Conversation with Charles Bernstein and Pierre Joris
Dear Charles, dear Pierre, it is a pleasure to meet here in New York, more exactly in Brooklyn where you both live. Thank you Charles for inviting us to your house for lunch. I am currently in residence in Iowa as part of the International Writing Program and I am taking advantage of my brief stay in New York to ask you a few questions (it was a friend of Mostaganem who asked me to interview new poets -Yorkais to benefit the readers of El Watan). It is all the easier for me that we are friends, that I have translated and published for you in the collection Poèmes du monde of the Apic editions. I will not go into your biobibliography here. After all, readers can buy your collections in Algiers to get to know you a bit. The three of us had lunch, discussed at length poetry, translation, politics, the Covid, cooking, friends. A good moment. Of course, no question of doing an interview, not to break the mood! But I had promised to write; so I prepared nine questions which I sent to each one, giving them a little time to answer them. Charles answered the first, in English (I translated his answers, except the third question which he translated himself), Pierre answered in French, later because of health problems. They did not work together to answer.
1. First of all New York. It is a city that has made more than one poet dream to name a Poète à New York by Lorca and Tombeau pour New York by Adonis. Myself, although having, since childhood, my head full of images of the city that the cinema projects us abundantly, I was literally flabbergasted when I arrived for the first time in 1996. You who are there. live, what can you say about it?
Charles Bernstein. I am originally from New York. My mom grew up in what was then called “Flatbush”, now Midwood, Brooklyn. She was born in 1921. As I write these lines, I lit a candle in her memory, she died that day three years ago.
My father, born in 1901, is from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Both were children of immigrants. I have spent most of my life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On one of New York’s hottest days in 2013, we moved to Brooklyn.
My mother, who had fulfilled her dream of living in Manhattan by getting married just months after the war ended in 1945, was appalled that I had returned to Broklyn: “Won’t you miss the city?” , she said in a way that was both sarcastic and worried. I’m so immersed in New York that it’s hard to imagine myself anywhere else. Today, after picking up my car from a repairman, I drove to Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park – not so far from where Pierre lives.
I had heard of a dumpling shop, which turned out to be a tiny place on a back street, with two tables and an access window. I bought two packages of frozen dumplings and took the scallion pancakes and the hot egg roll, to eat in the car.
The taste of the madeleine has nothing to do with it. I walked up and down Eighth Avenue – it looked so much like similar places in China that I had visited.
The streets were crowded: fish, vegetables, clothes and electronics were on sale in stores that spilled onto the sidewalk. Everyone wore a mask; in my neighborhood, people no longer wear masks outside. I had never passed through this neighborhood before.
This feeling of familiarity is at the heart of who New York is to me, how I feel: here I belong, at least in my own way.
Pierre Joris. I fell in love with it at the end of August 1967 when I first landed at JFK. I’m still madly in love with it. Often unfaithful, living for years in London, Paris, Constantine, San Diego, etc.
Every time I returned, she welcomed me with open arms. I am here, I am staying here. What Breton and his friends were looking for in their surrealist excesses in Paris, I have here just by walking normally in ordinary streets.
In Bay Ridge, my neighborhood in southwest Brooklyn, in fifteen minutes of walking I go from the old Scandinavian layer to the layer of newcomers Russians and Bulgarians mixed with Latinos, to arrive on “the little Beirut” where I will go a little later to eat the best Foul Mudammas in the world in a Yemeni restaurant and when I get home I will buy an organic Korean or Mexican dinner.
As I’m hungry, I talked about food, but I could just as well have talked about poetry or art, the same abundant wealth would be displayed – this weekend I will go to an exhibition which juxtaposes Kandinsky and Etel Adnan, our friend who has just disappeared, and / or at MoMa, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jospeh E. Yoakum or a Moroccan friend with whom I collaborated around Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Yto Barrada.
And as I travel through New York, I will hear some of the 250 languages spoken there regularly. And when I get home I might stop to see a poet friend – hey, Charles! – to discuss poetics & politics …
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