Régis Debray — as those who know me will be well aware — has been a writer, thinker, and activist I have greatly admired and have kept reading and rereading for forty-plus years. Gathering work for a book of essays, I came across my review of a book of journalistic articles by Debray called L’espérance au Purgatoire, or Hope in Purgatory — published back in 1980 by The New Statesman in London. I thought it worthwhile to post this piece today — in the hope that it might help spark what I perceive as a needed reassessment of how we, poets, writers, and intellectuals working in these Disunited States right now need to (re)focus our attempts to resist and (re)act. The question of the public intellectual — or rather of his/her absence — in this country has often exercised me.
So, trying to relax on a windy & cold Sunday morning, I turn to the just-delivered paper The New York Times, skip all the outside layers of toxic DT-news & non-news, dig all the way to the travel section, knowing that in its fold they hide the weekly Book Review. For years now I haven’t had any truck with the NYTBR, except for checking their non-fiction reviews from time to time. Opening it this morning I instantly come across what I fear most: their take on American poetry — & I’m instantly a time-warp of major proportions. Fifty years ago when I first came to this country & city & opened the “paper of record,” it was the same names I saw bandied about: Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell. Clearly, the NYTBR suggests, nothing has happened in American poetry since then, though even back in 1967 — I first typed 1067, & it could as well be 1050 years ago — they were completely out of touch with what had in American poetry in the twentieth century, & a fortiori, its lineaments after WWII.
[FB’d this in dismay on 5 March, but seems worthwhile to keep track of on my blog. It concerns a review of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall, but mainly Patricia Bosworth’s review of Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, by Kay Redfield Jamison.]
So, trying to relax on a windy & cold Sunday morning, I turn to the just-delivered paper The New York Times, skip all the outside layers of toxic DT-news & non-news, dig all the way to the travel section, knowing that in its fold they hide the weekly Book Review. For years now I haven’t had any truck with the NYTBR, except for checking their non-fiction reviews from time to time. Opening it this morning I instantly come across what I fear most: their take on American poetry — & I’m instantly in a time-warp of major proportions. Fifty years ago when I first came to this country & city & opened the “paper of record,” it was the same names I saw bandied about: Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell. Clearly, the NYTBR suggest, nothing has happened in American poetry since then, though even back in 1967 — I first typed 1067, & it could as well be 1050 years ago — they were completely out of touch with what had in American poetry in the twentieth century, & a fortiori, its lineaments after WWII.
Canto Diurno, my Selected Poems (1972-2012) in French (translations coordinated by Jean Portante) and with a foreword by Charles Bernstein, was published this month by Le Castor Astral in their “Les Passeurs d’Inuits” series. Many thanks to Jean Portante, Jean-Yves Reuzeau, Jacques Darras, and Charles Bernstein for their invaluable contributions.
Here, an extract of Charles Bernstein’s foreword:
Pierre Joris’s Cantos Diurno are never solemn, but they acknowledge the “darkness that surrounds,” as Robert Creeley once put it, that we are always behind our ideals, hopes, aspirations, premonitions, regrets, fears — behind both in the sense of supporting and after, trying to catch up, desperately for the most part, but in these poems not desperate but fortunate, in good humors and with humor.
Archipelago books — maybe right now the finest US press truly turned toward and tuned in to the world beyond these Benighted States — has just released a gorgeous eight-hundred-page bilingual tome of the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s Selected Poems under the title In Praise of Defeat. The choice of poems is the author’s own, and the excellent translations from the French are by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Rather than “review” and laud the book here now, I’ll own up to the fact that it was my great pleasure to write a foreword for the book, which I’m reproducing here below. Enjoy, and then buy the book — don’t let the heft make you hesitate: the book — in Archipelago’s usual square format — rests well in the hand, is a pleasure to handle and read.
Nomadics