ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Pierre Joris
Interview Questions for Pierre Joris
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in Luxembourg. Writing was there from early on -- in the form of adventure narratives rather than poems. Homeric-Western, though I used to be Hector, not Brad Pitt, I mean Achilles, at least for a short time, & then was Winnetou, the fictional Mescalero Apache chief in Karl May's late 19C adventure tales for young boys. But something to do with poetry was already present via the languages I was using -- or, better, incorporating into the basic German weave of my stories: the woof were secret coded language fragments in Apache, Sioux, Arabic, Persian, etc. taken from May's books & elsewhere.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Paul Celan was first in that hearing a poem of his read aloud in a high school class when I was fifteen made me realize with a truly ontological shudder that there was a use of language different from any other & that that was poetry. From tat moment on I started an exploration of all the poetries I could get my hands on. As a Luxembourgian I was multi-lingual, so began reading other German poets (Gottfried Benn, most importantly, but also Ingeborg Bachman & back toward the Romantics: Novalis, Hölderlin, etc.) and simultaneously the French tradition, where the classics bored me stiff in school, but the moderns got me going -- there too I was reading backwards, from some minor contemporaries to the classical Surrealists to Dada & then back to the two essential figures: Rimbaud & Lautréamont. I was also learning English & was soon gone on the Anglo-American modernists. And the discovery, circa 1963, in the one gay bookshop in Luxembourg, of Ginsberg & Burroughs -- & a copy of On The Road found abandoned on a beach in Spain when I was 15 – was central. Once I got to Paris to go to University, it was Pound & Joyce -- & of course some of the prosists too, Hemingway who got me to, of all people, Stein. Then, after the decision to write in English & the move to the US (as an undergraduate at Bard College) came the discovery of the New American poetry, with the help of Joby Kelly -- Robert Kelly's first wife -- who sat me down on the second or third day after my arrival in Annandale-on-Hudson & told me to read Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly -- I was afraid they would all be Roberts but then she mentioned Charles Olson and told me to go visit my fellow student poet Thomas Meyer who introduced me to Jack Spicer's poetry. Music, especially jazz, was always important, though I have a lousy ear & was never able to learn to play an instrument. Art was interesting, but remained peripheral for a long time, or at least into the seventies when I lived in London. But I am influenced by anything & everything, by whatever is around me -- & I could have answered your question just as well by sending you to the 2 volumes of POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM which are exactly that: a gathering of my favorites poets & of all those who influenced me in some way or other.
3) When did you 'become' a poet when did poet become part of your everyday life?
You never 'are' a poet; you always & again have to 'become' a poet: that's the ongoing everyday work. You only 'become' a poet in the act of writing, all other times you are mailman, barmaid, husband, racing driver, father, teacher, sister, electrician, mother, drunk, stand-up comic, whatever. Obviously there are moments when you realize that you are becoming -- or have the strong desire to become -- a poet. See above: after hearing that Celan poem read aloud, I decided that I wanted to become a poet, without the slightest clue of what that entailed. And I didn't necessarily have much more of a clue when some 5 years later I dropped out of medical school to actually declare myself a "poet" (with Bobby D's lines playing in the back of my head: "I'm a poet, & I know it, hope I don't blow it"...). Ever after that I've been grateful for the odd sense of unease I always had & still have when saying "I am a poet" -- and indeed, the problem is not so much with the word "poet" but more with the verb "to be."
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
Important, yes. But not more important than dropping out between the various bouts with official education. After a year & 1/2 in med school, I dropped out for a year, bumming around Europe, venturing as far as Tangiers, then dropped back in, got a BA from Bard in 2 years, then dropped out & into NYC, edited an underground paper (this is the dusk of the sixties), lived on the Lower east Side & in the Chelsea Hotel, then moved to London, did graduate work at King's College & the Institute of United States Studies with Eric Mottram (maybe the most important & influential teacher/friend figure of my protracted education) but refused to sit University of London exams & dropped out again, for a year or two wrote & edited SIXPACK & spent nights talking & listening (i.e. educating myself) to the young English poet-friends, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Iain Sinclair, & others (see my later bi-lingual anthology MATIERES D'ANGLETERRE, co-edited with Paul Buck, published by In'Hui Editions in Amiens in 1984). Then I dropped back in, to get an MA in translation studies at Essex University, with Ted Berrigan as "advisor" & Ted & Alice Notley as friends & companions in poetry. Got that done & dropped out again & left Thatcherite England in '76 in deep disgust to move to Constantine, Algeria where I taught at the university for 3 years, then back freelancing in Europe until 1987 when I moved back to the US & got an assistantship at SUNY Binghamton via friend Jerome Rothenberg as we were starting work on various collaborative projects. So I wound up getting a doctorate based on the previous 15 years of work on translating Celan. Right now I am dreaming of dropping back in & using a sabbatical to go to Beirut for intense study of Arabic & Arabic literature at the university there.
4.1) English is not your first language how has this effected your work?
Made it & still makes it more fun as I had to/have to make it all up. At least I was never fooled into believing that "language' is something "natural." If at the beginning this was something worrisome, I now feel it as a continuous boon. I have written about this in some detail in a number of the essays in A Nomad Poetics, so I don’t want to repeat myself to much here.
6) What is your favorite food?
