This afternoon Dante
\nwill be ex-
\npelled from Florence \u2014
\na good thing as how could he
\nhave written so well
\non the far-away imaginary ex-
\nile of the comically divine
\nrealms had he not known
\nwhat it meant to walk
\nover a cold January day\u2019s
\nground frost, clod-
\nbreaking, heart beating,
\nfrom one city to another
\n\u2014 to come to
\nthis: that exile
\nis but the next step you take
\nthe unknown there
\nwhere your foot comes
\ndown
\nnext, in
\nheaven or on earth
\nexile is when you can still
\nlift a foot
\nexile is when you are not
\nyet dead.<\/p>\n
Originally published in Barzakh<\/em> (Poems 2000-2013), Black Widow Press, Boston 2014<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies \u2014 most recently Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (Black Fountain Press), the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (CMP) & A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly. Earlier, Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays, Spuyten Duyvil 2019), Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018), & The Book of U\/ Le livre des cormorans (with Nicole Peyrafitte, Simoncini 2017). When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This afternoon Dante will be ex- pelled from Florence \u2014 a good thing as how could he have written so well on the far-away imaginary ex- ile of the comically divine realms had he not known what it meant to walk over a cold January day\u2019s ground frost, clod- breaking, heart beating, from one city […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[62,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/images-2.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1MY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6880"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6880"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8075,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6880\/revisions\/8075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Click here to go back to:\u00a0Contributors and Links to Pages 1 – 4<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"