Pierre Joris' Meanderings & mawqifs of poetry, poetics, translations y mas. Travelogue too.
Philippe Sollers died earlier this month at 86. I was just now able to retrieve my translation of extracts from Paradis II (1986, Gallimard), his most experimental book, extracts first published in 1987 in...
News of Jack Hirschman’s death on August 22nd simply knocked the wind out of me. Despite his age, it came without premonition, and felt unexpected and jarring. When mutual friend David Meltzer passed in 2016 I dreamt about...
Arab Culture / Intellectuals / Obituaries / Palestine / Poetry / Translation
by Pierre Joris · Published February 16, 2021
With thanks to the ever excellent & useful ArabLit for this compilation: On February 14, poet and memoirist Mourid Barghouti died in Amman, Jordan, having spent most of his life in various exiles: Below,...
It was exactly 50 years ago, on the night of 19 to 20 April 1970 that Paul Celan left his apartment on the avenue Emile Zola, and succumbed to his psychic demons: the Pont Mirabeau...
Very saddened to learn this morning that Uri Avnery has died at 94. His weekly column which I read religiously — no, that’s the wrong word, though “irreligiously” won’t do either — as...
Cecil Taylor: Completion Then Scherzo in Mind (1928-2018) : keyboard, acquire roiling equipoise. Who once sent your keys catapulting into free space breathes somewhere his vapor trail here after remains in visible, his touch...
Gerrit Lansing, poet, scholar, friend, passed away peacefully this past night. A man of wider & deeper knowledge than almost anyone I have known, Gerrit was as familiar with, and brought as much care...
Elegy for Roswell Rudd: Curtain Calls With Glissandos Galore just nerve-jazzed getting off Wilshire then mysterious left turns then soccer field arises, horizon fills with team of middle-aged realtors, one puts a trombone...
My translation into French of Motel Chronicles (and Hawk Moon) came out in 1985 & reused the same cover photo than the US edition above, though I had the original photo, much wider, and wrote the...
Pierre Joris, born in Strasbourg, France in 1946, was raised in Luxembourg. Since age 18, he has moved between Europe, the Maghreb & the US & holds both Luxembourg & American citizenship. He has published over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose, from CMP) & The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). Forthcoming are: Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (Small Orange Import, 2023) & Diwan of Exiles: A Pierre Joris Reader (edited with Ariel Reznikoff, 2024). For a full list see the right column on this blog.
In 2011 Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, published Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays on Joris’ work by, among others, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Jean Portante, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff & Nicole Peyrafitte (2011).
Other work includes the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta’wil Productions). With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, and with Habib. Tengour Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3: The University of California Book of North African Literature.
When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte. A volume of their collaborative work, to be called Domopoetics, will be published in the near future.
More
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader” edited & translated by Pierre Joris
“Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj”
“Paul Celan: The Meridian Final Version”—Drafts—Materials
“Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-Between” edited by Peter Cockelbergh
“The University of California Book of North African Literature”
4×1 : Works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey and Habib Tengour
PABLO PICASSO The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems
Poasis (Selected Poems 1986-1999)
Poems for the Millennium 1 & 2
ppppp-Poems Performances Pieces Proses Plays Poetics by Kurt Schwitters
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)” Contra Mundum Press
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello” Contra Mundum Press
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux