Johan Jönson, Collobert Orbital (Displaced Press, 2009)«If Vicente Huidobro met Georges Bataille on a Waste Management(R)truck, the result might be something akin to Johan Jonson's COLLOBERT ORBITAL, the new manifesto of "the waste-disposal-working-class." At times soaring across "aerospatiality," at others existentially grounded in "an overheated world factory" of "all work, all healthcare, all logistics," Jonson's linguistic propulsions and dynamic formal innovations challenge "a victorious bourgeois poetry order" to, once again, rearticulate verse experimentation to the politics and poetics of working a day job." - Mark Novak
«DNA bonanza contaminant reverie, target overhead. Flock to revelator gridded up to have no stake in history. See that their grave is kept clean. Fatalize wrong, upend amphetamachinic tort. Zero immunity. Cology — hyperplex mini flair, underalphabetic biodebt. Ssay. I couldn't remember the advanced memory formula. Dunno ergo soma. Autoquadrilateral & exogeneric, the transparencies regroup. Law intuition anything uncocked reason craters. Eco rad mono dead with note attached, incalculably inorganic property of the object continuity you just heard — the world, overtime. Mooniac, tricked-up torso love before discharges false dichotomies start stuttering. Ahysterical — swiftest closeup transplant nude spatiality. "To speak an ecstatic technology." The flattest are the busiest arterial munchies. Sextras: bend them over. Faster buckle conjure against choice as surrogate overheating extinction as obliteratable chew. Speed mash mouth lexicon amphetamaneuver. The goo goo amok, self torture broad-minded guts — interzonad gaffered all over you. Put tools in your face. Overdifferent anti-creamery daub up name. Existential logistics: a porous will, a rectal will suckling finality. Mutate epithet or no ending belowgistics. Buzzerless blisscharge, cuties with fists pry open your syllables. Cunnilanguage, cunnilanguish — hope, a surgical implant. Wishful stun: harmony is a warning where anything can breathe. Poppy, missile! Safe, natural, bombing run — victory post-mortem lab blubber. Difference gets you dead. Prey unwriting rumba complicity radio spook you white on white disgust. Whiteous coke on scalpel socialized ice cream. The larval class: vote yes. Cattle reward you, interzonked Fanonical swearing in cattle corporation. Dark retro, subtlety reverses it up the ass. Wage labor, context meltdowns. War — short term memory loss. You think about a lot of things when you're insoluble. Reptility: turn gold into cash. PEWS (Political Economy [of the] World System) refusal mash-up. Organize the slaves to vaporize hegemon. Any accident would be one ending.» - Bruce Andrews
«COLLOBERT ORBITAL sounds like an operation performed on the retina of a late night comedy show host. It is not. What is it? To speak an ecstatic technology. It is labor and language. Work and wonder. I would like to connect your tongue to a garbage disposal and then ask you to moan a song called Global Capitalist System Dynamic bribes. The fucking ocean is bleeding black tears right now. People say experimental, here it is. Packed up tight. This poetic arterial order. Bleeding, too, as it spins. worldfactory. It is an isotope slam of French writer Danielle Collobert’s journals. Wait now. Johan Jonson flicks the switch.
Original Gravity: 1.059 Final Gravity: 1.013 International Bittering Units: 30 Color (SRM). Carry the one, etc. About a 3 inch head with great sustainability. The coating was itself river flotsam and endured. I drank all 6, quickly. The buzz was not dissimilar to running four miles and then downing a cruet of heavy syrup. Glow.
Jonson as member of Teatermaskinen. Some remember his performance, Project FAUST-FUCK. His poems reminded me of eating glass, shitting out the glass, reconstructing the glass into a mirror or a frame to frame ourselves doing the fake smile. Asked to. What does all that mean? This.
That the scalpel-sharp
amphetamine logic
reconstitutes
things and orders.
Deep in the darkest depths of Rock Lake prowls a great saurian known today as Rocky. The legend of Rocky is old. The ancient inhabitants of Aztalan warned of the beast by building a giant serpent mound at the lake’s edge. The early residents of Lake Mills were forewarned of a guardian placed in the lake to protect its sacred stone tepees. And history tells of numerous encounters with Rocky, who became a source of great worry and fear. Although not seen for over a century, divers still experience a feeling of dread and being watched. Enjoy Rocky’s Revenge, our offering to this legendary protector of Tyranena. Right. Ok. It tasted malty. Ever had Russian black bread? It tasted like Russian black bread someone had shoved beneath the radiator of a studio apartment in Grand, Rapids, Michigan, one of those pipe heater things that groan and ping all night. Toasted black bread. Malty. There was a slight toffee finish, like that hard grandmother candy. Also a finishing note of whiskey. Why? It was aged in whiskey barrels, dumb-ass. I liked it.
