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T H E E M E R G E N C Y O F P O E T R Y

Andrew Joron

V E L O C I T I E S C H A P B O O K S E R I E S

Berkeley, California 

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© 2 0 0 2 B Y A N D R E W J O R O N

T H I S E S S A Y F I R S T A P P E A R E D I N U R V O X # 2
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I .

What good is poetry at a time like this? It feels right to ask

this question, and at the same time to resist the range of
predictable answers, such as: Poetry is useless, therein lies
its freedom. Or, poetry has the power to expose ideology;
gives a voice to that which has been denied a voice; serves
as a call to action; consoles and counsels; keeps the spirit
alive.

All of the above answers are true, yet somehow inade-

quate. This is because poetry cannot be anything other
than inadequate, even to itself. Where language fails, po-
etry begins. Poetry forces language to fail, to fall out of it-
self, to become something other than itself—

A kind of topological fold or failure (called a “catastro-

phe” in mathematics) precedes the emergence—consti-
tutes the emergency—of the New. If poetry “makes lan-
guage new,” then it must be defined as the translation of
emergency. Even politically engaged poetry cannot es-
cape this consequence. The abyssal language of poetry
represents (translates) the motion of social change more
than it does the facts of social change.

Language is a social construct, yet it was fashioned by no

one in particular. Language continues to be haunted by

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this “no one.” Indeed, the basic structures of language

have more in common with molecular bonds than with
human interactions.

To the extent that words are things, they cannot speak.

(Speaking belongs to social action.) Poetry, before taking
action, listens to the speechlessness of words.

Receiver of the sender who is “no one.” (As the initial

shading out of nothing, the sending of the longest ampli-
tude—the deepest, the slowest—is always a lament.)

I I .

At this moment (late ), public space in the United

States is bedecked with flags, colorfully curtaining the
contradictions of the “war against terrorism,” which is it-
self a higher, officially sanctioned form of terrorism.

“America stands united,” yet remains a divided and an-

tagonistic society, driven by capitalism’s war of all against
all. Such a society can achieve “unity” only through ha-
tred of an external enemy. This is the utopian aspect of
military campaigns.

But the euphoria of this new-found unity is fading fast.

The screens have been repaired, but the picture still does-
n’t look right. Civil liberties have been curtailed, while
new rights and benefits have been granted to the big
corporations. Moreover, the “war of good against evil”

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seems to entail .. support for undemocratic regimes and

clandestine organizations, hardly differing from those of
the purported enemy, to the extent that such forces enable
.. capital and influence to penetrate a given region of
the world.

In the Mideast, in particular, acts of resistance to .. dom-

ination have grown increasingly desperate. Needless to
say, no grievance could justify the atrocities committed on
/. These horrific acts constituted nothing less than
crimes against humanity—to which the .. was obli-
gated, morally and politically, not to respond in kind. A
civilized nation would have investigated and prosecuted
the crimes according to procedures laid down by interna-
tional law. Instead, the .. chose to violate the law by con-
ducting a war of annihilative vengeance, caring very lit-
tle to discriminate between suspected terrorists and
innocent bystanders.

––only an inert and mechanical prose can accommodate

these events. It would be barbaric to write a poem about
them, to use them for aesthetic purposes—

The United States, in its all-consuming pursuit of wealth

and power, “has rained death and destruction on more
people in more regions of the globe than any other nation
in the period since the Second World War” (Monthly
Review, November ). Violence of this order must take
its toll on the life-world of the destroyer-nation itself. A
harsh, acrid odor begins to seep through the walls, spoil-
ing works of art and other fixtures of civilization.

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In the case of America, this odor appears to be invigo-

rating.—Adorno believed that any civilization guilty of
mass murder must forfeit its right to cultural creation. As
he famously declared, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric.” In his view, aesthetic practices that once pre-
figured social emancipation now serve only to mask or to
legitimate systemic violence. Here in America, however,
“culture” has been reduced to a simple play of intensities,
to the simultaneously brutal and sentimental pulsions of
mass media. Any “legitimation function” would be su-
perfluous: the American machine, with its proudly ex-
posed components of Accumulation and Repression, has
no need for such a carapace.

American poetry is a marginal genre whose existence is

irrelevant to the course of Empire. Yet here, only here, at
this very juncture between language and power, can the
refused word come back to itself as the word of refusal, as
the sign of that which cannot be assimilated to the sys-
tem—

Word that opens a solar eye in the middle of the Night.

