Maintenant #94 – Pierre Joris
My core sense here is to defeat the old chestnut of “inspiration” — a romantic reliance on the muse, whoever she, he or it is meant to be. I tell my students: poetry is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Thinking on this (& trying to find a way of putting it I haven’t already used, as this is something that comes up again & again) & not finding one immediately, I turn away from the work under hand & pick up a book– I’m writing this on the TGV between Paris and Bordeaux – the “light reading” I picked up in Paris yesterday after getting in from New York, this year’s Philippe Sollers’ “novel” called L’ éclaircie, which I started reading into during the past night’s jet-lag insomnia hours, & this is what I immediately come across now, here, on the train: “Mallarm é tells how in the morning Manet would throw himself with fury upon his canvases, ‘as if he had never painted.’ A capital notation: one has never written anything, painted anything, composed anything, the spontaneous act belongs to the pure present, always new, without past.”
In the 94th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Luxembourger poet Pierre Joris.
Notes on Solon & other poems
“this is happening” she said
in the muddle purge
oratory. can
Ned, not I, in
fuse the middle
stand. ground. class.
a container trans-
parent sentences.
the two you. The to
you. The us of
things, the rex of
things no rex.
unqueened anorexia.
By Pierre Joris.
The Deep Live
[View the story “Form is literature’s content” on Storify]
In praise of brevity
Junot DÃaz in The Rumpus: Well, yeah, there’s little question that short stories, like poetry, don’t get the respect they deserve in the culture — but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change. And yes, I have no […]
No States, Only the Sky
Writing about Plato’s Sophist, Alain Badiou analyses life in terms of five axioms: “being, motion, stillness, sameness, and the other.” For me at least, the core elements of Other Kinds are comparable: a boy, a girl, a place, another place, all separated by space. Close and far, light and dark, wind and sun, warmth and cold: a world. This is why Nice’s depictions of movement through space mean much more than they say. Each is, in its way, an epiphany: one of those moments of world-disclosure we know only once or twice in our lives. Every so often, an everyday scene shifts its aspect, pivoting from the prosaic to the essential. In passing, a single perception embodies the whole of human existence.
David Winters reviews Dylan Nice‘s Other Kinds.