Memorials

Philadelphia — September 10, 2025

The Kelly Writers House, UPENN
Special Episode of PoemTalk: Pierre Joris & Jerome Rothenberg
6:00 PM in person
Co-sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program
RSVP here to attend in person

NYC Book Launch/Memorial - Friday September 12, 2025

Pierre Joris — Poasis: Many Tonngues, Many Fires
The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church
131 E 10th St, New York, NY
Reception 7:15PM / Reading: 8PM sharp
The program will feature poetry, music, & tributes reflecting the scope of Pierre’s decades-spanning, boundary-crossing work. — and most of all POASIS II (Wesleyan University Press), selected poems from 2000–2024. Copies will be available at the event, and you can also order the book online if you cannot attend.

Albany — Seeptember 27, 2025

Pierre Joris — Poasis & Beyond: Always the Many
Part 1: Panel — 4:00–5:30 p.m. in UAlbany Campus Center Auditorium
Sponsored by NYSWI and Department of English.
Part 2: Reading & Performance — 6:30 p.m. in UAlbany Campus Center Multipurpose Room following a 5:30 p.m. reception. Hosted by Department of English with support from NYSWI. More details TBA.
Presented by The English Department, New York State Writers Institute, and University at Albany, as part of NYSWI Book Festival

---

Tributes:
New York Times
Boundary 2
Jacket 2

Orange Import Through/You series #1. Hand-bound chapbook featuring Pierre Joris’s first handwritten attempt at translating Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” from German into English, along with an essay by Joris on his lifelong journey translating the work of Celan.

Review of Interglacial Narrows by Sneha Chowdhury in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

"In Pierre Joris's latest book of poems, Interglacial Narrows, a poem about the speaker’s first dream of Paul Celan appears twice, once in the section titled 'Homage to Celan' and again in the final section, 'Up to & Including the Virus.' Perhaps the dream manifests what never happened in Joris’s life—his meeting with the poet he has translated for the last 50 years." READ REVIEW

Pierre Joris’s Interglacial Narrows and, with Florent Toniello, Always the Many, Never the One,” by Jason Weiss in the Brooklyn Rail

"In his book of conversations Always the Many, Never the One, Pierre Joris notes that he likes to date his arrival in New York, in 1967, as being 'three months after John Coltrane passed.' For a lad who had already left his native Luxembourg to go study medicine in Paris, where he discovered that poetry was his calling instead, the shift in direction could not be clearer. Coming from a multilingual environment, he had no trouble deciding which would be his language for writing—his fourth, in fact: English." READ ARTICLE

New from Wesleyan University Press.

Poasis II gathers Joris's major poetic works from 2000 to 2024. These nomadically shape-shifting poems range widely across times, places, and cultures, addressing, for example, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster (in a quasi-opera libretto),the meditations of tenth-century revolutionary poet, sufi teacher, and thinker Mansur al-Hallaj, an homage to his old friend and collaborator Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024), a list poem celebrating Herman Melville's 200 birthday, and extracts from his Book of Cormorant.

New from Contra Mundum Press.

Interglacial Narrows gathers a range of Pierre Joris’ poems written between 2015 and 2021, including an extended version of the Book of U / Le livre des cormorans by Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte, initially published by Galerie Simoncini in Luxembourg in 2017.

"Pierre Joris is a word-wizard who shines light on the soul itself. His poems are precious jewels—compact, crystalline structures—each containing their own unique secrets, guiding you to undiscovered places, feelings, images, and ideas. It’s impossible to read his work and come away unmoved. Magically inspiring!" - John Zorn

With Florent Toniello. New from Contra Mundum Press.

With a starting point on July 14, 2021, when the Centre national de littérature hosted Pierre Joris’ 75th birthday celebration, Always the Many, Never the One builds upon the initial interview by Florent Toniello that took place that day to go deeper into a major Luxembourg-American poet’s reflections on literature, philosophy, and life. Throughout this book Joris develops a core concept of his thinking and writing, “in-betweenness,” using both literary examples and life anecdotes, some never shared in Joris’s vast bibliography so far.

Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All 9 volumes of Celan's poetry are now available in Joris's translation.

Fox-trails, -tales & -trots is an assemblage of proses and poems on the themes of foxes, Renert, Luxembourg and America, hunting, healing, translating and writing. Renert is in Luxembourg, but also in New York with nomadic Joris who explores with him the meanings of identity, migration, language and literary creation. ‘Pierre Joris is the turbulence of the world in words of betweenness, an omnicultural shaman, you never know where he takes you with his rhizomatic writing; it’s not a direction, it’s not a way, it’s opening, oscillation and becoming.’ — Nico Helminger

Translated by Pierre Joris. In the mid-fifties Paul Celan suggested that he had a mind for writing that “would be a bit more sober & more spacious” than his poems. And yet, in his life-time Celan published very little of such “more spacious” work — i.e. prose — except for two essays that were public award-acceptance speeches, and a few occasional bits and pieces often published, or better, hidden away in obscure places. It is only with this volume, edited by Barbara Wiedemann and Bertrand Badiou, that Celan’s multifaceted achievements as a prose writer can be discovered.

Edited by Pierre Joris with Peter Cockelbergh & Joel Newberger. Robert Kelly is one of the major and most prolific American poets of our time. Between 1961 when his first collection, Armed Descent, was published by Hawk’s Well Press, and Seaspel, brought out in 2019 by Lunar Chandelier Collective, Kelly has published some 66+ books of poetry as well as 14 volumes of prose, including novels, short stories, & essays. A City Full of Voices is the companion volume to the 2014 A Voice Full of Cities, the Collected Essays of Robert Kelly, also published by Contra Mundum Press.

This is a treasure, a caravanserai of a book, erudite, personal, enlightening. Pierre Joris poet, translator, editor, anthologist scholar, flâneur par excellence—is an incomparable and friendly guide to these realms, his lifelong passion and esprit manifest and up for the rigor of this vast deserta. — Anne Waldmann