A CELEBRATION OF PIERRE JORIS, POET, TRANSLATOR,
AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST, AT UALBANY

NYS Writers Institute, March 5, 2014
2:00 p.m. Panel discussion | Standish Room, Science Library
4:15 p.m. Conversation | Standish Room, Science Library
8:00 p.m. Reading | Standish Room, Science Library

CALENDAR LISTING:
A Celebration of Pierre Joris—poet, translator, performance artist, and UAlbany Professor Emeritus—will feature three events on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. The events will include a panel discussion on Joris’ works at 2:00 p.m.; a conversation with Joris at 4:15 p.m.; and a reading by Joris at 8:00 p.m. The events are cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and UAlbany’s English Department, with additional support from University Auxiliary Services, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Fence, and Barzakh.

PROFILE
“A Celebration of Poet and Translator Pierre Joris” will feature three events on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 in the Standish Room, Science Library on the UAlbany uptown campus.

Events will include a 2:00 p.m. panel discussion on the works of Pierre Joris, moderated by New York State Writers Institute Director Donald Faulkner, with poets and scholars Robert Kelly, Peter Cockelbergh, Belle Gironda, and Don Byrd; a 4:15 p.m. conversation with Joris, moderated by UAlbany English professor Tomás Urayoán Noel; and an 8:00 p.m. reading by Pierre Joris.

A professor at the University at Albany from 1992 to 2013, and one of the foremost translators of avant-garde poetry into both French and English, Pierre Joris has moved between the U.S., Europe, and North Africa for 45 years, publishing close to 50 books of poetry, essays, and translations.

Joris’s recent publications include the poetry volume, Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (2013), and The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013, volume 4 in the Poems for the Millennium series), coedited with Habib Tengour. In reviewing this volume, Artforum said, “With ingenious translations and informative commentaries, Joris and Tengour ... make palpable that this region is a wellspring of the culture we value in the West. In so doing, they restore to us missing parts of the ‘cradle’ of our civilization.”

Other recent translations include The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan (2011), which was awarded the Modern Language Associations’ 2013 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature. Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poems of Paul Celan, translated and annotated by Joris, is scheduled for a December 2014 release from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

A new collection of Joris’s poetry, Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012), will come out from Black Widow Press in 2014. His earlier poetry volumes include Breccia: Selected Poems 1972-1986 (1987), and Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (2001). Other notable works include the essay collection A Nomad Poetics (2003) and three volumes of the avant-garde anthology series, Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998, co-edited with Jerome Rothenberg; 2012 co-edited with Habib Tangour). Publishers Weekly described Volume 2 of the Millennium series as containing “an astonishing amount of exciting poetry [that] freely crosses national and aesthetic boundaries.”

Joris received the 2005 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Paul Celan’s Lightduress, the 1996 PEN Oakland Award for the first volume of Poems for the Millennium, and the 1994 PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Translation for pppppp: Selected Writings of Kurt Schwitters (1993, with Jerome Rothenberg).

A collection of scholarly essays about Joris’s work, Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, appeared in 2012. Edited by Peter Cockelbergh, the book features essays by Mohamed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff, and Nicole Peyrafitte, among others.

Previous Visits: February 16, 2007 and November 15, 2001

Additional Link: Joris and Rothenburg