Dan Rounds and Andrew Joron
Monday, August 11 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Bethanie Humphries
Dan Rounds spent the better part of a decade in UCLA’s graduate political science and sociology programs studying political economy, social theory, and social movements before abandoning graduate school to become a labor activist. He has worked for various labor unions, environmental organizations, and community groups. His poetry has appeared in Aufgabe, 3rd Bed, Aught, XConnect, Good Foot, Fish Drum Magazine, and the American River Review. He lives and works in California.
[some distant lateral present]
you roll over the land
like a wheel. you never
arrive. you take off your
hands. you remove your feet
to hide your head and
never arrive. Counting
backward from none to
all you count backward
from none. to live in the
distance. to inhabit a space
between the origins and
aftermath of some
distant lateral present.
Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010). Joron’s previous poetry collections include The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Along with Nancy Joyce Peters and Garrett Caples, he is the editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (University of California Press, 2013). From the German, he has translated the Literary Essays of Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch (Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Perpetual Motion Machine by the proto-Dada fantasist Paul Scheerbart (Wakefield Press, 2011). He has won the Rhysling Award three times: for Best Long Poem in 1980 and 1986, and for Best Short Poem in 1978; and the Gertrude Stein Award twice, in 1996 and 2006. Joron’s poetry is included in two W. W. Norton anthologies: American Hybrid (2009), edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, and Postmodern American Poetry (2013), edited by Paul Hoover. Joron lives in Berkeley, California, where he theorizes using the theremin and plays in the improv ambient/drone quartet Cloud Shepherd. In the 2014 fall semester, Joron joins the faculty of the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
The Poverty of Fact
One lizard is less than one word.
Whose tongue unscrolls to taste the dust?
The wall of the mind are painted
Hot pink, the color of electricity.
Either aether or ore, the barrens accumulate.
Forgive me, I have not eaten today.
I am a talking picture, nothing more
Than a tissue wedged between ages of silence.
Frame by frame, the bus window
Animates the still desert.
By the roadside, the skull of Taurus whitens
Beaconwise —
Correspondent to the unspilled sky.
His horns are garlanded with wandering planets
The evening in the plaza
Heaven is the guitar that plays itself.
Old church, a rubble patch. Stop here to venerate
The bloody stumps of the black cactus.
Canyon I call for no answer.
To be accurate, a man goes back to his ghost.
As the militia guards the volcano, so
Is necessity measured, against the will.
Hecho en México, Mayo 2002
from Trance Archive
