Too busy this past weekend in the city and right now with end of semester chores to post much, but check out Nicole’s Collectages blog: as a further installment of her “Spring Meditation Places in NY,” she has just posted the narrative of our Saturday excursion with visuals into the depths and heights of Staten Island. Not a place I ever knew well, or felt specially attracted to — though I can’t set foot on it without thinking of my old departed friend, the poet Armand Schwerner. He must have known the Tibetan Museum, but not sure if the got to see the Chinese Scholar’s house which opened the same year he died, 1999. Here’s poem from his Selected Shorter Poems:
the way up is the way down with some material from Robert Kelly and Ted Enslin
so often as if earth had a trachea full of dust I envision my sons Adam and Ari falling through the street
‘as if earth had a trachea’ that was your phrase but I envision my sons Adam and Ari falling through the street that wasn’t what you had in mind?
that was your phrase but I was drawn to an image of falling; that wasn’t what you had in mind father?
I was drawn to an image of falling— the way up is the way down— father did you used to have such pictures?
the way up is the way down so often did you used to have such pictures full of dust
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.