Pierre Joris, Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024

 

This afternoon Dante
will be ex-
pelled from Florence —
a good thing as how could he
have written so well
on the far-away imaginary ex-
ile of the comically divine
realms had he not known
what it meant to walk
over a cold January day’s
ground frost, clod-
breaking, heart beating,
from one city to another
— to come to
this: that exile
is but the next step you take
the unknown there
where your foot comes
down
next, in
heaven or on earth
exile is when you can still
lift a foot
exile is when you are not
yet dead.

Despite having caught a reading by the late award-winning Luxembourgish-American poet, essayist and translator Pierre Joris (1946-2025), a translator well known for his work on Paul Celan, and his wife, Nicole Peyrafitte, years ago in New Orleans during a jaunt south that Stephen Brockwell and I did (circa 2011 or so), the first title of his own writing I’ve properly attended is the newly-published Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024 (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025). Published as a companion volume to his Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), the author biography of this new volume does provide that “Pierre Joris competed the selection for Poasis II before his passing on February 26, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York.” Normally I would complain a bit when hearing a writer assembled their own selected or collected poems, but there would be few capable of doing the work required for such an imposing volume, by such a writer and translator as Pierre Joris (although an introduction might have been nice, as part of my usual selected/collected complaint; was there no-one else around that could have offered a tribute of sorts, and a bit of context to Joris’ work?). The two hundred pages-plus of Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024 gathers sections of his poetry, as the acknowledgments offers, “sometimes revised,” from an array of books and chapbook produced within that particular window, including Permanent Diaspora (Duration Press, 2003), The Rothenberg Variations (Wild Honey Press, 2004), learn the shadow (unit4art, 2012), The Gulf (between you and me) (The Crossing, 2013), Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (Chax Press, 2013), Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012 (Black Widow Press, 2014), The Book of U / Le livres des cormorans, with Nicole Peyrafitte (Editions Simoncini, 2017), Fox-trails, -tales & -trots: Poems & Proses (Black Fountain Press, 2020) and Interglacial Narrows (ContraMundumPress, 2023).

There’s a kind of intellectual flourish and play within these works, comparable to the work of the late San Francisco-expat Vancouver poet Robin Blaser (1925-2009) or of American poet Rosmarie Waldrop; a way of incorporating and interweaving contemporary and classical references amid multiple languages, musical scores, translations and explorations through critical thinking and poetic form. Robert Kroetsch once offered literature as a conversation, and here it is. Through Blaser, Waldrop and Joris, a poetics, one might say, of companions and conversations, offering a wealth of responses, translations and interactions between languages, between literatures; a poetics rich with collaborators. I would only hope someone that far more familiar with his ongoing work might provide a fleshier review than my scant notes here.

Reading Edmond Jabès

Here, the end of the word. of the book, of chance. 

Desert!
            Drop that dice. It is useless.

Here, the end of the game, of resemblance.
            The infinite, by the interpretation of its letters
            Denies the end.

Here, the end cannot be denied. It is infinite. 

Here is not the place
            Not even the trace.

Here is sand.