pierre joRis in conversation with JOHN WISNIEWSKI
Pierre Joris is a Luxembourg-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa, and the United States for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations, and anthologies. He was awarded the 2021 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation.
John Wisniewski: When did you begin writing, Pierre?
Pierre Joris: Very early on. I was a big reader starting at five and I see myself at eight or nine sitting at the table in my grandparents’ farm copying words out of the volumes of adventure stories by the German 19th century novelist Karl May. The words I would copy out were all in foreign languages, especially Native American languages such as Mescalero Apache or Kiowa or Comanche, but also some from Arabic, Persian, and even English. With those words—I knew their meaning via his German language translations in the books—I put together a secret language in which to communicate with my friends and propose adventures. I still see the old heavy hardcover kettle register my grandmother had given me for this undertaking.
And nearly 70 years later this is still a magical remembrance for me. You see, when I became a writer I had to choose the language to write it as I did not know how to write in my mother tongue (Luxembourgish) and had to choose from the other languages I knew: German and French as first cultural languages, English or possibly Spanish as secondary acquired languages. If I picked English-American English to be precise—it would because of the felt need to leave my European heritage behind as I saw American writing in both poetry and prose as the most lively vital adventurous.
That decision was taken when I was 19. Weirdly enough when I was 16 I wrote my first poems—a dozen or so—in English already because I had fallen in love with an English girl, but then went back trying to write in German and French for a couple years.
John Wisniewski: Are there any poets who inspire you?
Pierre Joris: It’s all great and even just good poets inspire me. What turned me to poetry was hearing a Paul Celan poem read in high school —that moment defined the trajectory of my life and I've been thanking Celan ever since by translating his work. In 2020 I finished paying off that debt by publishing the last two volumes of this work, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, the Early Collected Poetry, and Microliths, his posthumous prose. But I came to America and became an American poet because I had discovered Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac already in Europe, and soon after arriving here in 1967 I came across the richness of the Don Allen anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960 which lead me directly to the Black Mountain poets, Charles Olsen, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn etc. But also others such as Diane Di Prima, Jack Spicer, Amiri Baraka. And the New York poets from O’Hara to Ashbery, but also my generation, poets who became close friends such as Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman. The richness of American poetry! I started working on translating Paul Celan at Bard College with the poet Robert Kelly—who became a life-long friend—as advisor and the next year he sent me to meet Paul Blackburn and Jerome Rothenberg in New York City. Then, in the very early 70s I moved to London where I became close to poets such as Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, and Eric Mottram. Later that decade I taught in North Africa and all of Arab poetry from pre-Islamic poetry to current post-independence work opened up new worlds. No lack of poets who inspire me! Easiest—and fullest —overview of that would be a look at the anthologies I put together, especially the three volumes of the Poems for the Millennium series I co-edited with Jerry Rothenberg for the University of California Press.
John Wisniewski: Please tell us about editing the poetry magazines Corpus and Sixpack.
Pierre Joris: In late summer ’69 I moved to the East Village and trying to find a way to pay the rent I answered an ad in the Village Voice for an editorial job but happened to be just a few blocks from where I lived on Seventh Street, namely in what had been the Diggers’old Free Store and which was now the Free Theater, where a strange play, Che, had been playing until busted for obscenity on stage. The producer-director Ed Wode and the author of the play, Lennox Raphael, had also started a magazine, Corpus, an underground newspaper there was supposed to come out every two weeks. Rather than repeating what EVO, the East Village Other, was doing, we thought we would put the cultural transformations we were living through upfront. This allowed me to also bring poetry into the magazine. Those were heady days with my favorite bars located halfway between the Fillmore East and Saint Marks Poetry Project. And so in Corpus, I could publish a poem by Jerome Rothenberg next to an interview with Ed Sanders next to an interview with the Grateful Dead or transcriptions from the Che trial for obscenity and preface it all with what is a Burroughsian cut-up editorial. It was a lot of fun as long as it lasted—which was only for six months or two issues as the money ran out and the play couldn’t re-open. Interestingly enough, we were able to rent for very little money one of the first IBM text layout computers, a giant machina that took up half a room and wasn't as performative as the laptop I’m typing this on, but still it was great to be able to shape text on the page, lay in illustrations and try to come up with a layout as psychedelic as our minds felt at that moment.
