Adonis Reading at AWP
PJ, Adonis & Khaled Mattawa by NP.
Below, an extract of the reading Adonis gave at AWP under the auspices of New York’s great Poets House last Thursday, with Khaled Mattawa, his translator reading the English versions of the poems. You can find his translated books here and here. It was amazing — I have heard him read a number of times, but the power of his diction & the beauty of his Arabic take my breath away again & again.[Sadly & differently amazing (to me) was the half-empty room when it had been filled to capacity for the previous event, some all-American session on how-to-write-something-or-other-succesfully. The nombrilisme (fixation on one’s own belly button & its confessional lint) of the “creative writing” minions shouldn’t surprise me anymore, I know.]
[audio:https://pierrejoris.com/blog/audio/Adonis.mp3]
Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“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”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Try looking at these rooms as half full. Even one person can be an audience. You’ve got to start somewhere. You can end there too!