JUST PUBLISHED

PABLO PICASSO
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems


Edited with Introductions by
Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris
Afterword by Michel Leiris
$19.95 352 pages
ISBN 1-878972-36-7

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is arguably the most famous and influential
artist of the twentieth century. What few in the English speaking world
know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to
halt all painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after
resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a
characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that
André Breton praised as, “an intimate journal, both of the feelings and
the senses, such as has never been kept before.” Similarly struck by
the poems’ originality, Michel Leiris wrote, “If we must compare him,
despite his fierce singularity, in order to try and situate him on the
literary map, I see only James Joyce.” Near the end of his life,
Picasso himself was quoted as having told a friend that, “long after
his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would
say: ‘Picasso, Pablo Ruiz — Spanish poet who dabbled in painting,
drawing and sculpture.’”

For the past five years, poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have
overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into
English for the first time. Working from Picasso’s original Spanish and
French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a
dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their
introduction, “Picasso’s entry into our own time.” This is indeed a new
Picasso for most of us, or rather, a renewed Picasso: the poems are as
protean, erotic, scatalogical, and experimental in form as his visual
art has always been described. But amid the ubiquitious posters,
t-shirts, and tchotkes, how many of us have truly felt the impact of
Picasso’s visual work as powerfully as it was perceived in the first
half of the twentieth century? The poems give us a twenty-first century
Picasso, free of cliché. Perhaps they will even help spark a revival of
interest in his “dabblings”.


Contributing translators include David Ball, Paul Blackburn, Manuel
Brito, Anselm Hollo, Robert Kelly, Suzanne Jill Levine, Ricardo
Nirenberg, Diane Rothenberg, Cole Swenson, Anne Waldman, Jason Weiss,
Mark Weiss, and Laura Wright.


Exact Change Publishers
5 Brewster Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

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http://exactchange.com/

Other new books by Jerome Rothenberg include A Book of Concealments
from Chax Press and 25 Caprichos, after Goya from Kadle Books in
Tenerife, Spain, the latter with facing Spanish translations by
Heriberto Yépez.  Both books should be available through Small Press
Distribution (http://www.spdbooks.org/).

Other new books by Pierre Joris include The Rothenberg Variations from
Wild Honey Press, a new edition of Permanent Diaspora from Duration
Press, and forthcoming later this fall, Lightduress by Paul Celan from
Green Integer and Paul Celan: Selections from University of California
Press.



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For updates on readings, etc. check my  current events page:
             http://albany.edu/~joris/CurrentEvents.html
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Always keep the tempo -- Steve Lacy
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Pierre Joris
244 Elm Street	
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c: 518 225 7123                                                 	
o: 518 442 40 85                                                        	
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
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