like some placeless angel
I wandered over your threshold
and was caught--an animal
without end
became the streets you couldn’t walk
you told me: Paris is free
and I dissolved into it
some wild chance
the bells of Notre Dame invited us
to write our way through the real
that breath of loss
we were innumerable
the forever you promised me--of life and the city
--our only secret
pushing self out of self
on the impossible edge of the Seine
where a science of loves
was forming itself
what past--that past?
we aren’t over, George
today the earth
like a veil that falls
from Salomé’s sovereign hand
is hardly empty of you
--it’s your gift
an overabundance of evening color
my body limbless and extended
out your window past Cité
I was infinite between languages
my sorrows were passions
I exceeded the museum
and the books
and had the papers for you
daily
I was only world
because of you
I rose out of your bathtub
like a sylph
making way for night
and spilling over
in your little tower you absorbed
the joy from all the
busy masquerades and games
of comers and goers
the musics of all centuries
converged in your company
you gleaned the girls of every era
without shame
I think it was a singular ancient talk
you filled me with
waking up with the unsaid
taking her dance
not an instant lost on us
no end to the poem
I wrote myself into--from you
time allows for us to disappear
behind its back
you were more than
alive--outside living
beyond the congregation of
statues at the cathedral
garden
and cannot have truly died
you sharp-eyed king
above all law
generous wit
collector of stray children
facts were never a great
interest of yours
--the fact of life or being dead
I salute you
in our common luck
of having for a birth
--that sudden city
"Interglacial Narrows: Readings by Pierre Joris” (details to be announced)
Wednesday, November 29, 4PM
Brown University
Lecture: Witnessing for the Witness: The Ferryman’s Labor in Translating Paul Celan.
Thursday, November 30, 5:30PM
Brown University Bookshop
Poetry Reading
Thursday, January 4, 2024
Reading
Segue (Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, NYC)
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.