{"id":10048,"date":"2013-03-12T08:40:57","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T12:40:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=10048"},"modified":"2013-03-13T10:38:15","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T14:38:15","slug":"ron-silliman-on-millennium-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/ron-silliman-on-millennium-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Ron Silliman on Millennium 4"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Calligraphy<\/a>

Calligraphy by Al-Qandusi (1790-1861)<\/p><\/div>\n

Extracted from a\u00a0larger\u00a0piece on Silliman’s blog<\/strong> on a number of new & recent anthologies (check out the whole post here<\/a>):<\/em><\/p>\n

(…) Another anthology available from UC Press that is a \u201cmust own\u201d item is\u00a0Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>co-edited by Pierre Joris &Habib<\/a>\u00a0Tengour<\/a>. It\u2019s not a slam on any of the other volumes to say that this is the best and most important book in this series to date, because it is precisely the fact that this collection opens up new territory \u2013 to deliberately employ an imperialist metaphor for a moment \u2013 that separates it out from the three earlier collections. Unlike\u00a0Shaking the Pumpkin, Technicians of the Sacred\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Revolution of the Word\u00a0<\/i>\u2013 the anthologies for which Jerry Rothenberg will go to heaven \u2013 the first 3 collections of\u00a0Millennium\u00a0<\/i>gather together work that is generally known and available, if not always under one cover.\u00a0Number 4<\/i>\u00a0may not be the first gathering of work from just south of the Mediterranean \u2013 and in some key instances to its north as well — but it certainly is the first such aimed directly at the general poetry reader. As such, it is as profound an explosion of new writing as any of Rothenberg\u2019s early anthologies. Like those books, and\u00a0Across the Line \/ Al otro lado,\u00a0<\/i>it is also a great read, a book that contains everyone from Callimachus to Fanon to contemporary experimental work (the volume ends with Omar\u00a0Berrada\u2019s\u00a0comparison of Alfred\u00a0Jarry,\u00a0Ibn\u00a0Arabi\u00a0and bpNichol). It is\u00a0also 750+ pages, all in English, so functionally four times the size of the Baja book. It could \u2013 I am certain \u2013 have been much, much larger, but it already is one of those volumes one could sink into and not come up for air for a year or more, without exhausting its riches.<\/div>\n
If this book has a limitation, it is that it tries to do too much \u2014 the poetry of multiple societies that represent some of the oldest civilizations on the planet, stretching from the western border of Egypt to the southern tip of Mauritania. This follows the outlines of the Arab Maghreb Union and thus omits Egypt, Chad & the Sudan as well as sub-Saharan Africa, although the volume does include some Tuareg proverbs from southernmost Algeria, work from the Maghreb diaspora (primarily to Europe) as well as imperial influences that impacted the region as well. Inevitably, these raise the issues of the histories of borders & the impact that occupation has had on each of these societies \u2013 only 25,000 of the 1.2 million Tuareg peoples in the world are to be found in Algeria, for example, with much larger populations centered in Mali & Niger. Even today, the Western Sahara is an occupied territory claimed by Morocco along the coast, and Algerian-backed forces to the east, tho most of the land borders Mauritania.<\/div>\n
Joris & Tengour attempt to create order out of historical messiness in the best way possible, by being quite specific in laying out different groupings. The result is a book that has\u00a013 major subdivisions<\/a>, a lot for an anthology and one that is apt to be ignored by the casual reader who treats such volumes like a giant bazars, hopping about without specific reading route in mind \u2013 some of these subdivisionsare\u00a0further segmented by nation. I can\u2019t think of another volume \u2013 in the\u00a0Millennium\u00a0<\/i>series or elsewhere \u2013 where there is going to be a greater gap than between the relative opacity that greets the peripatetic casual \u201cdipper-in\u201d and the in-depth mini-collections that are available to anyone who decides that today is the day for Tunisia, or for early prose.\u00a0Poems for the Millennium 4\u00a0<\/i>is\u00a0a great anthology, but it is not a book for browsers.(…)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Extracted from a\u00a0larger\u00a0piece on Silliman’s blog on a number of new & recent anthologies (check out the whole post here): (…) Another anthology available from UC Press that is a \u201cmust own\u201d item is\u00a0Poems...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1368,9,11,1367,22,66,91,103],"tags":[1257,1369],"class_list":["post-10048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazigh-poetry","category-anthology","category-arab-culture","category-berber-literature","category-book-review","category-maghrebi-literature","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-poems-for-the-millennium-4","tag-ron-silliman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10048"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10057,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10048\/revisions\/10057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}