http://www.egs.edu/ Pierre Alferi, French poet, writer and author reading poetry, discussing his work, films and thoughts, metaphors, symbols, meanings, representation, poetry, literature, writing, reading, multimedia, visual arts, performance, opera, film and the nightingale. Free public open video lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies department program, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2006. Pierre Alferi
Alferi was born in 1963; he earned a degree in Philosophy at the University of Paris and published his thesis on William of Ockham in 1989. Two years later, in 1991, he published another philosophical essay, bearing primarily on questions of language and literature, Chercher une phrase. He did not pursue an academic career in philosophy, however, or in literature. His first volume of poems, Allures naturelles (translated by the American poet Cole Swensen as Natural Gaits) appeared in 1991, his first novel, Fmn, in 1994, and his first film pieces, Films parlants and Ciné-poèmes, in 2003. He earns his living as a teacher in art schools in Lyon and Paris (L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, L'Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, and L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris).
In 1996, with his friend and fellow-poet Olivier Cadiot, he founded the extraordinary Revue de littérature générale, each of whose two issues was a thick book: a "digest," as he and Cadiot diffidently put it, of poetic methods, mechanisms, ideas and techniques all aiming at a lively new conception of lyricism. With Cadiot, and Anne Portugal, and in a different manner Emmanuel Hocquard, or Jacques Roubaud, Pierre Alferi is leaving behind the divide that has characterized French poetry since around 1980 between "poetry that sings"--to an appreciable public--and on the other hand an austere, abstruse, negative poetic sensibility (represented, for example, by Denis Roche or Jean-Marie Gleize). Indifferent to polemics, Alferi and his friends are cheerfully unleashing new, funny, startling, stirring lyric energies-which a reader can easily feel in Alferi's nightingale poems, for example (in the collection La Voie de l'air, 2004), as well as in the "grunge ideas" active in his 1994 collection Kub Or (translated by Cole Swensen as Oxo).
Throughout his career Alferi has been an active translator: of John Donne, for example, and of the American objectivist poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky. He knows British and American literature intimately; his English is perfect. His works include: Les Allures naturelles, P.O.L., 1991, Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif, P.O.L, 1992, Fmn, P.O.L, 1993, Kub Or, P.O.L. 1994, Sentimentale Journée, P.O.L, 1997, Personal Pong, Villa Saint Clair, 1997, Le Cinéma des familles, P.O.L, 1999, Petit petit, rup & rud, 2001, La Voie des airs, P.O.L. 2004, Sonnet, Mix, 2004, L'estomac des poulpes est étonnant, Ed. de l'Attente, 2008. Essays: Guillaume d'Ockham-Le singulier, Ed. De Minuit, 1989, Chercher une phrase, Christian Bourgois, 1991, Des enfants et des monstres, P.O.L, 2004. Translations: Šof texts by Louis Zukofsky, John Taggart, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, John Donne, Lyn Hejinian, Julie Kalendek, George Oppen, Tom Raworth, Stephen Roderer, Lev Rubinstein, Cole Swenson, Giorgio Agamben, Meyer Shapiro.
Alferi participated in the preparation of Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet-Journoud's 49 + 1 nouveaux poètes américains (1991). He was among the collaborators in the new translation of the Bible published by Bayard in 2001. Films: Films parlants/ciné-poèmes (les laboratoires d'aubervilliers, 2003), Intime (scenario, 2004)
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