Pierre Joris' Meanderings & mawqifs of poetry, poetics, translations y mas. Travelogue too.

Category: Literature

March 21, 2013

Happy 250th, JP!

This morning’s riddle, dear bloggiste: Who is the famous German writer from the days of Goethe and Schiller, known by his French first name, if known at all, and who was born today 250...

Arab Culture / Art Exhibition / Intellectuals / Literature / Middle East / Painting / Performances / Poetry / Poetry readings / Translation

March 10, 2013

Poetic Voices of the Muslim World

This is a fabulous site and the whole project is excellent. Poets House & City Lore are to be congratulated for their pioneering work. I participated in the first installment here in New York...

Algeria / Arab Culture / Essays / Literature / Poetics / Poetry / Translation

March 5, 2013

Tengour’s “Exile is my Trade” Reviewed

Laurie Price’s review on Amazon: Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader, edited & translated by Pierre Joris (Black Widow Press Modern Poetry 2012) (Paperback) To this reader, Exile Is My Trade turned out to...

Criticism / Cultural Studies / Essays / Homage / Intellectuals / Language / Literature / Obituaries / Paul Celan / Translation

December 7, 2012

Jean Bollack (1923-2012)

When I think of Jean Bollack — philologist, philosopher, hermeneut, translator, commentator, friend to Paul Celan & irritant to many — the first word that comes to mind is “décrasser,” a French term that means to clean,...

Arab Culture / Book Launch / Celebration / Literature / Maghreb / Maghrebi Literature / Poetics / Poetry / Prose / Translation

December 1, 2012

Diwan Iffrikyia is Here!

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature Pierre Joris (Editor), Habib Tengour (Editor) order HERE In this fourth volume of the landmark Poems for the Millennium series, Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour...

Journalism / Language / Literature

September 26, 2012

Dead Poets & Live Language: scatter my brain yet ginger my swagger

The Guardian, as so often, has interesting material on dead poets & live languages. The first concerns Keats as opium addict (vide new biography by Nicholas Roe) & the second, Nigeria’s strong, very alive & quickly...

Literature / Novel / Prose

September 13, 2012

Marginalia on Casanova

I am, as readers of this blog will know, not the most ardent consumer of novels, for questions of time & form. But from time to time a book in novel form comes along...

"Arab Spring" / Arab Culture / Literature / Poetics / Poetry

September 10, 2012

Hala Mohammad: Waiting for Spring

Via aljazeera’s “Artscape” series Poets of Protest: Exiled in Paris, the Syrian poet despairs for her country as the crisis there deepens. Renowned and outspoken Syrian poet Hala Mohammad explains how she thinks poetry is...

Literature / Uncategorized

July 17, 2012

Jörg Fauser — a Quarter Century Already

Started the day thinking on an old friend, the German writer Jörg Fauser, who was hit & killed by a car 25 years ago today — when at the tailend of his 43rd Birthday party...

"Arab Spring" / Arab Culture / Literature / Syria / Translation / Uncategorized

June 1, 2012

Writers in Syria

This in via the Arab Literature (in English) site, where you can also read the rest of the article, and a further range of materials concerning Arab literature in translation, such as their previous post detailing...

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.