Andrew Joron & Andrew Zawacki

Sunday, February 8
7:30 pm

Concordia Coffee House
2909 NE Alberta

$5.00 suggested donation


Andrew Joron has been called "the metaphysician-elect of contemporary American poetry" (Cal Bedient, Boston Review). Joron's latest poetry collection is The Sound Mirror, published by Flood Editions. After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in the volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), Joron began to elaborate other forms of lyric speculation. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999) and in Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Joron is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch's Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998). He lives in Berkeley, where he works as a part-time proofreader and indexer.

Andrew Zawacki is the author of three books of poetry -- Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia). Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews, he has published criticism in the TLS, Boston Review, Talisman, How2, New German Critique, Australian Book Review, and elsewhere in the US, Europe, and Australia. A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers' Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and edited and cotranslated Aleš Debeljak's new and selected poems, due next fall from Persea. His translation from the French of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming from Burning Deck. He teaches at the University of Georgia.


THE MIRROR SOUND

Penned A
Cage confined
To page --

Lit, upon unlit lot, the
Letter
          O

 -- wrong sun, rung reason of
   
         One, that avatar of two. To
         One, who won't won't want --

         Here
O is I's
  
         avowal, a dead deed.
A gain to negate no gate.

So just my jest, my
Vote to mon oeuvre:
  
         vroom over room & verity, the

Straight arriving
         late to
Strayed, a raid upon the rayed.

Andrew Joron




Wherefrom the shadows that are forms

Escorting the immediate ornament of dream
     it lingered past the absence it invoked
like a thunderstorm, decisive in its indifference,
     that over a folded, unfamiliar premise
recast the decadent frieze allure had let go:
     sharpening of caution along a branch,
expansion into dark, elaborate fields
     where, because it had not yet inquired,
trees resisted wind that sounded of nothing,
     no place, nobody known,
already other than why it was setting out:
     closing in of clouds, forgotten forms,
dusk erotic blue at the river's inflection
     as if, by encountering its design,
an end was reached before the terms were met:
     across the outer suspicions of grass
teased by a wrapped, a razor moon
     heavier for its weight against a hill,
it stayed above an interior lit from within
     at the edge of sight: where we,
because we lived there, were never at home.

Andrew Zawacki