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Pierre Joris
 
Æ G E A N   S H O R T W A V E
 
NEWS IN FRENCH from jerusalem parse the value of the gold napoleon in relation to the shekel radio mediterranean emits in english a flying hospital soon be put into service in italy carried by regular plane the voice of america tamil insurrections in sri lanka a concert of baroque music held in aspen colorado tent sip çay & codis

                                            THIS IS GÜMÜSHLÜK twirl the buttons tune in the voices invisible waves surround and pierce us jack and jean are our hades & not just news from it condemn the servile policy of european bourgeois states in front of u.s. aggression fade out from communist not yet-state-of-the-art technology who rules these waves

 

 
                          RADIO TIRANA
a message from the mysterious mediterranean tibet weird cousin of god god save the queen imagination does not rule the waves wiser warsaw radio pologna in french broadcasts sonatas

            WIND CAME UP waves on the beach and in the air changed poland into an arab pop song world war 3 will be declared in english a live voice from the bed a french poet died last week thirty years hard labor transcribing & selling short wave broadcasts from serbo-croatian & fifteen other european minority languages

      IT MUST BE TRUE I heard it on the shortwave grapevine tonight it is true for him this narrow page broadcast while the plo denounces delivery of fifteen fighter planes in geneva it is always talk there is an energy conference somewhere else neo-colonialist division of labor and now the congolese people discuss the new five year plan to overcome colonialist static

                                                                                SALISBURY is to be renamed horava after a chieftain lived there once in estra madura political observers in latin america the liberation front concentrating prominent opposition world wide protest against reagan's neutron bomb decision this is moscow speaking from madagascar to greenland via england a brazilian paper quoted

                                                              HALICARNASSUS in eyeshot as bodrum no memory no plaque I quote de préférence herodutus who got his news from hearsay so do we all he added that's what I was told that's what I hears it's the best I can do with what's at hand you are the ones responsible heterogenous elements acquire consistency and persistence only as they cross thresholds me for my part I take some I leave some

                                            WANTED TO HEAR herodotus over the radio but all that was said was you have just heard vous venez d'entendre usted escutcho evening news nouvelles du soir nachrichten always after the fact and detached from the surrounding world closed upon itself like a hedgehog a furious mullah breaks in loué soit jésus-christ radio vatican still meddling 2000 years later but the arab's discourse had the edge quicker louder covers the tired jesuit for awhile they run parallel but the vatican's frenchman a trained long distance runner they got experience in that area he comes through clean through the caesuras of arabic rhetoric the tortoise and the hare an old race

                                                                                THE FUTURE messenger of good news better kill him then the one who only tells the truth about the past no matter how bad sapientia xtiana is theological unity and the problem of forming missionaries jihad clearer if not cleaner at least bad news are called just that here the messenger is killed even before he opens his mouth

                                                              INCH ALLAH the vatican has been displaced arab rhetoric so fierce though no jihad only radio jordan listing the names of grateful listeners who had written in to the station from somewhere else a nursery rime another station comes back to haunt us greetings and welcome gentile talks of longinus an empress dowager 255-330 AD travelled all over remains of holy cross colchester or turkey constance married her then discarded her one son constantine the great her life drowned out by local music an imported heritage devout and chaste poetry is dead prose is dying architecture has lapsed into the horny hands of the ingeneers barbarians from the east contest victory of xtianity no counterpoint o wallah inchallah

                                            TWO STATIONS fighting it out yet sterlings trade interest down two points to roll with the punches but to keep rocking the boat the moment the sun went down the wind died too sea breaks at left elbow gold spangled aegean at sunset last rays through bleached forearm hairs shadow thrown by black bakelite box called radio this white sarap in the glass is golden too and comes from ankara called çankaya and/or kavaklidere the names things are ready to go under knowledge is not noise occludes the brighter pattern to be captured in its true essence nor a step toward something else it is how we arrive and where we stay or go

                                                                                THERE ARE NO TRUE VOICES there are only voices jack its not the angels its only the men who talk and talk and talk so furchtbar enttäuscht nicht mehr hier of myself my wife called cool german drama listen doktor bortele don't listen to anyone one can buy the parts to make the engine in any shop you cannot make your discovery public noch einmal das feuer miterleben nach den unruhigen jahren

                                                              THINGS FLOUNDER under the combined weight of their polylingual accretions or is that human failure to see the things they stay what they are where they are old trees their names the many leaves die and fall each year leaving the thing das ding remains an- für- und so weiter grows new names next spring or next shortwave bulletin bounced off ionosphere bent hereward bends your ear and what would you be in a discourse of tattoos a dragon or a brace of first names

                                            DAWN a lone black dog a beach a mirror a shaving bowl empty batteries lead to rickety three rung ladder leads to flour sack filled with unknown looks out over the sea she rises in its back catch you later hours to go a full frontal two oars anchored off shore small white shiny black outboard tarpaulin covered net catch chos ten miles off shore no jewels in the haze on the highest point of this peninsula rises a watchtower drab military pecker turkish angst a greek invasion

                          BRONZE EXTREMITIES clash a white trunk bends washes unwilling goat separating the one from the other biblical morning how to keep head above water they come out of the surf arm armed with a thorough brush gleams waist-deep fat-eyed voyeur rites of dawn tea with honey short waves fade out cough table on a terrace blue cap white jacket part of description included beyond my ears eyes the gesture excludes fullness not foam enough for aphrodite a man on a mule parallels the consequent limit

 
 

Pierre Joris
 
 
Pierre Joris left Luxembourg at eighteen & has since lived in the US, Great Britain, North Africa & France. He has published over 20 books & chapbooks of poetry, among them, WINNETOU OLD (Meow Press, Buffalo, NY), TURBULENCE (St. Lazaire Press, Rhinebeck), and BRECCIA, SELECTED POEMS 1974-1986 (Editions Phi / Station Hill), as well as several anthologies and many volumes of translations, both into English & into French, the most recent being Paul Celan's Breathturn, Maurice Blanchot's The Unavowable Community & Edmond Jabès's From the Desert to the Book (both from Station Hill Press). In 1992 he returned to the Mid-Hudson valley & teaches in the Department of English at SUNY-Albany. With Jerome Rothenberg he has published a two volume anthology of 20th Century Avant-Garde writings, POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM: A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BOOK OF MODERN & POSTMODERN POETRY, (University of California Press) 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 (Temple University Press, 1993) was awarded the 1994 PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Translation. A new collection of poems entitled POASIS is due from Sun & Moon Press in 1999, as is a theoretical volume, TOWARDS A NOMADIC POETICS, from Spanner Editions in England. Rothenberg & Joris are presently co-editing & co-translating the collected writings of Pablo Picasso for Exact Change publishers in Boston.
 
      As reader & performance artist recent work includes "Manifesto&a" in collaboration with Nicole Peyrafitte (premiered in Luxembourg, July 1998); "Riding The Lines," a performance work in collaboration with Nicole Peyrafitte (European Tour summer 1997; New York City performance at the Here Inn, Dec 1997); "Pierre's Words (Toward an Opera)," a collaboration with composer Joel Chadabe & the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company (Premiered May 3rd, 1997, 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 January 21, 1996; "The Egg," Albany, NY, April 12 &13, 1995); and "This Morning" (part of Music Juggle) a multimedia collaboration with composer Xavier Chabot.

 
 
 
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