Monday, October 19, 2009

Pierre Joris: a Poetic of Nomadism

Jerome Rothenberg posted this. It's great. Peirre blogs here.

Ecerpt:

"A nomadic poetics is a war machine, always on the move, always changing, morphing,moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping. Refuelling halts are called poases, they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on. The sufi poets spoke of mawqif - we will come back to this.
A nomadic poetics needs mindfulness. In & of the drift (dérive) there is no at-home-ness here but only an ever more displaced drifting. The fallacy would be to think of language as at-home-ness while "all else" drifts, because for language to be accurate to the condition of nomadicty, it too has to be drifting, to be "on the way" as Celan puts it.
[...]
If the mind is only the body's invisibility (Merleau-Ponty) then the poem is merely the unreadability, the non-transparency, the opaqueness of that mind. An opacity grounded in the materiality of language as much / if not more than in the viscosity of psyche. A turbulent opacity -not a monumental, laminary , marble-or-granite opaqueness."

10 comments:

Jared Wells said...

Yeah, a read his other book (which may cantain this same essay) "A Nomad Poetics," a few years ago. Tis good, but prefer Joris manefestos/essays to his actual poetry, sadly.

Ross Brighton said...

I haven't read a lot, though I'm keen to check out his Celan translations. Though they'd he hard pressed to beat Hamburger's later ones, and John Felsteiner's are great too.

Andrea said...

As manifestos go this one is great - a line of flight, a becoming and "space is the place". Something that references Sun Ra, Paul Celan and Jack Kerouac has got to be fairly interesting in my book.

Ross Brighton said...

Nomadism, Lines of flight, the plane of immanence, deterritorialisation, etc are all terms from Gilles Deleuze (& Felix Guattari), if you're interested.

Andrea said...

Deleuze and Guttari may have come up in English or Art History class at some point, but I don't remember for sure. I did however get out a Deleuze book from the library the other week so I am quite interested in reading some more of them.

Ross Brighton said...

It's great stuff. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature is amazing.

Unknown said...

No, Empedoklean terms or reveries may not be taken as valid.

Unknown said...

Furthermore, having obliged us with The Need for Roots and being dead beyond doubt, Simone Weil is neither watching this nor laughing.

I hope you have recovered from the wet ticket that was Dimmer, as they seem to have been getting.

Ross Brighton said...

As with everything, there are parts that don't gel with me - that construction of an eros/nike, even if it is somewhat expunged in the same paragraph - the 'deconstuction' (if one can even call it that) is Aristotlian, where i would rather see them as engaged is some post-Janus-faced state of eternal flux and intermingling.

Which brings me to the second point - the throwaway line describing "the critic/theorist [as] the dog that barks as the caravan passes" - the duality constructed here between poet and critic/theorist is, i think, just as unfounded as the earlier one. Any writer enacts theory in the act of writing, and any reader enacts criticsm in the act of reading. Better to be aware of these processes, and be able to put them to use - arms for the "war machine".

Farrah Field said...

Any writer enacts theory in the act of writing, and any reader enacts criticsm in the act of reading.

That's the most beautiful thing I've seen all day.

If every teacher doesn't use that in their classroom...