Visit Pierre's Blog : http://pjoris.blogspot.com/
Pierre Joris left Luxembourg at eighteen & has since lived in the US, Great Britain, North Africa & France. In 1992 he returned to the Mid-Hudson valley & teaches poetry & poetics at the State University of New York, Albany where he lives with performance artist and singer Nicole Peyrafitte and their son Miles. He has published over 20 books & chapbooks of poetry, among them, The Rothenberg Variations, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999, h.j.r. Winnetou Old, Turbulence, and Breccia, Selected Poems 1974. In 2003 he published a selection of essays under the title A Nomad Poetics.He has also published a range of translations, both into English & into French, the most recent being Paul Celan : Selections 4x1: Translations of Tristan Tzara, Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour, and Habib Tengour's Empedokles's Sandal. He has also translated Paul Celan's 3 volumes Lightduress (for which he received the 2005 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Threadsuns and Breathturn, Abdelwahab Meddeb’s The Malady of Islam, Maurice Blanchot's The Unavowable Community & Edmond Jabès’s From the Desert to the Book.With Jerome Rothenberg he has co-edited a two volume anthology of 20th Century Avant-Garde writings, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, the first volume of which received the 1996 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Rothenberg’s & Joris’s previous collaboration pppppp: Selected Writings of Kurt Schwitters was awarded the 1994 PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Translation. Rothenberg & Joris recently co-edited & co-translated The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Writings of Pablo Picasso.
As reader & performance artist, work with performance artist / singer / painter Nicole Peyrafitte includes a range of collaborations such as "dePLACEments" (premiered at Cave Poésie, Toulouse, France); "Manifesto&a" (premiered in Luxembourg); "Riding The Lines," (New York City performance at the Here Inn); other performances include "Pierre's Words (Toward an Opera)," a collaboration with composer Joel Chadabe & the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company (Premiered at The Egg, Albany); "Frozen Shadows," a dance & reading performance based on Winnetou Old, choreographed by Ellen Sinopoli & danced by the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company (Union College, Schenectady, NY; "The Egg," Albany, NY). "Sumericabachbones" with performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte.
