“Interglacial Narrows: Readings by Pierre Joris”
“Interglacial Narrows: Readings by Pierre Joris”
Drawing on his own poems and his work as a translator and essayist, Pierre will discuss his relationship to the Bukovinian poet, other writers he has translated and read from his recent work.
Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 2015-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations in-between, with Florent Toniello (both from Contra Mundum Press), Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (poems & proses, Black Fountain); the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (CMP). In 2020 he published A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with P. Cockelbergh & J. Newberger, CMP), & earlier: Arabia (not so) Deserta :Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018), & The Book of U (poems, with Nicole Peyrafitte, Simoncini 2017). When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte.
A small wine reception will follow immediately after the reading.
Interglacial Narrows:
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
Always The Many, Never The One:
This generous and engaging book is an album of conversations, including Pierre Joris’s speech in his first country, Luxembourg (“a portable small country”), upon winning its major literary prize. Joris (with Florent Toniello) assembles witty, ranging, informed, and passionate insights on the vectors of contemporary poetics. From translation to nomadism, from “the between” to the scintillation of borders, from his critique of toxic gender/race myths to lively riffs on genre (particularly epic and long poem), Joris’s convictions are telling, and his aphorisms are generative. Always the Many, Never the One is a defining overview of a distinctive poetic career.
— Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Pierre Joris is phenomenal, a rare (unprecedented?) combination of serendipity and gumption. He’s a hydra-headed omnivore, eyeing the delightful and the grim with equal savvy. These conversations are at once a deft feather touch to the heart and a blistering grimace in the face of the constant darkening of our time. Listen in — and as the saying goes, stay tuned.
— Jed Rasula
A fascinating collection of conversations that run the gamut from poetry to film, music, philosophy, critical theory, and more. With an encyclopedic knowledge, profound understanding, and sparkling wit, Joris illuminates and elucidates upon Olson, Duncan, Brakhage, Schneeman, Enheduanna, Boulez, Cage, Coltrane, Kurosawa, Godard, Karl May, Ed Dorn, Rothenberg, Ibn Tarafa, Rimbaud, Assia Djebar, Edouard Glissant, Zukofsky, Giordano Bruno, and the art of translating Burroughs, Kerouac, Celan and more. Freewheeling and spontaneous, these are immensely invigorating exchanges between two kindred spirits.
—John Zorn
The duet, lush with resonance and reference, has become a beautiful habit for Pierre Joris. His interviews let you see so far outside that coming around again, but off, is easy. The resulting spiral is a new curriculum and in this “riot of air” it’s almost like we know all that he knows.
— Fred Moten