{"id":17320,"date":"2023-07-07T10:26:59","date_gmt":"2023-07-07T14:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=17320"},"modified":"2023-07-07T14:40:08","modified_gmt":"2023-07-07T18:40:08","slug":"jason-weiss-brooklyn-rail-review-of-interglacial-narrows-always-the-many-never-the-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/jason-weiss-brooklyn-rail-review-of-interglacial-narrows-always-the-many-never-the-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Weiss’ Brooklyn Rail review of “Interglacial Narrows”\u00a0&\u00a0“Always the Many, Never the One”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pierre Joris
\nInterglacial Narrows<\/em>
\n(Contra Mundum Press, 2023)<\/div>\n
Pierre Joris with Florent Toniello
\nAlways the Many, Never the One<\/em>
\n(Contra Mundum Press, 2023)<\/div>\n

In his book of conversations\u00a0Always the Many, Never the One<\/em>, Pierre Joris notes that he likes to date his arrival in New York, in 1967, as being \u201cthree months after John Coltrane passed.\u201d For a lad who had already left his native Luxembourg to go study medicine in Paris, where he discovered that poetry was his calling instead, the shift in direction could not be clearer. Coming from a multilingual environment, he had no trouble deciding which would be his language for writing\u2014his fourth, in fact: English. He had first heard Charlie Parker while still in high school, when he was also picking up on the energy of the Beats, so he moved to the States and plunged into the new American poetry. By the end of that decade, under Robert Kelly\u2019s guidance at Bard College, he began to translate Paul Celan\u2019s poetry into English, a commitment that was to last him more than fifty years.<\/p>\n

That early awakening to poetry brought with it yet other paths. After dropping out of medical school in Paris, Joris stayed for a while in a room upstairs at Shakespeare & Company bookshop and there his roommate was Moroccan poet Mohammed Kha\u00efr-Eddine, who introduced him to the new North African writing. Many literary friendships, exchanges, and translations ensued through his contact with Maghrebi writers and the wider Arab world. During the 1970s and \u201980s, he wandered back to earlier terrain: further studies in London, teaching at the University of Constantine in Algeria, doing radio and translating in Paris (mostly into French, for the publisher Christian Bourgois, including Jack Kerouac\u2019s\u00a0Mexico City Blues<\/em>\u00a0and Sam Shepard\u2019s first two books of prose), eventually returning to settle and teach in the US. With Jerome Rothenberg, he edited the two initial volumes (1995, 1998) of the monumental\u00a0Poems for the Millennium<\/em>\u00a0series, with its worldwide range of modern and postmodern poetry, and then they brought out large editions of poetry by Pablo Picasso and Kurt Schwitters in translation. Joris was well prepared, therefore, by the time he co-edited the equally innovative (& massive) fourth volume of\u00a0Poems for the Millennium<\/em>, with Algerian poet Habib Tengour,\u00a0The University of California Book of North African Literature<\/em>\u00a0(2012). His essays on modern Arabic writing,\u00a0Arabia (not so) Deserta<\/em>\u00a0(2019), partly an outgrowth of that project, offered another bridge to anglophone readers.<\/p>\n

Thus to tell something of the rhythms Joris carries in his ear. After many previous collections,\u00a0Interglacial Narrows<\/em>\u00a0gathers poems written between 2015 and 2021, organized into four sections that provide less a unified sequence than distinct territories of focus, with plenty of overlap and shared concerns. The first section, \u201cLoess and Found,\u201d would seem the baggiest, except it begins and ends with poems in memory of longtime poet friends newly departed. The two pieces couldn\u2019t be more different, in language and line, yet both call up the person in mind with a loving specificity in music and tone. \u201cElegy for Anselm Hollo\u201d delights in the resonances of words and small phrases, how they can yield unexpected transformations, with a subtle underlying humor:<\/p>\n

a thousand
\ncrows
\non the snow
\n& yet, 2 crows
\nalready make a crowd.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A moment later, he pivots in an ancient gesture of camaraderie toward his fellow transplant from across the sea:<\/p>\n

