Proses

The Thereminist I am seven years older than Andrew Joron was when we first met some 25 years ago. In that time, I have grown old, fat, ridiculous, while Andrew—I won’t say looks the same—he certainly looks older—but he looks just as well as he did at age 40. Imperially slim, full head of hair, the same Germanic frown of inquiry constituting his face at rest, set off at the chin by a dashing cluster of thin white scars owing to a horrific boating accident as a child in Stuttgart. This habitual expression shows to best advantage during Andrew’s performances on Theremin, making him look stoic almost as he gesticulates like a crazed Wagnerian 10 hours into the Ring.The Theremin was a gift for his 50th birthday; a bunch of his friends, myself included, chipped in for the instrument that Andrew had long admired both for its surrealistic properties—it’s the instrument you play but don’t touch—and for its evocation of the science fiction of his youth. Still, as a non-musician, he was, I fancied, almost intimidated by it, though he began dutifully investigating its sonic properties and occasionally reporting his findings in poetic settings.But what changed everything was the return to the Bay Area of our friend Brian Lucas, after a six-year stint in Bangkok cave diving. Brian is a triple threat—poet, painter, musician—and being an old hand at being in bands, he soon had Andy jamming, then playing in a trio called Free Rein, which became a quartet called Cloud Shepherd. In the process, Andrew definitely became a musician, however free or outside. Cloud Shepherd is no more, but like every improv musician, Andrew’s now in a hundred different bands of varying degrees of notoriety. Ostrich Nostril, Man the Fingerguns, Crow Crash Radio, they proliferate like Tribbles; he’s even in one with Clark Coolidge on drums called Ouroboros.And much like Tribbles, these bands are trouble. Always a deliberate writer, fastidious in output, Andrew has had to relax his literary productivity even further to accommodate these bands, an invasive species in a creative field hitherto devoted to writing. If this is a midlife crisis, it’s an extraordinarily avant-garde one. New Andrew Joron poems appear at ever greater intervals; his publisher curses his apparent indolence, and I sometimes wonder if his friends and I are to blame for having bought him the Theremin, or more likely whether it’s Brian’s fault for teaching him to jam. Have we inadvertently altered the course of literary history by reducing the eventual sum of Andrew Joron books? I myself am perfectly willing to accept a certain portion of his output in Theremin, but will literary posterity ever forgive me?Well, I’ve got my own problems, so it was only a matter of time before my concern for Andrew’s decreased rate of literary production became a meditation on the related matter of how to turn the situation to my advantage. To wit: some time ago, during one of those speculative conversations two poets might have touching on future projects, Andrew mentioned he wanted to publish a book of prose called Proses. I thought this was splendid, and cheered on the idea, but the fact is he hasn’t published such a volume in the intervening years, and perhaps indeed had mentioned it as a passing fancy, a funny idea rather than a serious endeavor.It’s funny because it underlines the fact that prose is a mass noun, though frequently placed in opposition to the count noun poem. In truth, one might say, prose is in opposition to poetry, but then there’s no equivalent for an individual unit of prose as there is for an individual unit of poetry. But this essentially grammatical joke nonetheless takes on the air of an empirical one, as if the difference in the way the terms worked somehow reflected the distinction between poetry and prose.Meanwhile, I myself was contemplating putting together a volume of prose of uncertain genre; the pieces were stories, yes, but I found myself resisting the label of “short story,” associating it as I did with the moribund contemporary magazine fiction that dominated the popular conception of that term. To me, the pieces seemed more allied with poetry than with fiction, but they weren’t really “prose poems” either, and so I cycled through various terms like “fables,” “parables,” or even “fairy tales,” though none of these designations seemed to quite encompass the assemblage of poet’s prose I had in mind. But Proses, I thought, would be an ideal title for such a book, highlighting the poet’s versatility in the matter of writing prose.Being a poet, I am, of course, an inveterate thief, and the prize was already in my possession; I merely needed to tell my own publisher, and the book would be announced and maybe even printed before Andrew would get wind of it. But even a cold-hearted fucker like me would hesitate to jack a title from my best friend without permission. Indeed, I’d already done this to him once inadvertently and felt badly about it; doing it again deliberately was a bridge too far.