Zero" in
the title does not refer to Ground Zero,
the site of the collapsed World Trade
Center on lower Manhattan island, but
the impetus for Lamantias Neo-Surrealism,
and Joron affirmed to Rain Taxis
interviewer "Zero is the sign of
Utopia." Andrew Joron proudly claims
this books diffuseness as analogous
to the decentralized spontaneity of the
Zapatista movement in Mexico, and the
Direct Action Network in anti-globalization
demonstrations. Yet in the invasions and
repressions that followed after 9/11,
these promising social movements and innovative
tendencies have been eclipsed. Andrew
Joron endeavors, grasping for arguments
and inclinations in various cultural corners,
to craft a poetics for these times. And,
however provisional, rarefied (or even
momentarily gaseous), its a poetics
that doesnt exclude politics.