& yet,
\nwe have to travel, Anselm
\nbecause there are wines
\nthat don\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By contrast, \u201cA Three-Minute Composition \u00e0 la Mode Dalachinsky to Celebrate Steve\u201d embraces at full throttle the long swinging lines of the beloved talkaholic and nonstop poet from Brooklyn, recounting rambles through the East Village:<\/p>\n

you hadn\u2019t seen me yet
\nso I took out my phone
\nshifted coffee bags under left arm
\n& snapped you & Yuko eating
\n(see, here is the photo
\nI\u2019m not making this up, then you saw
\n& said Hi Bub<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With his substantial experience as a translator and the agility gained, in addition to his early start navigating several languages and literatures, Joris in his poetic voice seems ever protean, eluding a fixed style. Rather, the circumstances of the poems elicit their own language and processes according to the particular dialogues that animate them. The third section of the book, \u201cHomage to P.C.,\u201d in that sense, shows the remarkable range of poetic tonalities he employs while wrestling with the difficult angel, as it were. But that is also because this set breaches the general time scheme of the book by taking in all his poems related to Celan, reaching back to 1969, granting a glimpse of Joris\u2019s broader poetic practice. The last was written in 2020, a year that marked the hundredth anniversary of the poet\u2019s birth and the fiftieth of his death, and crucially for Joris the publication of the final volumes of his Celan translations:\u00a0Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry<\/em>\u00a0(his versions of the collected later poems appeared previously) and\u00a0Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Among the late poems in the Celan-orbiting group, Joris touches down on familiar ground, where he lands again and again throughout the book: in the here and now of where he lives, and has for the past two decades, in Bay Ridge, at the southwest corner of Brooklyn, especially the view from his desk or on his morning walks along the Verrazano Narrows, as in the book\u2019s title. \u201cEarlier Today I Saw\u201d tells of \u201can old atlas \/ floating down\u201d the Narrows, but then an odd footnote found that same day recalls Celan and his suicide, and the connection becomes apparent as the poem casts both image and reflection of him \u201cfloating down \/ the Seine, \/\/ for so many years, \/ my Atlas.\u201d Indeed, the Narrows, the shore, the waters, the distances, the full implications of that location, enter the poems often. The penultimate poem in the first section, \u201cShipping Out at 1:25 P. M. on Herman Melville\u2019s 200 Birthday,\u201d simply lists the evocative names, destinations, and speeds of nineteen ships passing through that stretch of the harbor. His attentions to that local realm take up the entire second section, \u201cThe Book of U,\u201d which first appeared as a bilingual chapbook published in Luxembourg, in collaboration with his wife, multimedia artist Nicole Peyrafitte, whose painting of the bright, curved, wide-open beak of a cormorant graces the cover. In this set, the cormorants draw the poet\u2019s eye as much by their nature and habits on that shore as by where they take him in thought as guide or spirit. Always on the lookout for their company during his walks, he thinks of them as \u201cmy cormorants,\u201d until one day he doesn\u2019t see any and concludes:<\/p>\n

