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Interview with Pierre Joris

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Interview with Pierre Joris Interview with Pierre Joris Barzakh: What is the trajectory of your own poetics? PJ: from Homer (in German prose translations) via Gottfried Benn — Paul Celan — Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud — Lautréamont — some Breton & the Surrealists — Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg & the Beats — Mohammed Khair-Eddine (first published poet I shared a room with) & the francophone Maghrebi & Caribbean poets — Ezra Pound & T.S. Eliot (already fighting in the captain’s tower — EP won easily) — Shelley (& small doses of the other English Romantics, especially Keats for Neg. Cap.) — Rilke (a little, at arm’s length) Whitman (all of it) — H.D. & W.C.W. — Basho (Oku no Hosomichi more than any single haikus) — William Blake (the great Prophetic Books before all) — Charles Olson & Robert Duncan & Robert Creeley, again & again — Gertrude Stein is Gertrude Stein is Gertrude Stein — Jack Spicer — Robert Kelly & Jerome Rothenberg & Clayton Eshleman — Dada & Kurt Schwitters — Ken Irby & Gerrit Lansing — Osip Mandelstam & Marina Tsvetaeva (I had read & liked the Futurists before, but these two stayed closest, certainly O.M. did) — Frank O’Hara & Ted Berrigan — Joyce Mansour & Claude Pélieu — to my contemporaries, more difficult to judge or name all, — Allen Fisher (core) — Eric Mottram (core teacher) — Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Charles Stein, Habib Tengour, Nicole Brossard, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino — the list is endless, nomadically so, of course, & this morning typing this in the Pyrenees at 5:35 a.m. I worry that I’ll leave out important ones for me & hurt friends — not sure what made me do this as a list of names, but I guess that besides whatever personal, psychic, physical compulsion drives one to not only write poetry as everyone does in their teenage years, but to continue into adulthood & make it the essential, daily activity of one’s life, besides that possibly unfathomable urge, one’s poetics come from reading, absorbing, confronting, digesting, rejecting the poetry of the past & the present. For me, coming to this with 4 languages & having decided to write in the last one I learned, this also meant reading in a variety of cultures, something I have come to think of as essential for anyone wanting to write today in our “global” world. The best contemporary poetries have made process-showing (i.e. integrating & making visible the “how” of the poem, or its poetics, in the poem itself) part & parcel of the work, just as a situationist like Guy Debord insisted that in all made things the final product should show the actual trace of the means & tools that produced it (ideologically, that trace is exactly what the products of capitalism try to obliterate absolutely). As the previous sentence would indicate one’s poetics do not necessarily come from lit-crit or purely literary analysis. My own ideas of what poetry today should be & how it should configure itself to be as relevant as possible to the complexities of our world, have been shaped and advanced by a wide range of readings in the sciences (Heisenberg’s writings, among others), and the history of the sciences (Michel Serres is major here, especially his study of Lucretius, but also Jacques Monod, Jacques Ruffié, on biology, Francis Crick on the structure of DNA, but further Joseph Needham on the history of science in China, and G. Spender-Brown, whose Laws of Form brilliantly investigates matters of form via mathematical concepts. Then of course there is philosophy, from the pre-Socratics (way more essential today than Plato & Aristotle) via the Renaissance thinkers, from Montaigne to Giordano Bruno, to the core moderns, for example Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, to contemporary thinkers, with, essential for me, Gilles Deleuze & Jacques Derrida as core movers. Other areas, like anthropology, history, geography, botany, medicine, the traditional (neo-platonic) sciences & systems, are also useful areas of investigation for one’s poetics. As a poet & writer you want to know what happened and what is going on right now as you write (to just enjoy aesthetically but also learn from & be inspired by) other art forms, painting, music, performance etc., from the earliest prehistoric art (it so happens that tomorrow morning I’ll be going for the 4th time to the Gargas Cave here in the Pyrenees, to check out those amazing paintings of hands, and one of the most fabulous vulva representations we have in the history of our species) to the work of my contemporaries (I just wrote a preface for a catalogue of an exhibition of paintings happening in Paris later this month investigating the concept of “Le Mal – now” & including work by the likes of Irving Petlin, whose work is on the covers of my two books from Wesleyan University Press, Horst Haack, Joyce