Yes. Something is taking place. Yes, it is enormous and white wall, strong institutional lighting. You stand there, in front, on the surface. A speech therapist instructs you. You cannot speak. The words produce an unendurable aftertaste. The word combinations produce an unendurable aftertaste. You write write think write for no reason. It is disgusting to hear that which is said to be YOUR voice. What do you remember? You remember a creature without name who stuttered in a foreign language. The speech therapist is a whispering choir machine, a movement, a kinetic, a gray and white. Nothing worth seeing. That which is visible is always already lost territory, lost time.
A good beer makes the mouth feel tingly. My mouth felt tingly with all 6 beer. I could bounce quoted poems off my ideas of, but to pick is like selecting a drop of water from the river–I’d like you to experience the river whole, in all its…Here is 67. I mean come on. Read 67 and then go read the book entire. Flow.
Simultaneously ongoing labor:
-laboratory-bacteria-cultures-
the unconscious concretized in multiple bombings
the energy extraction from the event the
reveling body aggregate
animal and machine
mutations and pleasures
only not dead which you miss
only not torture which you want
The capital’s industrial revenue.
you only absolute time without space
Deleuzian deterritoritializations
the impulse flow never stopped by human will
your bodily blood no longer testifies about you
illiteracy for no minds
the room a neverending field
the key an open repetition
swallow more infected seed
gurgle the disgusting swallow again
always already uninterrupted in the inscribing reactor
self-mutilating-freedom
Light carbonation. I already discussed light carbonation. You want steak not sizzle. You want flavor not fluff. You want light carbonation. God invented beer.
The Swedish Arts Council invented the money for COLLOBERT ORBITAL. Johannes Goransson invented the English words to put into the words (thanks for doing that). Frank Place invented a pregnancy test that will always come out positive. Steven Hendricks invented the scaffolding world of this book. A. Hormel & Co. developed the world’s first canned ham in 1926. Meghan McNealy invented the colors. Eric Gill (who was a sculptor, designer, devout Catholic, and person who experimented sexually with his own dog) invented the font used here called Gill Sans. Temple Grandin invented a friendly way to slaughter cattle. Antoine Louis invented the Guillotine (not Guillotine himself). Johan Jonson says:
Buzzerless blisscharge.
Buzzerless blisscharge.
Buzzerless blisscharge.» - Sean Lovelace
«Johan’s text is in many ways a "re-translation" of Norma Cole's translation of Collobert's diaries (Litmus Press), translating it into his own severely restricted language, and also his life (he used to work as a feces-remover at a hospital).
Johan is an interesting poet. A working class guy who was early on heralded as a bright young promise in the late 80s; then his work grew increasingly obscene and constrained (an odd combination); and in the 90s he was more or less exiled from the poetry world. Instead he wrote performance pieces for an incredibly obscene Artaud/Muller-inspired performance troop in northern Sweden (Teatermaskinen), publishing his texts as pamphlets that were eventually gathered up as I krigsmaskinen (In the war machine, they dealt largely with the war in Yugoslavia).
At this point he was in many ways “rediscovered” by Aase Berg, a young poet who had gone from being a member of the radical avant-garde group the Stockholm Surrealists Group to an incredibly popular and influential young poet. The big press Bonnier very briefly let her edit its flagship journal BLM, and she used it in part to bring Johan into prominence. I’ve translated her work too, so I included one of those books. She also has an interesting tie-in for American poetry: as you can perhaps tell, there’s a big shift in her work from the extreme Bataille-influenced early surrealist prose poems to the highly charged, extremely translation-infused poems that follow (particularly Transfer Fat, which is based largely on “translations” of string theory, sci-fi films and other materials, a text that seems to “transfer” the “fat” of signifiers/signified in a continuous movement). Anyway, a big part of that shift had to do with Berg’s interest in American poetry, particularly Susan Howe, who was then just being translated into Swedish.
Since then, Johan has become one of the central poet of OEI, a journal and publishing house founded by Jesper Olsson, a Swedish scholar who spent years in the 1990s studying with Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo and who was inspired by Charles’s emphasis on do-it-yourself publishing. In the years since he came back from Buffalo, Jesper has made OEI into a major influence on contemporary Swedish poetry.» - Johannes Göransson
