Pierre
Joris is formidable by many measures. In thirty years, he has published twenty
books of original poems, including this, his second Selected Poems. Multilingual,
he has translated Jean-Pierre Duprey, Habib Tangour, Paul Celan, and rendered
Carl Solomon, Julian Beck, Kerouac, Corso, Sam Shepard, and Melville in his
native French—fourteen volumes of translations so far.
His
four books of prose range, as restlessly as one would expect, among literary
criticism and political, cultural, and communal commentary. Their titles signal
his motives: Another Journey, The Book of Demons (with Victoria Hyatt),
Global Interference, and Toward a Nomadic Poetics. He has also edited five poetry anthologies, the best-known
being Poems for the Millennium (with Jerome Rothenberg). He
is a comprehensive man of letters, in the voracious Pound tradition.
In
Poasis, whose title is characteristically ambiguous—his poetry to date,
as-is; poesis knocked on its ass; etc.—his wry, peripatetic erudition samples
from many tongues ("In another stolen language/here we go again").
In a voice that can veer in a syllable from the oracular to the funky, he recalls
not only Pound but Celan, Herbert, Duncan, Olson, and the Beats. He is American
by decree of passport and academic address (SUNY-Albany), and also in his hunger
for the new and impatience with the old, the tried and found untrue. More accurately,
he is the ultimate self-exile, reacting against the leftovers of European colonialism
and the red-, white-, and blue-plate specials of globalism. His weapons include
his linguistic arsenals and his sense that words, however provisional, are our
only hope: "There is nothing human beyond words & words are the only
gate we have."
Through
the boundaries of nations and their political lies, a poem by Joris breaks and
points multidirectionally: It takes in the static of the world's short waves,
faces the stark alternatives of the desert and ocean, and turns laterally to
face its brothers fore and aft, turning his oeuvre into one sequence. He is
always alive to the next word:
in
this dream too
you have to add a line
your place is between
the already written
& the unwritten,
in the white empty space.
Such
writing-as-living is demanding, but never defeated:
not
to worry:
you had your birth given you
you will be given your death—
in between
keep moving
His
words impel a continuous disequilibrium. A favored word is clinamen, 'inclination
toward the other.' Turbulence, a book excerpted here, is an ode to the flux which impels
the writing hand-eye-mind-spirit to rove, alert to the evolution of all life.
And his lines move too, often skeletally:
the
hordes follow alpha
betical
ly
vertical
horizon down
or
they go the other way, drive to the margins in prose-poem blocks of energy,
key phrases stressed by repetition:
bend
backwards to be God and encompass it all. The flowers of winter the flowers
of winter traceries musk of repetition symphonic the phonic be enough or all
you can handle the single voice is always two as it hears itself in its saying
we are never alone never all one you are your own echo echo.
Joris
repudiates "yourappian Kulchur," though "the Reagan States"
of the '80s and after are no better. Least reliable are the old creeds: "How
come, in matters of religion, this last of the new people are always, always
trying to bind their asses to ye old substatum and willing in the worst way
to buy into any second hand wisdom?" Home is a delusion, any homecoming
"a reminder of a broken promise." He finds the desert truest to our
condition, as it defies political boundaries and impels "the daily move/the
daily oasis." Its spaces echo our own: "Wandering creates the desert."
There our journeys, inner and outer, find their provocation:
Do
not retrace
your steps. The earth
is round, you cannot avoid it.
But keep on going on. Nomad visits.
At
times I wished that Joris would turn toward the comic implications of his insatiable
paradoxes, that he had the gift of cosmic- and self-mockery of, say, Beckett.
As Frank O'Hara wrote of and to V. R. Lang: "You are so serious, as if/a
glacier spoke in your ear." In Joris's ear, it is the desert that speaks,
as it spoke to [D. H.] Lawrence at his life's end. No comedy there either—and
none wanted.
But
to stress this lack is to overlook Joris's crucial commitment to the space ahead
and to the word as "life-raft," a commitment that makes him an excellent
translator and editor. His move toward knowing, always word-impelled, never
complete, has an undeniable urgency:
We live in
between
dunes
be-
duins in
charge of
our coming &
going.
(Richard
Pearse is the author of several books of poetry, most recently, Private Drives:
Selected Poems, 1969-2001 (Rattapallax Press). He is a professor of English
at Brooklyn College.)
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