On the one week anniversary of his death
Wednesday 26 February 2025
2:07 PM
The lyre of Orpheus, the typewriter of Pound, the nomadics of poetics...
There was no one I knew who embodied the spirit and lineage of poetry more than Pierre Joris, and he reached with ease from Gilgamesh and Ibn Tarafa to Cendrars and the Beats, from Basho and the oral literatures of the Maghreb to the Black Mountain poets and beyond. And while Pierre was also very much in the Now, he was free of the pitfalls of topicality, entering into and expressing the Now like an animal, for it is “when one becomes an animal that,” as Emerson realized, “one is invited into the science of the real.” “This day,” Emerson said, “is better than one’s birthday.”
Pierre traversed borders and boundaries not only physically through his travels and rootings (the various places where he chose to live), but also linguistically, crisscrossing Luxembourgish, German, French, English, Arabic, Dada & more. Ultimately, such places and languages are never borders or boundaries, but rather: open and porous thresholds where cultures and civilizations blend and intermingle, for there is no purity, just as there is no pure language and no pure, fixed, stable word free of contagion, but only ever: crossings, volatility, seismic events, language being no different from terrain, with it too subject to shifts, splits, and tectonic schisms. Language is not something to preserve like a jam or mummify like a corpse for eternity, but something to crack into pieces, an element to fuse with other elements to generate new, unexpected, startling hybrids. “All translation, and all cultures are,” Pierre said, “to a smaller or larger extent, creolized!” “Another way of putting this would be to consider — as Mireille Gansel does — translation as a kind of transhumance. Which also allows for a way of questioning the ‘appropriation’ part of ‘cultural appropriation’ via its root words ‘proper, property, etc.’ & thus the concept of private property as overweening & defining cultural value (& root of capitalism) belonging, as it invariably does, to sedentary peoples afraid of nomads & of the very concept of the nomadic.”
There are writers who burrow into the heart of reality through isolation, and they must live apart, separate from the world, if not at war with it, making symptomatologies of it, diagnosing it with a necessary ferocity, but Pierre was a writer who wasn't isolated from the world and people; through his heart and his writing, he was wholly immersed in life, in the currents streaming through every continent and terrain. It was part of his way of embodying Robert Kelly’s dictum of the poet being “a scientist of the whole,” a dictum that clearly evokes Rimbaud’s exigent demand of total self-knowledge; the rational derangement of the senses is senseless without it. While Pierre cut against the grain in his own way, he cut into the heart of reality through contact, through intimacy, through being born into other languages and cultures. To students who spoke of wanting to find their voice, he countered, “Why don’t you get cough syrup if you lost your voice? You have your voice, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Writing, poetry, for Pierre was not to live in one’s own voice, but to “listen to other people’s voices.” “Translate,” he rejoined. “Go & find what is happening around you & elsewhere in the world. That’s where the poetry is.” It isn’t in the mirror, let alone in the morass of social media that reflects back only one’s own subjectum ad nauseam as if nothing exists in the world but the self, it is elsewhere and outside, in the in-between, where the minuscule circumference of identity is at last subsumed. It is a Dionysian event.
The nomad doesn’t close in upon him- or her-self, but opens out into the world, to the many and to the multiple, to the voices resounding everywhere and elsewhere, to voices not only human, but to animal ones too, to the very sonics of the earth and the cosmos, to the sensorium of vibrating frequencies that can reverberate only in and through the body via its engagement with the totality of reality.
“As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy, — sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth — are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.” — Emerson
Pierre’s unexpected death strikes a sharp and tragic chord — —
He was of the world and the world was in his words ~
Rainer J. Hanshe
— Black and white photo of Pierre Joris by Julien Peyrafitte
— 17th C. Jesuit Chinese World Map mutation by Nicole Peyrafitte
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