Nomadics

Here are a few more translations from Mohammed Bennis’s collection Le Don du Vide: RINGS Anchor the air to the rings of the doorsor to the ruins of the praisesThe sea fulfills youYour depth...

Ernst Jandl (1925-2000), the great Austrian (sound/concrete, etc.) poet, would have been eighty today. The German daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reminds of us the occasion and brings some unpublished poems, the following among them:...

To close the Rodez visit, here are a few photos of those famous gargoyles on the cathedral. They were taken by Nicole Peyrafitte, & if I was a better editor of visuals, they would...

It is, I believe, worth reminding us every so often of the scandal the major lack of translations of poetry (& other literary writing) in the US represents. This lack, I have noticed over...

For me Rodez has always been linked to Antonin Artaud — & his stay in the mental institution down in the plain around the hilltop city from 1943 to 1946. Nicole remembered that a...

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...

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 —...

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...

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...

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...