Pierre Joris

Selections of Pierre Joris's best work from this past quarter-century of writingsPoasis II gathers Joris's major poetic works from 2000 to 2024. These nomadically shape-shifting poems range widely across times, places, and cultures, addressing, for example, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster (in a quasi-opera libretto), the meditations of tenth-century revolutionary poet, sufi teacher, and thinker Mansur al-Hallaj, an homage to his old friend and collaborator Jerome Rothenberg (1931-2024), a list poem celebrating Herman Melville's 200 birthday, and extracts from his Book of Cormorant. These sequences are interspersed with shorter works, such as poems addressing Paul Celan upon completing translations of that poet's oeuvre, Dante's expulsion from Florence, and more. As he says in the poem "The Poet's Job," "pick up everything that shines / discard the gold / keep the light." Or, as Randall Horton suggests, these poems "are inter-cont(in)ental as sound and symbol weaves in and out of cultures, traditions--they critique, inform--teach in a multiverse of languages--they love. The beauty, as with all of Joris's literary work, is when language is allowed to be nomadic and unbound." sample poem]Outside: sun caught in bare tree branches, cradledInside: me caught in shelter in place, cradled toop.s. We shall both rise again-4/1These buds on the brancheshere this year tootheir steadfastness . my surprise

Interglacial Narrows gathers a range of Pierre Joris' poems written between 2015 and 2021, including an extended version of the Book of U / Le livre des cormorans by Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte, initially published by Galerie Simoncini in Luxembourg in 2017. Both central to the book and opening up its time-lines is the section "Homage to P. C." Put together in 2020 to celebrate Paul Celan's 100th birth-year, it gathers poems the earliest of which dates from 1969 & the most recent from 23 November 2020, the day Celan would have turned 100 years old. The final section of the book is a diaristic sequence of poems & notes started during the spring of 2020, i.e. at the moment the covid-crisis hit NYC the hardest. ... Pierre Joris is a word-wizard who shines light on the soul itself. His poems are precious jewels - compact, crystalline structures - each containing their own unique secrets, guiding you to undiscovered places, feelings, images, and ideas. It's impossible to read his work and come away unmoved. Magically inspiring - John Zorn

A series of dialogues between the major Arab-language poet Adonis and poet and translator Pierre Joris, including reflections on monotheism, poetics, and the possible role of the spiritual in contemporary poetry and ethics. This book originated out of the Les Porteurs de Mots festival in Germ-Louron in the French Pyrenees. English/French edition.

Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 is an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. Allen Fisher—a highly accomplished poet, painter, critic, and art historian as well as a key figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s—has a close and discerning connection to his subjects. In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts. Fisher addresses, among other subjects, destruction as a signifier in twentieth-century art; the poetic employment of bureaucratic vocabularies and “business speak”; and the roles of public performance and memory loss in the fashioning of human knowledge and art. Commonplace notions of coherence, logic, and truth are reimagined and deconstructed in this study, and Fisher concludes by suggesting that contemporary culture offers a particularly robust opportunity—and even necessity—to engage in the production of art as a pragmatic act. Scholars of art, poetry, and aesthetics will be engaged and challenged by this insightful work.

Breccia is an inspired grouping of poems from celebrated poet, translator, anthologist and essayist, Pierre Joris. "[Breccia] is a showcase for poems from roughly twenty, sometimes rather fugitive, volumes, written and published during a time when Joris was living as a kind of postmodern nomad. One of the virtues of this in-gathering of work is that it makes clear the extent to which a sense of 'nomadism' - of being intensely in a place because one knows one has already left it - marks Joris' poetry.... The sense of immediacy in his work is striking. But the images of weather and shifting light and shade that give so many poems their climate of feeling, always play against a complex flow of conceptual activity and the possibility, but only the possibility, of archetypal permanence..." - Don Byrd

"The days of anything static-form, content, state-are over," declares poet and translator Pierre Joris in A Nomad Poetics, his first collection of critical essays. Joris maps the success and limitations of contemporary avant-garde poetics, from Tristan Tzara to the most contemporary American experimental poetry, an investigation that leads him to envision a "nomadic poetics" as a strategy for new poetic work, for translation and, fundamentally, for an ethics of early 21st century life. Extending concepts and concerns voiced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Nomad Poetics is a daring first step in deploying the method of the rhizome, one grounded in Paul Celan's insight that "Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won." With articulate immediacy, Joris's essays announce a metamorphosis of language-based art, much needed if poetry is to be of essential use in shaping the world to come.

Pierre Joris's poems are characterized by an arresting mix of passion and intellect, by what Pound called "language charged with meaning." For Joris, a language is always a second language, and his poetry takes as its main concern the question of marginality and exile. He is unique in being an American poet comfortable in three languages, and his work is filled with a dynamic language play, cross-linguistic puns, and themes of speculation on language, translation, and nomadism. Poasis, Joris's first major publication in the United States, highlights his work since the mid-1980s.