Well, we’ve come to our end here. Somehow, in the hundreds of hours of phone calls and emails and late nights and breakfasts after, Jerry and I had never once discussed what might happen to this space once he passed away. We have even published a number of obituaries for friends of Jerry’s over the years. I’m not entirely convinced, sitting here writing at 3 a.m., that Jerry thought I’d be left with this task — and not the other way around.
If the words of the British poet/artist William Blake stand as the opening for our book, it is both for his recognition of a larger America and for his regard for poetry as an instrument of prophecy. It is in this sense that we invoke him as our guardian angel, to remind us (when circumstances or history repeat themselves) of this “calling” for our continents and poets. Like Blake, whose America a Prophecy is part of a series of continental prophecies, our hemispheric assemblage tries, through the voices gathered here, to reiterate this markedly American “path,” or in our case, this series of paths. Thus, the “prophecy about America” (if there is one in the following pages, as there surely was for Blake) becomes not so much a projection of events-to-come, but a testimony of the difficulties and threats we face today, North and South and replicated ominously throughout the world.
All of this has been compounded of course by the circumstances of the time in which we’ve been working: events that have both reinforced our vision of America — as poetry and prophecy — and an upsurge of forces that have come to stand against it. More directly the time in which we have been working has been marked by an almost unprecedented pandemic and an ongoing threat of climate change, the consequences of which are continuing to assault us.
On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions Endur'd by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep: I see a Serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love; In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru; I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away. O what limb rending pains I feel. thy fire & my frost Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent; This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold.
The title of this work in progress adds “Romantic” to the title of a little book of polemics on poetry by the Chilean master of “sky” poetry, Vicente Huidobro. I propose: gather 75 or so statements, terms, and jargon from the “Romantic mother-lode” (Anne Waldman) with the hope that together, with accompanying commentary, they will accumulate irrefutably a major well-spring for modern and contemporary innovative poetry. In one sense Romantic Manifestos Manifest brings to attention the underpinnings of Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three, Jerome Rothenberg’s and my anthology of Romantic poetry broadly conceived as a radical poetic formation — even as a guide, a skeleton key, for that book. Taken together, the items here compose a “field of thought” (Feld von Gedanken, Herder) of what Julie Carr and I have called active Romanticism.
[Pairingsis a sequence in which two (sometimes more) poems meet on the page in the way that persons might meet on the street. For the most part, they stand across the page from one another in the way that people stand across from one another as they speak. They have things in common and things that separate them. In many ways they illuminate each other. The “unit” in these pieces is not the individual poem but the meeting — sometimes the collision — of the poems.
From publisher’s site: Interglacial Narrows as published by Contra Mundum Press gathers a range of Pierre Joris’s poems written between 2015 and 2021, including an extended version of the Book of U / Le livre des cormorans by Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte, initially published by Galerie Simoncini in Luxembourg in 2017. Both central to the book and opening up its timelines is the section “Homage to P.C.” Put together in 2020 to celebrate Paul Celan’s one hundredth birth-year, it gathers poems, the earliest of which dates from 1969, and the most recent from November 23, 2020, the day Celan would have turned one hundred years old. All of these poems address Joris’s relationship to the Bukovinian poet and his work. Core to this section is “The Book of Luap Nalec,” which dates from the later ’70s, was published as a now lost chapbook in 1982, and was included in Breccia (Editions PHI) in 1987.
1/ Interglacial Narrows (poems)
From publisher’s site: Interglacial Narrows as published by Contra Mundum Press gathers a range of Pierre Joris’s poems written between 2015 and 2021, including an extended version of the Book of U / Le livre des cormorans by Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte, initially published by Galerie Simoncini in Luxembourg in 2017.
Both central to the book and opening up its timelines is the section “Homage to P.C.” Put together in 2020 to celebrate Paul Celan’s one hundredth birth-year, it gathers poems, the earliest of which dates from 1969, and the most recent from November 23, 2020, the day Celan would have turned one hundred years old. All of these poems address Joris’s relationship to the Bukovinian poet and his work. Core to this section is “The Book of Luap Nalec,” which dates from the later ’70s, was published as a now lost chapbook in 1982, and was included in Breccia (Editions PHI) in 1987.
Poems and poetics