Pierre Joris reading at Brown University Nov 30 2023

Pierre Joris' reading of his latest collection of poetry: "Interglacial Narrows" for the Comparative Literature Department Readings. This event took place Thursday, November 30, at 4:00 pm at the Brown Bookstore.

Interglacial Narrows gathers a range of Pierre Joris’ poems written between 2015 and 2021, including an extended version of the Book of U / Le livre des cormorans by Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte, initially published by Galerie Simoncini in Luxembourg in 2017. Both central to the book and opening up its time-lines is the section “Homage to P.C.” Put together in 2020 to celebrate Paul Celan’s 100th birth-year, it gathers poems the earliest of which dates from 1969 & the most recent from 23 November 2020, the day Celan would have turned 100 years old. All of these poems address the author’s relationship to the Bukovinian poet and his work. Core to this section is “The Book of Luap Nalec,” which dates from the later 70s, was published as a now lost chapbook in 1982, and included in Breccia (Editions PHI) in 1987. The final section of the book is a diaristic sequence of poems & notes started during the spring of 2020, i.e. at the moment the covid-crisis hit NYC the hardest.

Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 2015-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations in-between, with Florent Toniello (both from Contra Mundum Press), Celebratory Talk-Essay on Receiving the Batty Weber Award (CNL, Literary Talks series), Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (poems & proses, Black Fountain); the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (CMP). In 2020 he published A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with P. Cockelbergh & J. Newberger, CMP), & earlier: Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays, Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018), & The Book of U (poems, with Nicole Peyrafitte, Simoncini 2017). When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte.