In the fall of 1987, as a second year MA student in Creative Writing at SUNY-Binghamton, I was taking a literary theory course from William Spanos, the editor of the journal Boundary 2, and a fiery believer in all postmodern critiques and literature. I had only begun writing poems with any kind of seriousness the previous spring, after seeing a Robert Creeley reading. I suddenly felt at that reading, for the first time, that I had a connection to poetry, that I knew how to write it and wanted to.
I was in my mid 20s. Among the fifteen or so students in the class was a male student who I guessed was in his 40s who spoke English with a markedly European accent. We struck up a mutual conversation several times. I don’t know who began it or how.
At some point a few weeks into the course I mentioned to this man that I was writing poetry. I had become very involved in it. I had taken to carrying around in my pocket one or of two of my own poems on folded paper because sometimes when I said to people that I was writing poetry, they would look at me oddly and ask if I was published. I had been a professional journalist since age 21, and along with my professional journalism in the education industry, I had also published a lot of music reviews in different small college or local publications, and also a few small pieces of fiction. But I hadn’t really published poetry. Keeping poems in my pocket was the best way I knew to show someone that I was writing them. It was the DIY 80s, and carrying around evidence of one’s artistic work was something that a lot of writers and artists who were just starting out would do. I mean okay, it was a little weird. But not too weird.
So I told this fellow graduate student that I was a poet. He said he was a poet too and asked to see some of my poems. I pulled a poem or two out of my pocket to show him, and I told him I’d love to see his poems some of his poems too. He said that he happened to have some of his own poetry on him just like I did. He reached into his bookbag to pull out something.
What he pulled out of his bag turned out to be a rather large book, which he handed to me. The title was: Breccia, Selected Poems 1972-86 by Pierre Joris. It wasn’t just some sheets of paper, not just a chapbook (I and my friends Keith Eckert and Joseph Battaglia started producing chapbooks of our own work that year), not even a single book of poems. It was a selected poems. I knew enough by then to know what that meant: it was material that had come from a number of different books, all of which would of course have been by him.
I looked at him startled. Other than my university professors, and a few writers who had given readings in universities I was attending, I hadn’t really spoken much to successful authors of creative work, fiction or poetry or anything. I had many friends in graduate school, and in the city of Washington, DC where I had grown up, who were trying to be writers or musicians or artists with a certain degree of DIY ambition, but some student in a class handing me a volume of his selected poems came as a fascinating shock. What kind of world was I beginning to move in?
I soon learned that he was legitimately working as a graduate student but also collaborating on editorial and other projects with Jerome Rothenberg, who happened to be teaching full-time at Binghamton for the 1987-88 academic year, the only year Rothenberg spent there. I didn’t take a class with Rothenberg, like some of my friends were doing, because my MA commitments were still focused on fiction, like my thesis, a collection of short stories, that I would complete that spring. But I would talk to Professor Rothenberg (as I probably called him then) a number of times that year, and that spring I attended a big poetry festival at Binghamton that he organized and that featured performances by Steve McCaffery and I think Charles Bernstein and a number of other poets, a festival with a significant language poetry presence along with a number of other writers. Some time around then, an issue of Boundary 2 was published focusing on language poetry. It featured both both an anthology of poems and relevant essays on language poetry, similar to earlier issues of Boundary 2 on Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
I can’t say that Pierre and I ever became close. He was a good decade and a half older than me and was working in different contexts (and, I have to admit, on a different level, especially at that time) than I was. But I continued to see him and talk with in various contexts both at Binghamton and over the years that followed, although I missed him the one time he was giving a reading in San Diego because I was teaching at the time, and I wasn’t working at the sort of university that looks kindly on assistant professors canceling classes to attend literary events. Wherever I happened to talk with him, he was always friendly and always had something fascinating to say. I think the last conversation I had with him was at the New Orleans Poetry Conference in April 2019.
I was in the audience on January 31 of this year (2025) at the University of California San Diego for a memorial performance and discussion of the life and work of Jerry Rothenberg, who I had come to know better after moving to San Diego and going to a number of dinners and parties at the house of him and his wife Diane in Encinitas. Most of the presenters at the memorial were present in the room. Pierre though gave his discussion over Zoom. It was obvious that he had become much more frail than the last time I had seen him, and even more so than in some recent photos in which he was walking with a cane. His brief talk, about Jerry and the anthologies they edited together and, of course, about Paul Celan, whose work Pierre spent decades translating, was thoughtful and moving. Several weeks later Pierre, like his friend Jerry less than a year earlier, was gone.
There are readers and scholars of Pierre’s work who will have more than to say than I do about the long-running significance of his translations, his critical essays, and his lively and sometimes unfairly neglected poetry, which I’ve always found witty and powerful and insightful in its global reach. All of that together is of course, and as he himself might have said, The Work which will form his legacy.
But I’ve always wanted to tell, and sometimes have told, the story of how we met and traded poems. For me that story remains the moment through which I recognized him and continued to understand him afterwards. He was willing to look at poems I pulled from my pocket and to give me a book that summarized his then already substantial writing, and to act like we were just two people in a class, which we were, trading poems and being willing to talk about our interests. It had a powerful effect on me. There were successful writers who seemed to welcome me and make me part of what they were doing, an experience often different than my experience with the professional journalism that I found quite tedious but which frequently paid a good portion of my bills during my years before and in graduate school and for a few years after. The experience encouraged me in my growing belief that it was possible for me to make something happen as a writer who wanted to be connected to the environment of literature and the arts.
I’m hardly alone in feeling that Pierre was both a guide and a friend, someone who encouraged me, by his way of being, to continue forward on the rather risky path I seemed determined to head down. I wanted to write this to add my voice to that of others. I want the encouragement that Pierre gave me to be noted as yet another example of the worthwhile activities of his life and literary work. I want that striking and funny moment between us to be remembered, a moment when some student I barely knew handed me a copy of a book of his selected poems and let me take it with me into the future.
In memoriam Pierre Joris (1946-2025)
