{"id":15091,"date":"2017-01-27T07:54:05","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T11:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15091"},"modified":"2017-01-27T05:54:37","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T09:54:37","slug":"reading-list-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/reading-list-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading List 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>I was asked to write\u00a0this piece in late December for the January issue of the Harriet blog\u00a0The Reading List<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>a feature of Poetry<\/em> magazine\u2019s Editors\u2019 Blog<\/a>, <\/em>as I had Celan prose translations in the January issue:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

No matter what else has gone wrong with this year (and much did, obviously, & I won\u2019t dwell on it!), it is going out with a bang: the mailman just handed me today, Tuesday, December 27, 2016 at 2:15, a large envelope with a large, gorgeous book: Clark Coolidge, Selected Poems 1962\u20131985<\/em> <\/a>edited by Larry Fagin and Clark Coolidge, & with an introduction by Bill Berkson<\/a> (Station Hill Press, 2016). A tome that will see me into the new year as I meet work again that has been a major pleasure for decades (but are the poems we read in a Selected ever the same, or exactly the same, as those we read over the years in magazines, chapbooks, or bigger, \u201cnormal\u201d collections? I don\u2019t think so.) As Lyn Hejinian<\/a> says: \u201cWhat\u2019s in this beautifully edited volume is, for me, the manifestation of art\u2019s ultimate achievement. Clark Coolidge writes a whole art, an all-moment of being somewhere and thinking it.\u201d I will not only read it but will read it aloud, as behooves the work of our finest sonic craftsman.<\/p>\n

For a good part of the year I have been delighting in a leisurely meander through the final two volumes of Rachel Blau DuPlessis<\/a>\u2019s long serial poem Drafts<\/em>, and have finally arrived at Draft 114, the final poem (in\u00a0Surge: Drafts 96-114<\/em>, Salt Publishing, 2013). Wow! What an achievement: the work deploys a dizzying, infinitely expandable (one could think) series of possibilities\u2014formal and content-wise\u2014just turn a page and you are in an elsewhere you didn\u2019t suspect could exist. If Pound called the long poem\u2014the male epic, that is\u2014a poem with history, then this is l\u2019<\/em>autre face<\/em>, a long poem, non-epic, but with herstory. Which she has meanwhile continued with a stunning little tour de force: Poesis<\/em> (Textile series<\/a>), a writing-over the exact formal layout of Mallarm\u00e9<\/a>\u2019s Coup de d\u00e9<\/em>s<\/em>. Spoiler alert: Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s last line\u2014Toute Pens\u00e9<\/em>e <\/em>\u00e9met un Coup de D\u00e9<\/em>s<\/em>\u2014becomes \u201cAll Books Gloss Insatiable Desires for a Further Edge\u201d & I\u2019m de pr<\/em>\u00e9<\/em>f<\/em>\u00e9rence <\/em>with Blau DuPlessis on this, as on many other such choses<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A major work to reach us in 2016, from England this time, is Allen Fisher\u2019s Gravity as a consequence of shape<\/em> (Reality Street Editions). The poems (sequences always, never single poems) that make up this nearly 600-page opus, were composed between 1982 & 2006 and published in many chapbooks and volumes over the years. Thought through ab initio<\/em> as a coherency with fractal topographies, Gravity<\/em> combines a vast array of knowledges, be they from biological or physical sciences, or from literature and art, with a most powerful degree of formal invention (procedural structures crossed, bent, enriched and written through by processual activities) coupled with a political and social radicalism and insight that are truly stunning. The work is both immediately enjoyable and demanding of long-time immersion, and the thinking is of a complexity similar to that of a Charles Olson<\/a> (who was certainly a fire-source for Fisher). Happily the University of Alabama Press has just published the perfect companion to Gravity<\/em>: a volume of Allen Fisher\u2019s essays, Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Feature & Perception in Art and Writing since 1950<\/em><\/a>. (Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword to this book.) Both these volumes will see you through a good part of 2017, may even give you some hope that a combination of human intelligence and aesthetic facture can offer us what Olson called meta hodos, <\/em>a methodology for en-vision-ing an exemplary path towards\u2014in a term that originates in Foucault\u2019s last conferences\u2014parrh<\/em>\u0113sia,<\/em> truth-telling, even deep inside the dire straights we\u2019re in.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned Olson, let me point you to another excellent book just out: Letters for Olson<\/em>, gathered & edited by Benjamin Hollander (Spuyten Duyvil Press), with Etel Adnan<\/a>, Ammiel Alcalay, Amiri Baraka<\/a>, Michael Boughn, Ed Sanders<\/a>, Ruth Lepson, Kenneth Warren just a few of the contributors. It was to be Hollander\u2019s penultimate bravura piece: Ben passed away in November\u2014a great loss for his friends & for the wider community of engaged poets. I have been rereading his truly prophetic 2013 book In the House Un-American<\/em> (Clockroot books) and, on the excellent & radical new online magazine of which he was a board member & major contributor, Dispatches<\/a>, excerpts from his final work, The Letters of Carla, the letter b. A Mystery in Poetry<\/em> with a foreword by The Future Guardian of the Letters and an afterword by Benjamin Hollander<\/em> to be published later this year from Chax Press. Another old departed friend, the Swiss-Italian poet Franco Beltrametti saw (I know you\u2019re looking, wherever you are!) a Selected Poems 1965\u20131995<\/em> called From Almost Everywhere<\/em> come out, edited by Stefan Hyner & published by Fondazione Franco Beltrametti & Blackberry Books. As Gary Snyder<\/a> has it, his \u201csmooth-barked Muse leads him across the grids of latitude and longitude to the source of good medicine poems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another writer I admired intensely left us this year: the Algerian poet & novelist Nabile Far\u00e8s\u2014should you not know his work, try A<\/em> Passenger from the West<\/em><\/a>, translated by Peter Thompson & including the author\u2019s 1970 interview with James Baldwin<\/a> (UNO Press) or his Exile and Helplessness<\/em> (same translator, Dialogos Books). To stay with the Maghreb for a moment: go read the Moroccan poet, essayist, and philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi\u2019s Tattooed Memory<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(translated by Peter Thompson, L\u2019Harmattan, 2016), a North African Bildungsroman<\/em> of the first order.<\/p>\n