Kozloff, Vladimir Velickovic and others) If this looks like a daunting list of “musts,” it is not: what it is is the vast field of human endeavors in which my decision to be a poet, and thus “the last generalist of the whole, … who eats everything,” as one friend has dubbed the poet’s job, allows & even demands me to play, to read & learn, to make connections & write through & from. This is not say that such knowledge supplants or replaces that unavoidable banality called “personal experience,” but that it helps give it shape, depths, adding dimensions & layers to one’s reading of daily events in one’s own life & in the world one lives this life in in the company of others. Barzakh: What has been the trajectory of poetics at SUNY Albany? PJ: I’m not really a historian of this, our, academic institution & can at best give a limited, personal, biased take on this matter. When I came to UA in 1992, there was a sort of triple braid happening: On the one hand there was the New York State Writers Institute with Tom Smith in the position that Don Faulkner now has, and on the other, in the department itself, there were two strains. The first, coming from Judith Johnson, a good & active poet & teacher, who brought to campus and edited the magazines Thirteenth Moon (primarily feminist / women’s work — & very important in that way at that moment) and The Little Magazine. Judy’s approach was very much creative writing workshop based & she would dearly have seen the department set up a dedicated MFA program. Then there was Don Byrd, poet & scholar, whose 1980 book Charles Olson’s Maximus is still the best intro to that major 20C American epic, and whose 1993 The Poetics of the Common Knowledge should be compulsory reading for all our poetics/poetry graduate students. Coming as he did from the Olson line of poets & thinkers, you can immediately see that my own interests were very close to his (just look back at the lists in my first answer above). We both felt that the invasion of American universities by cash-cow creative writing programs would eventually be a liability for thinking men & women, given their built-in anti-intellectual stance, their reliance on a fake arte povera based on “personal experience,” & their quasi-chauvinistic & simplistic American self-reliance guide-lines. So we both much favored the new PhD that had just been created (& in whose definition Don had had a hand) and which involved combinations of creative and critical &/or pedagogical areas. Don was also very involved with the new electronic arts & especially digital poetry; he taught in that area and supervised the first CD-edition of The Little Magazine that proposed a range of such poetries. After I got to Albany in 1992, I managed to convince Tom Smith at the NYSWI to let us bring in poets on a more solid basis than just the one-off readings, & so for a few years we had week-long residencies by poets who would interact with the students, teach a master-class, give a reading & be available to talk with students. We were thus able to invite the likes of Alice Notley, Anne Waldman and Robin Blaser, among others. Unhappily, due to circumstances beyond my control, that very fruitful situation only lasted a few years before the Institute, after the premature death of Tom Smith, folded back onto itself, mainly because of economic reasons, I’d guess. I was also close to Charles Bernstein & the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo & we were able to bring in a number of the international visitors Buffalo had invited (they had more money) & whom we got so to say on the rebound. But despite very limited means & opposition to its aims or at least benign neglect from the wider department, our poetics program over my 22 years here has always astounded me by its vitality — one gauge of which is the fact that year after year the number of excellent prospective graduate students applying to our department was top-heavy with first-rate poetics candidates. Barzakh: What does the term ecopoetry mean? PJ: I guess whatever you want it to mean — i.e. at this point there no long standing fixed definition of the term. In the word-combo, the “poetry” part is of course the oldest and best defined (with multiple & often contradictory definitions). Ecology is a much newer term, & as Robert Duncan pointed out long ago, “the O.E.D. gives 1873 as the earliest use of the word in our language, appearing in the translation of Haeckel’s History of Creation: ‘the great series of phenomena of comparative anatomy and ontogeny… oecology.’” And if you read on in Duncan (the quote is from Chapter 6 of the H.D. Book) you’ll see that far from being “just” an interdisciplinary field that includes biology and Earth Sciences, it is an all-encompassing system, in which all living beings and other matter, including human beings come into “their comparisons” — an egalitarian view, not one with the species speciously known as homo sapiens, is always the top or tip of the pyramid.
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