Since the news of poet, artist and translator Pierre Joris’ death at 78, I’ve been thinking about the way we view artists when they pass away; the way we are quick to conceive of their work as static, abandoned by its creator, and the creator’s absence meaning there is nothing left to be said. But there are artists who stood for something, and from whose work the following generations can and should learn something. Pierre Joris was just such an artist.
Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, given his international existence, the first time I heard of Pierre Joris was not in Luxembourg but abroad, in the English department of Warwick University. There, literature scholars mentioned having discovered the German poet Paul Celan through Joris’ translations; they mentioned his essays and collaborative ties to Jerome Rothenberg, Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein—all giants of avant-garde poetry studies.
At that same university, where I studied creative writing, we were told to choose ‘artistic parents’—influential figures who struck in us the creative spark, that understanding of some deeper possibility in artistic expression that only another artist can help you get to. As an artist, our teachers told us, you don’t exist motionless in a vacuum; like any dimensional object, you come from someplace and are going somewhere. And where you come from is, in part, other artists. They make up your artistic lineage and help you understand your aspirations.
The first time Pierre Joris knew he wanted to be a poet was when his teacher at the Lycée Classique in Diekirch read Paul Celan’s Todesfuge aloud to his students. Joris reported feeling as if in a trance, conscious for the first time of what poetic language can do.
After graduating from LCD in 1964, he briefly studied medicine in Paris1 before returning to poetry and moving to the US to study literature at Bard College. He moved to New York City, then back to the UK for a Masters in literary translation at Essex University. A first chapbook of his poems was published in 1972. He moved several times between places in Europe, North Africa and the United States, working as a teacher, radio commentator, author and editor, including for France Culture. He finally reached the US again via the Iowa International writing Program, then took on a PhD in Comparative literature in New York. In the 1990s, he went to California as a visiting poet at UC San Diego, where he met his wife, the French-born multidisciplinary artist Nicole Peyrafitte, as well as his long-term collaborator Jerome Rothenberg, with whom he worked on several long-standing anthology projects, notably Poems for the Millennium, an anthology series of global 20th century avant-garde writing. With Rothenberg, he also co-edited and co-translated a collection of Kurt Schwitters’ selected writings and a selection of poems by Pablo Picasso.
In 2009, Joris moved to Bay Ridge, a neighbourhood of Brooklyn, with his wife and one of his two sons, the filmmaker Miles Joris-Peyrafitte (his other son being the film producer Joseph Mastantuono), where he lived until his death. He taught in the English department of the University at Albany in New York until his retirement in 2013, and returned again and again to translating his first poetic love, Paul Celan. He translated into English artists as varied as Adonis, Rainer Maria Rilke, Habib Tengour, Safaa Fathy, and the Beat poets (Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg) into French. In 2020, Joris received the Batty Weber prize for his life’s work, and the PEN/Manheim award for translation in 2021, presented to him by fellow writer and translator Lydia Davis. In total, Pierre Joris has published over 80 books, of which 30 books of his own poems, which composer John Zorn called “precious jewels”, the rest ranging from essays to performative works and translations, as well as many anthologies, making him an important figure in the conservation and propagation of global avant-garde poetic works.
Joris’ creative approach paints a different picture from the conventional image of a writer sitting alone in his room, waiting for the muse to strike: with Joris, artistic endeavour becomes dialogue, a collective effort. His interviews are peppered with the names of his collaborators and influences, from the undubbed American films he saw as a child to Paul Celan and all the others he credits with his development as a poet; his writing seems inextricable from the people he encountered along his creative path. Much of Joris’ work is, in fact, collaborative – from his performances with his wife Nicole to his long-term anthological projects with Jerome Rothenberg. He seemed to see connectedness as not just underlying but enabling the creative process, and to conceive of writing as a spontaneous, joyful burst of conversation with something outside of himself. This feels especially invigorating in an age in which the whiff of neoliberal competitiveness has infiltrated even the lives of artists, isolating them from each other. Joris didn’t seem to conceive of himself in competition with his peers, but rather as part of a living continuum, anthologising the work of fellow poets from around the globe.
Joris conceives of the creative act as spontaneous, “belong[ing] to the pure present, always new, without past”, as he told the English poet Steven J Fowler in an interview for 3am Magazine. If you sit around waiting for inspiration, you won’t be ready when it does. You’ll be “unable to write, too rusty, unused — quick pain in the wrist, fingers not finding the right keys or not fast and dexterous enough to follow the thought.” Writing, to Joris, was a “daily process”, a kind of creative hygiene, separate from perfectionism or the imperative to produce something pre-planned. In fact, a poem “needs to be a discovery,” as he told Florent Toniello in their 2022 book Always the Many, Never the One. If you are receptive to its language, the world provides the creative spark: “I get my first line from various sources of inspiration: other poems, newspaper articles, dreams, something I read on the back of a truck – but I do not wish to know where it takes me, otherwise I lose all interest.” This seems an approach linking him to his contemporaries, other avant-garde poets and composers working since the second half of the twentieth century: working from a deep attentiveness to the world, being an open ear to what it provides and making art from it. Think John Cage and his open-process compositions, trying to move away from deliberateness and towards a kind of collaboration with the present moment.
There is another beautiful lesson from Joris, one I find particularly reassuring as a multilingual writer. Joris maintains that multilingualism a strength, and that borrowing – consciously or unconsciously – from other languages is, in fact, a poetic act. Poetry needs substitution, translation, collage.
When asked about his translation work, Joris has often suggested that no translation is ever the final one – that, in fact, every generation will have to translate major poets anew so as to innovate on what has been done, and to advance its own poetics. Just as no poem is ever finished, and is an elastic thing that appears in different form every time it is put down somewhere, no translation is ever the final one, no language ever in its final form. Nor is any language ever enough—it always requires updating, and being complemented by foreign lexica. Putting anything into language, he says, is in itself a work of translation, and being multilingual is a way to make up for any single language’s deficiencies. Languages, in other words, need each other, just like artists and human beings need each other.
Talking to 3am Magazine, he put it this way: “…even in Letzeburgesch [sic], my mother tongue, in fact especially in Letzeburgesch as it was a rather impoverished oral language […] you quickly ran out of native vocabulary & would automatically bring in German or French words, i.e. translate, substitute, collage. Thus you learned very early on that there was no one-fits-all version of language, that language was a DIY process, and that in order to make yourself understood […], you had to draw on several languages.”
With Pierre Joris, the global literary scene has lost a great and endlessly curious poet, a great champion of multilingual writing, and, as CNL director Nathalie Jacoby touchingly put it, “ein Mensch, der warmherzig und offen allem Neuen begegnete und der uns sehr fehlen wird”. While Joris’ work had a far greater impact abroad than it did here, his loss nevertheless makes itself felt, especially in a literary scene as small as Luxembourg’s. No doubt Pierre Joris’ work will be kept alive – as it deserves to be.