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Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently his Celebratory Talk-Essay on Receiving the Batty Weber Award (CNL, Literary Talks series), Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (poems & proses, Black Fountain Press), & the translations Agadir by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (with Jake Syersak, Dialogos Press), Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (CMP) as well as A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly. Further recent titles include Arabia (not so) Deserta (essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi literature & culture, Spuyten Duyvil 2019), Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018), & The Book of U/ Le livre des cormorans (with Nicole Peyrafitte, Simoncini 2017).
Forthcoming are Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations in-between, with Florent Toniello & Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021). Also: Diwan of Exiles: A Pierre Joris Reader (with Ariel Resnikoff, 2023). When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte.
Abdellatif Laâbi, In Praise of Defeat: Selected Poems
By Pierre JorisIt is this struggle, what he calls his “solitary-solidary struggle,” deeply committed, deeply political, yet situated outside any ideological system, a struggle toward the construction of an ethics able to equal the complexities of our world, that has been his compass. The rest is poetry.
Rachida Madani
Rachida Madani was born in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1951, and still lives there, now retired from a career teaching French.
For Salman Rushdie & The Satanic Verses
By Pierre JorisThe recent knife attack on Salman Rushdie was not only appalling, it also shook many of us out of a sort of complacency regarding his situation: thirty plus years after the pronouncement of the Iranian Fatwā against the author of The Satanic Verses, when all the noise and the danger seemed to have died down and Rushdie had been moving around freely and publicly for more than a decade, this assassination attempt came as a complete surprise.
Three Poems
By Pierre JorisPierre Joris has moved between the US, Great Britain, North Africa, France & Luxembourg for close to half a century. He has published over 40 books of poetry, essays and translations, most recently Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade, an Ahadada ebook, 2010. His translations include Paul Celan: Selections (University of California Press) and 4x1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour translated by Pierre Joris from Inconundrum Press. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry.
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