Pierre Joris' Meanderings & mawqifs of poetry, poetics, translations y mas. Travelogue too.

Category: Poets

Obituaries / Poets

September 14, 2009

Jim Carroll (gone @ 60)

Poet & diarist Jim Carroll died past Friday of a heart attack. An obit in the New York Times gives the details of the life, & a lovely piece by Tom Clark on his...

Arabic / Poetry / Poetry readings / Poets

August 11, 2009

Lodève (5): Souad Salem

Here a video of Libyan poet Souad Salem reading one of her works. I should have a translation of the poem up tomorrow. The festival’s poet’s bio-notes gives only this: “Born in Tripoli (Libya)...

Poetry readings / Poets

July 28, 2009

Lodève "Voix de la Méditerranée" festival (1)

Just back to our Pyrenean hide-out from 8 days in Lodève at the “Voix de la Méditerranée” festival. An excellent occasion, though exhausting, what with having to do at least one half-hour reading a...

May 8, 2009

Robin Blaser (1925-2009)

“…that was the beginning of my life in poetry — to find out that poetry had the most extraordinary intelligence, and that it would just wander and and wander and wonder. And so, I...

Intellectuals / Islamic Fundamentalists / Poets

May 26, 2007

Tahar Djaout — 14 years already

Fourteen years ago already! It was on 26 May 1993 that the Algerian poet & novelist Tahar Djaout was gunned down as he left his house in the morning to go to his job...

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.