Reviews

The particular difficulty of Andrews's poetry is also the source of its distinction; even within the tradition of the avant-garde there are few texts as radically anti-semantic. Andrews' poems, that is, do not simply mask or distance their referential 'meaning,' but they actually oppose the very grounds of reference itself. The work is not merely difficult to explicate, but the very notion of explication is put in question by the work. "There is nothing to decipher," as he writes in the early essay "Text and Context" (1977), "There is nothing to explain." Emphasizing the opaque materiality and artifice of language ­ the insubordination of words ­ his poetry challenges and frustrates the conception of language as either transparent or instrumental. The politics of such difficulty are manifest; Andrews's poems aggressively refuse assimilation to any conventionally available mode of reading, and they thus obviate the status quo by demanding new ways of thinking about and engaging language. To alter consciousness by disrupting language has long been the dream of a politicized avant-garde, but Andrews's poetics provide an especially sophisticated version of the revolution of the word: positing linguistic structures as analogous to social formations and recognizing the social ground against which even the most abstract play of the signifier occurs.
Craig Dworkin, "Bruce Andrews (encyclopedia entry)"

Excerpt:

Ache by it better to be booed to back brainpan. Bound
Fictitious Object- gingerbready kind of. Don’t overtax it,
get the muzzle off. The future as a program prompt present, a
sad finger in any dike aims full decay nervous in safety vora-
cious. No.No. this is action. The luxury of chlorophyll
convulsions in stride arraigned as fetish verb. The same soli-
tude keeps hope machines going by this overhatching. Quote The
Lord is my Shepard and he knows I’m gay Quote a low priced
car, it’s a prestige car. But only a king can escape disso-
nance, and kings, not infrequently, go mad. Fanshen.

from "Train Your," in Swoon Noir

Bruce Andrews was born in Chicago on April Fools Day, 1948. He is the author of several dozen books of poetry and performance scores, most recently, Lip Service (Coach House Press, 2001). His essays on poetics are collected in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis (Northwestern University Press, 1996). He was co-editor, with Charles Bernstein, of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978-1982) and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).Andrews has taught Political Science at Fordham University since 1975 — with a focus on global capitalism, U.S. imperialism, the politics of communication, conspiracy theory, and covert politics. In New York City, he has also been involved in a long series of collaborative multi-media theatrical projects and performances. As composer, sound designer & live mixer, since the mid 1980s, he has been Music Director for Sally Silvers & Dancers.