Photo of Pierre Joris by Kelly Writers House staff.
We’re all going to die; very few of us will have a death as remarkable — or perhaps as unremarkable — as Ingeborg Bachmann’s. It is against this canvas, the final days of Bachmann’s life as she lay comatose in an Italian hospital, suffering from burns — the result of a fire caused by a wayward cigarette — and the pursuant withdrawal from sedatives, that Pierre Joris sets his play The Agony of I.B. (2016).
We’re all going to die; very few of us will have a death as remarkable — or perhaps as unremarkable — as Ingeborg Bachmann’s.
I was asked to write this piece in late December for the January issue of the Harriet blog The Reading List, a feature of Poetry magazine’sEditors’ Blog, a
'Reading List' 2016
I was asked to write this piece in late December for the January issue of the Harriet blog The Reading List, a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog, a