I, like the rest of humans should be, and as pigs are, am an omnivore. For years I have been playing with the idea of writing a cookbook called "The innards of fowl and beasts" -- which should give you some inkling of my leanings. There's also an excellent recipe for hare my companion Nicole Peyrafitte & I cooked up in Douglas Messerli's anthology "Eating through literature and Art." Food writers have been important to me, starting with Elizabeth David who I still read with pleasure, and of course MK Fisher -- and back of them to the grand old French chefs & forward again to, say, Ronald Johnson from whose classic "American Table" I still love cooking. Try his recipe for peach cobbler. Absolutely devastating.
7) Sports Team? or Activity?
The Mets, the Mets, the Mets. Some hiking. Ashtanga Yoga -- as a "sport" for both body & mind.
8) Vacation Spot?
Any place I can gaze at the sea. Or at the desert. Or at mountains. And that has a table on which to put book & notebook, cup & glass.
9) favorite Curse Word?
None, really. Right now maybe "Bush."
10) You an Jerome Rothenberg created the best anthology of poetry I think in
print, Poems for the Millenium, some have critiqued it as too avant garde
and not concentrating on the confessional tradition enough how do you reply?
There are dozens of anthologies that present the confessional tradition under every aspect and from every angle imaginable and unimaginable. We wanted to present those poets usually -- not to say always -- left out of -- not to say banned from -- those Norton-ic objects.
Craft Questions
1a) How do you form a poem?
By hand or machine.
1b) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
Both, simultaneously. Sometimes the one dominates, sometimes the other -- keeping them separate is the least of my worries -- they are not categories I find very useful. What is most important to me is to keep the notion of process, of the processual, going and open-ended. What I would call a nomadic poetics.
2) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
In unlined notebooks with a fountain pen (right now a green Waterman I picked up in Berlin last fall) wherever there is a table and a chair; &/or on my iBook. All of it to be transferred at home into a Mac G4 -- which is also often used for composition. I used to smoke and drink coffee or whisky when writing -- but I no longer do that, except for the coffee, and even that in much smaller doses. There's nearly always music playing when I work at home -- jazz or classical --, or a radio playing -- the Internet is a life-saver for an old nomadic radiohead like me -- I can listen to most of the world radio stations I love whenever I want to. I have kept a great affection for that quaint European habit of writing in public places, cafés, bars, restaurants, etc. Except that US bars & restaurants are in the main too dark and cafés too bright. Or maybe that's just the age of my eyes. Well, diners work well.
3) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
All language is found -- or given. Language does not "belong" to us, it is there before we are and will be there when we are gone. So, for a writer the first realization has to be that one does not own language or does not "create" the language, but that one is invited into it -- an invitation that can come from any number of sources.
Global Questions
1) How do you view American and other English language poetry changing in the next few years? What is next, what is new?
Obviously it will change, it always does --eventually. I would suggest that right now we are at a fascinating moment, when there are probably more interesting poets writing than at any other moment in history -- & these poets are often extemely well-informed, well-read, well-trained even, as many have gone through a range of high-powered academic programs (I am not thinking of the trad MFA kind of programs) and as publishing both in magazines, book-form or in a variety of e-forms has never been more open and available. Perusing all of these forms I see a lot of engaging, extremely competent to excellent work -- the only thing that I do seem to find missing, however, is someone who completely blows me (& his or her contemporaries) away by breaking genuinely new ground (or is that just my inability to see, age setting in, blocked arteries, whatever, hardening of the sense, who knows?). This seems a moment of consolidation, when the experimental investigations of the Language area and that of the New American and the younger ones in that filiation who have pushed that range of concerns forward, when these lines are being braided into a strong rope. This seems certainly true in the US -- but not so in England (you asked for 'other English language poetry') from where I have just returned & where I did not see much exciting new work by younger poets. That is, I believe, due in no small part to the insularity of the British -- the great renewal, the renaissance of British Poetry as it as called, happened in the sixties and seventies and was due to the opening up of at least two younger generations to American poetry -- where the energy resided at that time. But this is generally true: change happens from the outside; any well-functioning system will tend to a certain autistic closing off of itself against change and believe in self-contained perfecting. That certainly has been the bane of the Brits -- but can also become that of US poetry, as "insularity" here is of "continental" size -- a doubly dangerous condition.
But, as I said above, I believe that change comes, has to come from the outside -- & in terms of poetry that means the need of first looking beyond the borders of one's own, even continental insularity, and then actively engaging with what is truly other and new (i.e. it is not enough to translate some kindred spirits from, say, Paris, who more often than not are mainly a reflection of one's own concerns). That engagement means of course translation, learning foreign languages, and so on, all of which will eventually enable the poet to question, spindle and mutilate the more comfortable home-grown beliefs.
But this is of course putting it in a much too limited and limiting way: the outside push required to create change can of course come also from other quarters -- the socio-cultural spheres may put such pressure on the writer that the old molds have to (be) explode(d) to accommodate an accurate vision of new possibilities. Who knows, maybe the disastrous situation of the US in terms of its present politics, both internal (the totalitarian trends of an Ashcroft & the homeland patriotic gore), external (the unlimited wars it is engaged in against all and any who will not submit to the imperial pax americana) and global (in the sense of eco-global, the earth house hold, to use Snyder's title, which is being destroyed -- though not only -- by the US, its government and those who pay for that government to be in place, i.e. the corporations), maybe that disastrous situation will lead to a convulsive reaction by a younger generation?
2) What major projects are you working on now?
Too many.
3) What do you think about poetry in the provinces?
Is that how you think about Chicago? I don't.
