Robert Kelly: An Alchemical Journal (10)
□ To my delight, the chauffeur was a girl, a tall young lesbian soft-skinned under her green silky mannish uniform. I thought of the softness of her calves inside the boots, & went so...
Pierre Joris' Meanderings & mawqifs of poetry, poetics, translations y mas. Travelogue too.
□ To my delight, the chauffeur was a girl, a tall young lesbian soft-skinned under her green silky mannish uniform. I thought of the softness of her calves inside the boots, & went so...
□ It was in front of the cathedral that the lepers gathered, the same in every city. They were the imperfections of the system, hopefully consigned outside it, segregated, wished to death. They showed...
□ I’m me, that’s the point of it. I am at your disposal. □ She was at the door, I know it, wrote her letter to me, sealed it in the wood of the...
□ I hold this one’s breasts & this one’s thighs & press myself on this one’s mouth & ask each one in turn: What is it that happened between us at the Pinner in...
□ A lifetime supply of goose-quills. Ocean of ink. First lessons in chancery cursive. Have an erection. Keep it. There’s your college of the spirit sank, she said, keep talking big boy. □ It...
The third time, she tells me, is the Charm. I try again: Hoping to learn by a sign how the Work prospers, I look out into the morning & see a black hen, her...
□ In 1955 I & some school-fellows attempted a revival of Batman as an object of inquiry. It does not feel good to have been in the avant-garde of kitsch. Yet my fingers smell...
□ And now we have been in the rain. She pulled her shirt off & ran before me up the slope, turning back to note how fast I followed, the eagerness of my address...
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.
More
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader” edited & translated by Pierre Joris
“Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj”
“Paul Celan: The Meridian Final Version”—Drafts—Materials
“Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-Between” edited by Peter Cockelbergh
“The University of California Book of North African Literature”
4×1 : Works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey and Habib Tengour
PABLO PICASSO The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems
Poasis (Selected Poems 1986-1999)
Poems for the Millennium 1 & 2
ppppp-Poems Performances Pieces Proses Plays Poetics by Kurt Schwitters