Sixpack was a different matter. I had already published a small poetry magazine as an undergraduate at Bard College called The Clown co-edited with Bob Kamm, and the concept of creating, assembling, and printing a magazine attracted me very much. As against an old European image of the poet as romantic isolato, locked in his or her ivory tower in exclusive and narcissistic communication with the genius of poetry & art before dying all too young, I had learned—via the modernist European groups such as the dadaists or surrealists and later, or contemporary groupings such as the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York poets to see poetry as a communal activity: the poet was active in a community, that place of companionship, company, from “con pan” those with whom you break break, drink, read, talk around a shared table. One such table you can actually share beyond your room is the poetry magazine. And, as I would tell students later on, a magazine, besides being a sharable showplace for your own and your friends’ work, is also a wonderful means to get in touch with the elder well-known, even famous poets you don't dare call on the phone. A letter—today an email asking these for work very often leads to interesting correspondence and a times even to lasting friendships, besides the poems these poets would send you. When I moved to London in early 1972, I quickly met my generation of British poets in that town and then beyond, and I wanted to share their work with my old friends in the US & other old and new friends on the European continent—and so a new magazine became the obvious way of doing this.
Early on, Sixpack was a home-made mimeo affair put together with the help of a few willing friends and a goodly number of six-packs of beer, mainly “Long Life,” an Australian Lager, and for a moment I thought of calling the mag itself “Long Life” rather than “Sixpack”—but I loved what I saw as the polysemy of the word “sixpack” because I also read it as a translation into Anglo-based English of the Greek-based word “hexagram,” a core term in the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, a manual for action we all much consulted in those days. Wanting to at least hint that this “translation” was also and very much present in the name “Sixpack,” I decided to use as image or visual trademark an actual I Ching Hexagram ( #47 Kuai) which consists of the trigram for The Joyous, Lake, above the one symbolizing The Creative, Heaven and means (in Richard Wilhelm’s translation) “Break-through, Resoluteness.” The “Judgment” could stand as the manifesto of the magazine: “Break-through. One must resolutely make the matter known / At the Court of the king. / It must be announced truthfully. Danger. / It is necessary to notify one’s own city. / It does not further to resort to arms. / It furthers one to undertake something.”
It would be too much to enumerate all the contributors to the 9 issues, though they included American, French & German beats from Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kaufman to Claude Pélieu and Carl Weissner, to old and new French avant-gardistas from Artaud to Michel Bulteau, US poets from Paul Blackburn (a special homage double issue—#7/8—after he passed) to Robert Kelly to Jerome Rothenberg, all jostling with the new English poets such as Allen Fisher and Eric Mottram or Jeff Nuttall. Issue #5 was guest-edited by my friend Bill Sherman & he brought in a slew of other US poets he had known from his days in Buffalo and then in Wales. After that my old friend William Prescott, who had returned to New York, became co-editor and he was able to locate money and so the final issues were well printed and professionally bound issues. The last one (#9) came to nearly 200 pages and ranged from David Antin to John Yau, including the likes of Ted Enslin, Jackson MacLow, Charles Olson, Clayton Eshleman, Nathaniel Tarn besides people of my own generation such as Norman Weinstein, George Quasha or Thomas Meyer. Looking back I feel pretty good about the company I was able to gather around that table—even if today I am appalled by how few women were included: Mary Beach, Alice Notley, Lindy Hough, Anne Waldman, Carolee Schneemann, Rochelle Owens, Carol Berge, and Martha King.
A great adventure, it was, and I was sorry back then and am still now that it had to come to an end because I was moving about too much and had in fact left London to move to Constantine, Algeria as we were putting together #9, which turned out to be the last hurray.
John Wisniewski: You co-translated and edited The Works of Kurt Schwitters with Jerome Rothenberg. What interested you about Schwitters work?
