A Nomad Poetics

Essays

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by Pierre Joris

Wesleyan University Press

Due/Published December 2003, 176 pages, paper

ISBN 0819566462

"The days of anything static--form, content, state--are over," declares poet and translator Pierre Joris in A Nomad Poetics, his first collection of critical essays. Joris maps the success and limitations of contemporary avant-garde poetics, from Tristan Tzara to the most contemporary American experimental poetry, an investigation that leads him to envision a "nomadic poetics" as a strategy for new poetic work, for translation and, fundamentally, for an ethics of early 21st century life. Extending concepts and concerns voiced by Deleuze and Guattari, A Nomad Poetics is a first step in deploying the method of the rhizome, one grounded in Paul Celan's insight that "Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won." With articulate immediacy, Joris's essays announce a metamorphosis of language-based art, much needed if poetry is to be of essential use in shaping the world to come.

"In Pierre Joris's prescient collection of essays, the nomadic is encountered as a metaphor for poetic word and for cultural translation: in other words, as a place of transition in which we wander to find a common ground." -- Charles Bernstein