My Index of Women Poets evolved from an idea to catalogue published Poethead posts in The Saturday Woman Poet Category (and tags) directly to a special page and thereby increase the visibility and searchability of women poets. I thought to edit the category and to create an index for poets, their translators, and in some cases their editors. Thus both Poethead indices have organically evolved, which will explain their roughness in design.
Today, I am linking directly to the poetry of Assia Djebar from the Nomadics blog, from the “Diwan Ifrikiya” anthology: Assia Djebar
The Nomadics blog is a wonderful resource for writers, it is concentrated in translations, essays, performance and polemics. Interested readers may take the link as a starting point in their reading. I recommend that they explore the blog wholly, as there are some wonderful links to external sites as well as links to Joris’ own poetic and translation works. The following excerpts are from ‘Poems and Poetics, from Notes towards a Nomadics Manifesto ‘ ( External links are attached to the quotes/excerpts below here).
NOTES TOWARDS A NOMADIC POETICS
- “A nomadic poetics is a war machine, always on the move, always changing, morphing,moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping. Refuelling halts are called poases, they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on. The sufi poets spoke of mawqif – we will come back to this.”
- “A nomadic poetics needs mindfulness . In & of the drift (dérive) there is no at- home-ness here but only an ever more displaced drifting. The fallacy would be to think of language as at-home-ness while “all else” drifts, because for language to be accurate to the condition of nomadicty, it too has to be drifting, to be “on the way” as Celan puts it. “
http://www.pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=6310
Nomadics , related Essay and discussion links.
- http://pierrejoris.com/nomad.html (link to discussions are here , Nomadics Blog )
- http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/10/pierre-joris-from-notes-towards.html from, Pierre Joris, Notes Towards a Nomadics Manifesto (Part One)
- A Nomad Poetics: Essays, published by & still readily available from Wesleyan University Press. Its relevance to our ongoing project on “outsider poetry” should be apparent.”
- nomads-by-choice in the welfare of settled rings” Allen Fisher, ‘Dispossession & Cure’.
Chris Murray 