Opens, but fails to dispel the dark. Of necessity, perhaps,

because it fails necessity itself. Opens, if only to make an
O, an indwelling of zero, an Otherness.

The creative Word comes into its exile here, in the world’s
most destructive nation.

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I I I .

This poetic opening in the “real world” is a wonderful

(meaning miraculous) wound, a sigh more than a sign. It
has none of the decorative quality of the art of forgetting;
this Word does not bring reconciliation. It affirms noth-
ing but the negative truth of its non-identity. It does not
communicate at all, except to announce the incommuni-
cable, as abyssal groan, as Ungrund.

This shudder makes itself felt in the oldest, shamanic art,

in labor turned against itself, toward the production of—
the distribution of—[say here what spills spells: that
Word that goes wanting]. Yet it also represents an expen-
diture that must be regulated. Polarized by the field of so-
cial struggle, poiesis is pulled at once toward the orna-
mental and the abyssal.

Ornament raises possibilities in order to restrict them. It

has no hold, however, on the release of the Cry. The lim-
ited cannot attain the limitless, except by a sudden break.

Adorno himself conceded, some years after his initial

statement, that “Perennial suffering has as much right to
expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may
have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no
longer write poems.”

Yet the Cry involves more than a reflexive response to

pain: it is an act of creation, a sign that the world is not
equal to itself.

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Haven’t the very bones of language, in which meaning

is always displaced from its object, the structure of a la-
ment? Isn’t this lament already evident in every self-
separation, every self-exceeding motion of matter? What
did Adorno know about the blues, and their ancient
authority?

The blues, all blues, are the matrix of the world’s subal-
tern cultures, an expression of triumph in defeat. The
raising of the voiceless voice, omnipresent roar of that
river forced underground.

(The more ancient the blues, the more collective the

voice.)

Today’s evidence: bare branches at the winter solstice, the

turning point. The word to be awaited here.

Word beyond meaning—for that which triumphs in de-

feat is the Inexpressible, the joyous object of lament. All
of language, as a mode of interaction that never is fully
present to itself, amounts to the labor of producing this
object.

The emergence of this object constitutes an emergency for

any restricted economy of meaning. The privileged site of
such an emergency in language is the poem, where some-
thing ontologically unprecedented springs forth: Der
Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes (the enigma is pure spring-
ing-forth), as Hölderlin testified.

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This “enigma”—the poem’s saying of the unsayable—

arises from the interaction of a particular set of words, yet
its enigmatic properties cannot be located among the
properties of its constituent elements (i.e., the meanings
of the words). The enigma springs forth purely at the
level of interaction, and so exceeds the reality of the in-
teracting elements themselves.

Indeed, scientists as well as poets now speculate that

the origin of language itself was an “innovation” that
“would have depended on the phenomenon of emer-
gence, whereby a chance combination of preexisting
elements results in something totally unexpected. The
classic example of an emergent quality is water, most of
whose remarkable characteristics are entirely unpre-
dicted by those of its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen.
Nonetheless, the combination of these ingredients gives
rise to something entirely new, and expected only in
hindsight.” Thus, “we have to conclude that the appear-
ance of language was not driven by natural selection”
(Scientific American, December )—instead, like wa-
ter, language also is an emergent phenomenon, sponta-
neously springing forth as a pure enigma, an overflowing
of reality, a surreality.

Recent studies of complex systems (from which the con-

cept of emergence is derived) appear to confirm the sur-
realist insight into the poetic-revolutionary nature of re-
ality. Investigations have shown that systems comprised
of a large number of elements far from equilibrium are
prone to beautiful convulsions called “phase transitions.”

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In this process, chance associations within the system, af-

ter reaching a critical point, undergo spontaneous self-or-
ganization. At this point, the Novum—an unexpected,
unprecedented superaddition to reality—emerges. Here
is the dynamical equivalent of water flowing uphill: the
system increases its complexity (and temporarily contra-
venes entropy) by incorporating chaos. The origins of
order are vertiginous: by “riding” its own chaotic tenden-
cies, the system propels itself to a higher level of organi-
zation. Complex systems, as one researcher* put it, are sit-
uated at the “edge of chaos.”

