Rachida Madani
w/ Pierre Joris
&
accompaniment by Gnawa Boussou
When: April 16, 2014 | 6:30pm Where: Silvana 300 W 116th St New York, NY 10026
Silvana hosts a reading of Rachida Madani’s “Tales of a Severed Head” on April 16 at 6:30pm, with Rachida Madani and Pierre Joris, featuring accompaniment by Gnawa Boussou, a traditional Moroccan band based in New York. Rachida Madani, a native of Morocco, has published several volumes of poetry in French, a language she also taught for thirty years.
A lifelong political militant, she expresses her resistance: “not by shouting slogans and waving banners. I fight with my words.” This event is part of a multi-cultural and eclectic experience of English and Francophone poetry. At the close of the “Printemps des poètes” festival in France, New York takes the torch, offering a diverse program of voices, sounds, drawings, and stories in which new poets and established masters use literary panache to express their social and political convictions. This cycle also includes Anne Portugal and Pierre Alféri.
St Marks Poetry Project, 131 E. 10th Street, New York, NY 10003
Saturday, November 23
Poetry Reading
Tucson POG/Chax (details to be announced)
ABOUT
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.