John Wisniewski: Please tell us about editing the poetry magazines Corpus and Sixpack. No lack of poets who inspire me! Easiest-and fullest -overview of that would be a look at the anthologies I put together, especially the three volumes of the Poems for the Millennium series I co-edited with Jerry Rothenberg for the University of California Press. Later that decade I taught in North Africa and all of Arab poetry from pre-Islamic poetry to current post-independence work opened up new worlds. Then, in the very early 70s I moved to London where I became close to poets such as Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, and Eric Mottram. The richness of American poetry! I started working on translating Paul Celan at Bard College with the poet Robert Kelly-who became a life-long friend-as advisor and the next year he sent me to meet Paul Blackburn and Jerome Rothenberg in New York City. And the New York poets from O’Hara to Ashbery, but also my generation, poets who became close friends such as Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman. But also others such as Diane Di Prima, Jack Spicer, Amiri Baraka. But I came to America and became an American poet because I had discovered Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac already in Europe, and soon after arriving here in 1967 I came across the richness of the Don Allen anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960 which lead me directly to the Black Mountain poets, Charles Olsen, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn etc. In 2020 I finished paying off that debt by publishing the last two volumes of this work, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, the Early Collected Poetry, and Microliths, his posthumous prose. What turned me to poetry was hearing a Paul Celan poem read in high school -that moment defined the trajectory of my life and I've been thanking Celan ever since by translating his work. Pierre Joris: It’s all great and even just good poets inspire me. John Wisniewski: Are there any poets who inspire you? Weirdly enough when I was 16 I wrote my first poems-a dozen or so-in English already because I had fallen in love with an English girl, but then went back trying to write in German and French for a couple years. If I picked English-American English to be precise-it would because of the felt need to leave my European heritage behind as I saw American writing in both poetry and prose as the most lively vital adventurous. You see, when I became a writer I had to choose the language to write it as I did not know how to write in my mother tongue (Luxembourgish) and had to choose from the other languages I knew: German and French as first cultural languages, English or possibly Spanish as secondary acquired languages. I still see the old heavy hardcover kettle register my grandmother had given me for this undertaking.Īnd nearly 70 years later this is still a magical remembrance for me. With those words-I knew their meaning via his German language translations in the books-I put together a secret language in which to communicate with my friends and propose adventures. The words I would copy out were all in foreign languages, especially Native American languages such as Mescalero Apache or Kiowa or Comanche, but also some from Arabic, Persian, and even English. I was a big reader starting at five and I see myself at eight or nine sitting at the table in my grandparents’ farm copying words out of the volumes of adventure stories by the German 19th century novelist Karl May. John Wisniewski: When did you begin writing, Pierre?
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