Within the complex system of language, a word’s mean-

ing is “edged”—and chaotically conditioned—by the
meanings of all other words. Communication attempts to
crystallize this chaos by establishing fixed relations be-
tween the meanings of particular words. But such lan-
guage-crystals melt and reform constantly in response to
their (subjectively mediated) surroundings. (Complex
systems are typically open systems to which rigid concepts
of “inside” and “outside” do not apply. Such openness al-
lows them to be extremely sensitive to changes in the en-
vironment.) In this process, communication proves sus-
ceptible to structural failure. The abyssal turbulence of
language as a whole, always brimming beneath the sur-
face of stabilized meaning, can initiate a spontaneous
phase transition that accelerates words far beyond equi-
librium, toward the condition of poetry.

*Christopher Langton, an expert on self-reproducing automata, quoted

in M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge
of Order and Chaos (Touchstone: New York, ).

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Poetry is the self-organized criticality of the cry.

(The concept of “self-organized criticality” can be illus-

trated by pouring a quantity of sand onto a tabletop: the
fallen particles will build up into a conical pile. This
shape is the product of self-organization, for the pile
maintains itself around a critical vertex, a balance-point
between order and chaos. Once this critical point is
reached, the effect of a single particle’s impact on the pile
no longer can be predicted. One particle may cause a
chain reaction of cascades upon impact, while another
may rest where it falls. Not only have the system’s ele-
ments spontaneously organized themselves in reaction to
an influx of energy, but the system as a whole has “tuned”
itself toward a state of criticality, where single events
have the widest possible range of effects.)

A poem tunes itself toward a state of criticality, a condi-

tion of language in which single words have the widest
possible range of effects. No matter how the poem has
been constructed, when poiesis has been achieved, the
words of the poem leap spontaneously to a new interac-
tive level (irreducible to any previous level), a level rep-
resenting the self-organization of a cry emanating from
nowhere and no one, but pervading all of language. What
disequilibrium forces this original cry to wander through
countless subsystems of meaning, always exceeding the
capacities of each to contain it, until it finally surpasses
the system of language itself ?

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I V .

When laments are raised, they run together like water,

collecting into a river that rushes toward an unknown
ocean. They travel always in the direction of lengthening
shadows, merging in the collectivity of night.

According to human-rights groups, the number of civil-

ians (mostly women, children, and old people) killed by
.. bombing in Afghanistan now equals the number of
people killed by the terrorist attacks on /. Once again,
vengeful acts have taken the lives of three thousand in-
nocent people. The .. has responded to a crime against
humanity by inflicting another, equally atrocious one.
Furthermore, the relentless bombing has halted the de-
livery of humanitarian aid, placing millions of refugees
in imminent danger of disease and starvation.

Through the night of these sacred and profane wars of

vengeance, the words of a poet must come together with
those of others struggling for peace and social justice.
Words of anger, argument, and analysis especially are
needed, for these words lead to action. But the oldest,
deepest oppositional words are those issued in lament.
The lament, no less than anger, refuses to accept the fact
of suffering. But while anger must possess the stimulus of
a proximate cause—or else it eventually fades away—the
lament has a universal cause, and rises undiminished
through millennia of cultural mediation. Unlike anger,
the lament survives translation into silence, into ruins.

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Contemporary lyricism has been described as the “sing-

ing of song’s impossibility.” This, too, may be a version of
the blues—whose strong ontological claim (to manifest
the spontaneous emergence—or emergency—of an un-
precedented Cry) now must be renewed.

Such a renewal would constitute an “ontological turn”

away from the epistemological dilemmas of modern
and postmodern poetics, where poetry is understood to
emerge from the questioning of poetry. To the extent that
a question anticipates its answer, it is unprepared to re-
ceive the Novum. That which is radically other does not
reveal itself under interrogation.

The deep blues, then, are not a mode of questioning, but

arrive in advance of doubt—and represent a negation
more primary than doubt.

Here is the seed of all resistance. Here is its ratio:

O, the grieving vowel

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
zero, the mouth of astonishment

V .

In a word, the uncanny reflection of an unfinished world.

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A N D R E W is the author of several books of poems,

J O R O N

including Science Fiction (Berkeley: Pantograph, )

and The Removes (West Stockbridge: Hard Press, ).
He has translated the work of Berlin surrealist poet Richard
Anders and the utopian Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch.

Contact: [email protected]