Author: Pierre Joris

The Last Occitan Butcher Stall

The core of the Estivada 2005 in Rodez was the music, but the other arts were also represented — the visual arts in a wonderfully funny & yet disturbing fasion via Claude Merle’s very...

Pass a Brother some Hot Sauce

Always had a certain admiration for Robert Duncan’s roving eye — sort of wished I too had the possibility of keeping the gaze fixed on at least two places at the same time —...

Occitan Festival in Rodez

The various cultural irridentisms that have marked Europe since the sixties have always made me feel uneasy. The enemy was (& remains) the nation-state, so what’s the point of creating more nation-statelet subunits based...

Artaud & I

Just arrived in Luchon-City after two days at the Occitan Festival in the city of Rodez, where I listened to a talk by Occitan writer René Duran, while sitting next to Antonin Artaud. More...

Nomadizing again

The Joris-Peyrafitte smala is preparing to travel again in order to rejoin their summer pasturing grounds in Bourg d’Oueil, in the Pyrenees, via a few days at the Occitan culture festival in Rodez. This...

Homage to Gustaf Sobin

Paul Gauguin — Café at Arles Robert Kelly just sent me this, his “klagendes Lied,” for Gustaf Sobin: MEMORIAL GUSTAF SOBIN Arles no rain a shadeacross stone bleacherswaited two thousand years forour one conversation...

Bastille Day, B-Day

Today, 14 July, is Bastille Day, the day when in 1789 the good people of Paris, after breaking into the Hotel des Invalides where they gather 28000 rifles, hear (the rumor) that there’s gunpowder...

3 poems by Mohammed Bennis

LIGHTNING You desertbe vasterlet a painful dustenvelop methe migrating dustthe birds have pushedtoward the tablet where violence residesBut now it burstsand delivers booksand dilutes itselfin all the veinsBe vasteryou whose place isthe perpetuity of...