Pierre Joris: I’ve known Jerry since ’69 or ’70 & we have always shared a great love for and interest in the various avant-garde movements of the 20th century and earlier, as anyone who knows our late-90s Poems for the Millennium anthologies & the series of Poets for the Millennium monographs we co-edited for University of California Press will know. I remember way back Jerry and I talking about the shame it was that Kurt Schwitters, such an amazing poet, and if not the first then one of the very early practitioners of sound-poetry, was not recognized as such more publicly, but was known primarily through his art. His collages & assemblages could be found in the large museums, and the art world knew, documented and talked about his Merzbau, while the writings were passed over in silence. But that is, I guess, no, I know, part & parcel of a capitalist money-based society, where art is $$$-valued while poetry is at best “priceless” and thus de-valued. Now for us, as we say in our intro, to see him as essentially a visual artist “is a major distortion of Schwitters’ accomplishment, especially because he himself never saw his various art and literary activities according to some such hierarchical model. On the contrary, Schwitters’ push was towards an ever greater integration and equivalence of the various facets of his artistic oeuvre.” For the two of us, as we go on to say, he “ranks squarely among the protean writers of the first part of the Twentieth Century, along with figures such as Apollinaire, Stein, Tzara, Marinetti, Pound, and so on. The professed sweep and aim of his poems (no contemporary poet worked with or developed more new forms and genres) are truly Poundian or even Wagnerian, though without Pound’s or Wagner’s mytho-historical ambitions or ideological strictures.” Well, at that time—very early 90s—Lawrence Venuti was editing the series Border lines: Works in Translation for Temple University Press, and Kurt Schwitters found a home right here under the title pppppp—which we made up and loved but then due to Library of Congress urgings had to spell out as “poems performances pieces proses plays poetics” (A gorgeous edition — you can still find copies on abe.com and a few years later the book was reprinted by exact change). Jerry and I chose the work, poems, proses, essays, we wanted to translate from Das literarische Werk, the superb 5-volume German edition of Schwitters’ Collected Writing (edited by Friedhelm Lach and published by DuMont Buchverlag), divvied up the translations, set to work—and had a huge amount of fun! The book came out in 1993—the year after the birth of my son Miles, whom I would croon to sleep during his babydom with recitations from Kurt Schwitter’s great Ur Sonata.
John Wisniewski: Could you tell us about a recent work, City Full of Voice: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly? How did this project come about?
Pierre Joris: As I mentioned earlier, Robert Kelly has been a friend since I worked with him at Bard College in the late sixties. His work has been a constant companion ever since, no matter where I lived — Europe, North Africa, West Coast, East Coast, wherever. Always carried some of his books in my satchel. Like those poets close to him, Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, George Economou or Diane Wakoski, Kelly saw his job as essentially writing poems and not as the pursuit of a “literary career” that would involve a lot of reviewing and manifestos and essays etc. Early on he did publish a small book of essays called “In Time” — very important for me as a way of thinking a contemporary poetics post-Olson and post-Duncan. After which book there would only be some scattered pieces of theoretical writings or of poem-statements in magazines here and there despite the fact that Robert would publish at least one volume of poetry a year. Then, as a range of poets of my generation — the so-called Language Poets, not to name them — started publishing vast amounts of theoretical writings, I thought it would be important to gather Kelly’s essayistic work in one volume. I waited & waited but neither Robert (who kept busy writing poem after poem) nor anybody else wanted or had the energy or desire to do this book, I guess. So I finally decided to do it myself and got to work on it around 2010, joined in the endeavor by Peter Cockelbergh, and we surprised ourselves by quickly having a nearly 800 page book together! We were lucky that Rainer Hanshe, the publisher of Contra Mundum Press, was willing to take on our project. I had also been surprised by the fact that there was no single book of essays on Kelly’s work, when this seemed to me to be a much-needed thing, given the circa 100 books of poetry RK has published. But maybe that very quantity was the problem: critics young and old may have been intimidated or flustered about writing on Kelly — there’s so much, where to begin! So Peter & I, joined later by Joel Newberger, gathered the companion volume collecting materials all the way from early reviews & essays by the likes of Olson & Creeley to his contemporaries and on to many younger voices reading him enthusiastically today. The double volume had in fact been on my mind from the star, which you can gather form the titles — A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly & A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly & the symmetrical structures when you open the books. Thanks again to Rainer Hanshe the publisher and Alessandro Segalini, the designer of Contra Mundum Press—they did an outstanding job!
I am very happy that these two books are out in the world. Those, plus the two big Paul Celan translations, plus the co-translation with Jake Syersak of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s great novel Agadir, my Conversations in the Pyrenees with the great Syrian poet Adonis (also published by Contra Mundum Press!) and my selection of my own poems & proses entitled Fox-trails, -tales & -trots, make for a whole bunch of books over the last 2 or 3 years. And I my collection of poems, Interglacial Narrows, came out the end of 2022 — it opens with a quote from Robert Kelly which, I guess, could stand for the best way to think about the poet’s (and translator’s) job: “Wake up, write down.”