The Daily Glance
Andrew Joron's Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems displays the range of Joron's playfulness and philosophic disposition. Reading these pieces is like reading some of the original pieces of the Language poets, but these pieces feel more contemporary. He brings up questions about language and how it means, about how language surrounds/creates our thinking, about the difficulties of translating; moreover, the poems exist in conversation with much of Western thought, from Prometheus to Celan.
As life is alien to the Earth, so language is alien to life. Between them, there can be no resemblance: each one is the mortal remains of the other. It is a work of dissolution to ascend from the order of the Rock to that of the Eye to the Idea.
Essentially, the poems are like flash philosophy that also focuses on playing with language, for Joron often plays with the sound of a word by repeating it or using rhyme to signal a variation on it later in the piece. It makes me wonder how the theremin would sound accompanying his piece "Constellations for Theremin."
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