Neo-Surrealism: Or, the Sun at Night

by Andrew Joron

Poetry. Cultural Writing."The history of neo-surrealism in American poetry is not a linear story whose future is determined by its past. It is a sleepwalker armed with reason. As such, it arrives both too late and too a solar apparition at midnight"--NEO-REALISM;OR,THE SUN. Andrew Joron is a poet and translator who lives in Berkeley, CA. He is the author of several books, including FATHOM (2003), selected by the Villiage Voice as one of the top 25 books of 2003.

Genres: Poetry

59 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Andrew Joron was raised in Stuttgart, Germany, Lowell, MA, and Missoula, MT. He studied under anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend at UC Berkeley, obtaining a BA in philosophy of science. Joron began writing science-fiction poetry before turning to surrealist-influenced lyric, reflecting his association with Philip Lamantia. His translations from German include philosopher Ernst Bloch's Literary Essays.

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

On some level, one must imagine chronicling surrealists is like herding cats... cats made of bread that swim through our childhood fears. Yet Joron's text is only partially a history. The Sun At Night functions very much like Joron's verse in that it gathers from the past specifically that which offers strength for the future. If it is an incomplete "history," it is so because Joron's project is not an impartial overview of surrealism that was, but rather a reinvestment of surrealism as a mode required in the modern moment to oppose the current forms of domination beneath the language of capital. This is not to say that the work is ahistorical: the history of the movement is knowledge is strength, and the work upholds its promise to history admirably. For one who has caught the promises and possibilities of surrealism on the wind, this is a great starting point to reclaiming the mechanisms of the movement and positioning them to drive into the future.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to neo-surrealism, and it does provide biographies of several major figures. This book is short, and is definitely an introduction work as opposed to one that is necessarily going to offer profound insights.

[Rodney Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

HERDING CATS INDEED

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ingenuous. Imagine Pete Frame, of the rock family tree graphic narrative books and broadsides, from the Seventies, and counterfactually pretend a Pete Frame who sat in on sessions by Bonnie and Delaney, before lovingly locating himself on one of those tree-limbs' outermost branches. Joron's subject is California surrealism. Joron's own place is established mid-way in the sixty page pamphlet (originally published in Foster and Donahue's The World in Time and Space: Toward a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time -- 2002) when Joron mentions that "Surrealism has entered the United States from more than one direction." Indeed, and we grew a bit of it here outselves, as Joron himself is the exigent example. But those that were not coming out of Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, City Lights Books and its poets (Foster & Donahue's anthology-version of the essay provides a useful bibliography) have a hard time in Joron's genealogy, a parochialism of which we could hope Joron was slightly more aware. When I think of the decades of poetry wars, from the fifties onward, and when I wonder how it all came down to "the failure of the deep image as a mode of experimentation (that is, its eventual reconciliation with New-Critical techniques in the form of "academic workshop" poetry) seems to have poisoned the roots of surrealism itself for many poets of the American avant-garde," I do a quick reckoning and decide I'm not sticking with Joron for the ideas, but for the California literary history, and leave it at that.

The book is subtitled Tranformations of Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999. For Joron, the literary journal kayak (1964-1984) was the center of the American surrealist moment, an arguably plausible claim that leaves out Bob Dylan and the rest of what Joron somewhat puzzlingly calls "pastoral surrealism," by which he seems to mean the Minnesota surrealism of Robert Bly and James Wright (though Dylan was there at Minnesota with Bly and Wright, and in fact their social circles overlapped). There's a "Romantic visionary" surrealism Joron values for its "dangerously deranging" energies, which Joron sees as revolutionary, but the only midwesterners who make this list are George Kalamaras and The Chicago Surrealist group, which included at one time Bill Knott. Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford, James Tate -- these poets, who all emerged in that moment of the late Sixties midwest: they do not make the history, presumably because they reflect a more subjective "intensification of intuition . . . rather than intensification of contradiction." Raw & Cooked, Hot and Sweet: And so it goes. However, in Joron's particular discourse, this distinction points toward his preferred surrealists, Ivan Arguelles, Adam Cornford and Will Alexander -- a genealogy of the California writers who have mattered to him.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is nice, compact book which traces the development of surrealist poetry from 1966 to 1999.