Two anthologies need mentioning: James Thomas\u2019s\u00a0Grains of Gold: An Anthology of Occitan Literature<\/em><\/a>, published in late 2015 by Francis Boutle Publishers in London, which reveals to an Anglophone public for the first time the whole wealth of Occitan literature beyond the 11\/12 century troubadours translated by Pound & Paul Blackburn<\/a>\u2014newsflash! The latter\u2019s Proensa<\/em> has just been reissued by NYRB!\u2014, a wealth colonialistically (if that word doesn\u2019t exist, it should, & does now) suppressed by France imposing their northern dialect (French) on the whole southern half of the country. The other major anthology of the year is A Sulfur Anthology<\/em> edited by Clayton Eshleman<\/a> (Wesleyan University Press)\u2014full disclosure: there is work of mine in it\u2014and which I reviewed on my blog, Nomadics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There were of course other books I read this year, most massively in the first part of 2016, the entire oeuvre of Ingeborg Bachmann<\/a>. The excuse for that breathtaking adventure was the fact that I wrote a play, The Agony of I.B.<\/em>, dealing with her life and death during those first six months. Rereading her\u2014especially the later prose\u2014made it clear that she is one of the absolutely major voices writing in German in the\u00a0second\u00a0part of the last century. If you only know the poetry, go check out the novel Malina<\/em> (translated by Philip Boehm, Holmes & Meier, 1990) and the unfinished the book of franza & requiem for fanny goldmann<\/em>\u00a0(translated by Peter Filkins Northwestern University Press). Two more & we\u2019re done: On my 2016 travels twixt New York, Boise, Paris, Casablanca & Glasgow, I always had two books of poems in my satchel: Robert Kelly<\/a>\u2019s Heart Thread<\/em> (Lunar Chandelier Collective) and his Opening The Seals<\/em> (Autonomedia). Here the opening line of poem 85 of Heart Thread: \u201cEvery page is precious especially the blank.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was asked to write\u00a0this piece in late December for the January issue of the Harriet blog\u00a0The Reading List,\u00a0a feature of Poetry magazine\u2019s Editors\u2019 Blog, as I had Celan prose translations in the January...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,23,64,91,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthology","category-book-reviews","category-literature","category-poetry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15091","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=15091"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15102,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15091\/revisions\/15102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}