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

Category: Writing

Middle East / Palestinian people / Uncategorized / Unnatural Disaster / Writing

March 27, 2020

Mahmood Darwish: Opening Pages of “Memory of Forgetfulness”

Getting up on the first morning after we started shelter-in-place here in New York, I went as always straight to the kitchen to start the ritual of making coffee — & immediately thought that...

Books / Obituaries / Prose / Translation / Writing

August 1, 2017

Sam Shepard, Writer — Homage

My translation into French of Motel Chronicles (and Hawk Moon) came out in 1985 & reused the same cover photo than the US edition above, though I had the original photo, much wider, and wrote the...

Intellectuals / Journalism / Writing

March 14, 2017

Régis Debray “Chez Lui”

Régis Debray — as those who know me will be well aware — has been a writer, thinker & activist I have greatly admired & have kept reading & rereading for 40+ years. Gathering...

Translation / Writing

March 1, 2017

Peter Handke’s “Landing Approaches”

Sometime last year, in May, if I remember correctly, I took the following notes toward a post, which I never got to finalize. I’ll post them today — Handke’s writing & thinking about writing somehow...

Baseball / Books / Cities / Prose / Uncategorized / Whatever / Writing

September 4, 2016

In Gil Sorrentino’s Bay Ridge Diner

Pierre Joris Flash Interview #1 from Tawil Productions on Vimeo.

Celebration / Literature / Writing

January 11, 2015

Happy 80th, Jürgen Ploog!

Jürgen Ploog, maybe the best & most adventurous of the German cut-up & collage writers — with Carl Weissner (1940-2012) — turned 80 on Friday. For 33 years a long-distance pilot for Lufthansa (I remember a photo of...

Writing

August 28, 2014

Robert Kelly: An Alchemical Journal

As promised —though delayed because of lack of internet connections in the Upper Pyrenees— here is the first installment of Robert Kelly’s An Alchemical Journal (first published in IO magazine #4, summer 1967 & reprinted in The Alchemist...

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.