Selections of Pierre Joris's best work from this past quarter-century of writings

Poasis II gathers Joris's major poetic works from 2000 to 2024. These nomadically shape-shifting poems range widely across times, places, and cultures, addressing, for example, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster (in a quasi-opera libretto), the meditations of tenth-century revolutionary poet, sufi teacher, and thinker Mansur al-Hallaj, an homage to his old friend and collaborator Jerome Rothenberg (1931-2024), a list poem celebrating Herman Melville's 200 birthday, and extracts from his Book of Cormorant. These sequences are interspersed with shorter works, such as poems addressing Paul Celan upon completing translations of that poet's oeuvre, Dante's expulsion from Florence, and more. As he says in the poem "The Poet's Job," "pick up everything that shines / discard the gold / keep the light." Or, as Randall Horton suggests, these poems "are inter-cont(in)ental as sound and symbol weaves in and out of cultures, traditions--they critique, inform--teach in a multiverse of languages--they love. The beauty, as with all of Joris's literary work, is when language is allowed to be nomadic and unbound."


[sample poem]

Outside:
sun caught
in bare tree branches,
cradled
Inside:
me caught
in shelter in place,
cradled too
p.s. We shall both
rise again

-
4/1

These buds on the branches
here this year too
their steadfastness . my surprise