Poasis: Selected Poems, 1986-1999
Pierre Joris
publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2001
isbn: 0-8195-6435-4
price: $16.95
For decades, Joris has been an important translator of important avant-garde authors such as Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, and Maurice Blanchot, and editor (with Jerome Rothenberg) of such important volumes as the pppppp: The Selected Writings of Kurt Schwitters and the massive two volume anthology of international avant-garde poetry, Poems for the Millennium, from the University of California Press.
Joris's first volume of selected poems, Breccia, appeared in 1987, and was jointly published in Luxembourg and by Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY); Poasis is, outside of several chapbooks and magazine appearances, Joris's first major publication of his own writing in the United States.
He has lived for several years in Great Britain, France, North Africa, and now the United States, and this "nomadic" existence -- he has written a manifesto for a "nomadic community," part of which is included here -- strongly informs the stylistics and content of his writing:
He decried the 'citoyen du
mond' as some Socratic
blunder -- but it is not so,
Charley, the particular is
everywhere, is the cosmo-
politan exactly, the particular is
everywhere, the smallest
unit, the particle is
everything -- & it moves,
it crosses bound-
aries, it moves
wherever [...]
[164]
"Charley" in this quote is Charles Olson, one of the writers who casts a deep shadow over this work. Another is Ezra Pound, and the sense of Europe's failing in the twentieth century, of the martyrdom and all-around shamanistic function of the artist as vortex of meaning, the globalizing breadth that takes in all facts of history (personal and social) and contemporeinty in one rhetorical swoop not to mention the condemnation of modern times -- Pound's tone and method in the Pisan Cantos -- runs through Poesis:
von Hollands Grachten bis tief ins Russische
Reich a Ganovenweise sung in Luxembourg anno domino 3
post world war 2 all the way to Ancel in the Bukowina
& we still go at it turba scriptorum tralala trying
to wring something from this long night
[84]
There is something antiquated about the method and subject matter, especially after the postmodernism made historical master narratives, not to mention the canon, leaky vessels that one would not want to board without a life raft of irony.
Joris attends to a singular sense of the "pure line" that one gets in poets like Robert Kelly and, earlier, Robert Duncan (Joris writes: "O that I had Duncan's eyes to see & hold both this America that Europe planisphere of my sense fine mercator mesh grid of this my prison earth"). For all of these poets, the coherence of a strong European tradition was of ethical concern, and a loose, speech-based epic lyrical style, with all its potential for bluster, was the best "American" way to confront it.
Many of the Joris' poems struggle with the issue of how to have an ethical engagement with history without quite being "historical" -- that is, without being an actor -- and so he often sounds like he is addressing an empty courtyard from a fragile pedestal; outside of a general teleological rush and longings for the visionary capacity, there isn't much touchdown, either into perfectly satisfying poetic form or a detailed, unique personal vision.
The better parts of this book are when Joris is just writing in normal prose (or prose-ish poems), discussing why Americans can be so dogmatic in their religions, or in the selections from "h.j.r." describing his search for the "Nomad Hotel" somewhere in, one presumes, Africa:
Realizing that we were children of no Sheikh, wanderers from another direction that had no direction, they led us outside the city's perimeter to where the Japanese buses were waiting, drowning in dust and sun. A low building without a well offered itself to us. I overheard talk bout emigrate / immigrate, the different sides of the same coin. Koiné. Porous borders.
[191]
Here, one senses the complexities of being an interstitial writer, of existing somewhere on the edge of mediated, globalized culture, away from theories of being and economics, though all the pulp and paradoxes of these issues are delivered in the details.
The super-national adventure of Joris' nomadic existence -- through the walls of Europe and Africa and through the wilds of all of Modernism, which he knows better than anyone -- might have been better displayed had he sacrificed his commitment to the tone of Olson and Pound, and written more freely of the contradictions of his particular, therefore meaningful, life.
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