the only one
\nof my birds
\nleft
\n— is me
\n& I worry
\nthat I may be
\nmore rant
\nthan
\ncore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the restless mosaic of reflections and poetic fragments that make up the book\u2019s final section, \u201cUp to & Including the Virus,\u201d an intermittent daybook, Joris returns to the local as evidence of some greater trouble, in the late winter of that fateful year: \u201cMeanwhile outside there are fewer cars and people. [\u2026] Things look semi-normal, but I feel odd.\u201d A month later, almost like a tarot card come to life, a hanged man turns up in the Narrows Botanical Garden across the street. Amid such strange intimations of mortality, he seeks out signs of spring in the budding branches, and when he does venture out from sheltering at home, a heightened instinct for birdwatching proves a salve and confirmation that life somehow goes on. Sightings of a kingfisher bring to mind Charles Olson\u2019s kingfisher poem, and repeatedly glimpses of the outer world in these disordered times call forth dreams and recollections of friends, family, literary forebears. Diligence in washing his hands reminds him of his surgeon father\u2019s handwashing, which leads to thoughts of his grandfather who died before Joris was born, though most mornings gazing out his window he greets \u201cgrandfather Joseph who just before or right after 1900 came up these Narrows in a Conradian ship sailing into New York Harbor.\u201d The mixing of poetic registers reflects his affinity for \u201cporous borders,\u201d between literary forms as between languages, cultures, countries. Inevitably, these writings approach a kind of closure with his note on receiving a second booster shot of the COVID vaccine at the moment of the winter solstice, while looking toward \u201cthe sun as it \/ moves & grows & makes \/ more light day by day.\u201d But his last entry opens the book out yet again as it takes up a question from the other work being completed at that time,\u00a0Always the Many, Never the One<\/em>, in offering a further comment about his \u201cpractice of the in-between.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years prior, Joris took part in a series of events that celebrated the Syrian poet Adonis and which culminated in a book attributed to both:\u00a0Conversations in the Pyrenees<\/em>\u00a0(2018). That hybrid form, between essay and interview, oral and written, attracted him as an opportunity to explore thoughts on poetry, language, cultural politics, science, in the context of his own long itinerary as nomadic poet and translator, so he invited the Luxembourg-based writer Florent Toniello to be his questioner in those exchanges, which took place during the latter half of 2021. Like the multiple strands of the poetry,\u00a0Always the Many<\/em>\u00a0unfolds a marvelous concatenation of themes that are by turns personal, artistic, and conceptual, often all at once. Here the books and writers enter into his life from the ground up. He first got interested in America from boyhood reading of the German romantic novelist Karl May and his tales of the Old West, notably the vivid, completely invented Native American characters. Through the eight conversations, different notions of the West keep cropping up: whether in speaking of the Maghreb, the west of the Arab world, or the mythical West as played with in numerous works, such as Edward Dorn\u2019s\u00a0Gunslinger<\/em>, which he brings up appreciatively while discussing achievements in the long poem over the past fifty years. On the other hand, when Joris first arrived at Bard and asked Robert Kelly what he should do to improve his (American) English, Kelly told him to listen to baseball broadcasts on the radio. These are hardly mere anecdotes, rather they indicate a whole web of relationships.<\/p>\n

In elaborating a discourse of the in-between along the numerous paths of this book, especially in the final conversation, Joris pulls together an impressive array of threads. Already poised by the circumstances of his upbringing for a role as intermediary from one culture to another, confirmed by his work as a translator, he recognized early on that the open field poetics of Olson, Duncan, and others, was a helpful way to think about his own practice as a poet. There he could remain alert to all kinds of information that might enter the poem, by chance or by purpose, and \u201cthat doubleness of the known & the unknown [\u2026] opens another in-between-ness, inside of which you have not just to be active & work, but you also have to be passive & listen & respond.\u201d But more than a perspective for poetry, that is \u201cwhere we are\u201d in our existence. \u201cWe don\u2019t see that the world is continuously changing & moving, so that you\u2019re always in an in-between.\u201d He traces such multidirectional thinking back at least to the Sufi poet Ibn Arabi who saw the notion of the\u00a0barzakh<\/em>\u2014a liminal space comparable to the Bardo or Purgatory\u2014as reflective of life itself; and he finds similar ideas today all over the place, in various scientific works and from other cultural angles, like Edouard Glissant\u2019s relational poetics and Gloria Anzald\u00faa\u2019s use of the concept of Nepantla. Such is the pleasure of these conversations that they keep sparking new connections to follow long after the book falls silent.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

By <\/span>Jason Weiss<\/a><\/h1>\n