Pierre and I circled each other throughout our lives. Both transnational, multilingual, and both poetically and politically minded, we met when, in the fall of 1992, Pierre began teaching at the University at Albany, where I had just entered my final year. He came to Albany from UCSD, where he had taught for several years, and where I teach now. Pierre’s long association with Jerome and Diane Rothenberg had not begun there, but earlier, when they had all lived closer to each other, in New York, when Pierre was completing a PhD at Binghamton and Jerry and Diane were living in the Seneca Nation, doing anthropological work. It feels important to talk about the Rothenbergs’ relationship with Pierre at the beginning, since it was crucial to all of their lives I met the Rothenbergs at a dinner party at Pierre’s house during the AWP conference held in Albany in 1999.
For much of my Albany time, I lived on Elm Street, a block away from Pierre and Nicole’s beautiful house on Madison Place. Pierre spent as much time in the “alt” spaces of the Albany literary scene—at readings held at Half Moon Café, Nepenthe (a great vegetarian restaurant), and the performance space Artists for a New Politics—as he did in the lecture halls and classrooms of the university. These were the days the great Tom Nattell was running the Readings Against the End of the World, an annual twenty-four hour marathon series sponsored by the Albany Peace and Energy Council against nuclear proliferation, American imperialism, and the military-carceral-industrial complex’s ravaging of the planet’s natural resources. In those days, as now, our agendas were ambitious and deeply felt.
Pierre first introduced me to Nicole as a “chef”; she corrected him by claiming to be “merely” a “cook.” For the record, I think he was right, she was wrong, but it didn’t matter to me—I, as well as everyone else who met her, fell a little bit in love: Nicole was brilliant, beautiful, and completely engaged with every conversation happening around her, whether it was about art, music, dance, or the best way to whip a mayonnaise. A smarter man would have cast her as Helen of Troy. Many a performance did I attend where Pierre would read, some musician would be playing, and Nicole—assisted by her then tweenage son Joseph Mantantuono (now a successful film producer and editor)—would prepare food—omelettes once, crepes with Chantilly crème another time. Amid copious dinner parties with endless (end.less.) bottles of wine, we would sit at that table, somebody (me, often) would have baby Miles (who has gone on to a stellar career himself as a film director) in their arms, the conversation would range wild, Jerry (or Diane) would step out for a cigarette, the night would grow long.
I’ve skipped to the middle (not the ending, with Pierre—circular—there’s no ending), without telling the beginning. I graduated that year, without having a chance to study with Pierre, but I remained in Albany, working for a non-profit devoted to advocating for funding and support for public higher education, while continuing at the university in the master’s program. I noticed that one of Pierre’s offerings was to be a graduate workshop in translation theory and practice. Now was my chance. The class met on the top floor of the Madison Place house in Pierre’s enormous library-cum-studio office space. He told us it was the first time in twenty years all of his books were in one place at one time. We sat in a circle—some of us in chairs, some on the plush Persian rug—reading Dryden, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Derrida, and others on the art of literary translation. We translated works from various languages and media. The approaches to translation were radical and catholic—one student was doing an interlinear feminist translation and commentary of a Hemingway story, another was rendering Sor Juana de la Cruz into contemporary Spanglish, I was doing captioned visual renderings of the fall of Troy (from the Aeneid), and dramatic adaptations of domestic scenes excluded from the Iliad, using Homeric descriptions and milieux—a dialog between Cassandra and Cressida, one between Helen and Creusa, another between Hecuba and Odysseus. We were wild and bold and Pierre enwildened us and emboldened us. And, indeed, there were students who were translating in a more legible mode. Pierre joined us as a “student,” bringing in for workshop his own work on Celan in progress—“arnica, eyebright,” he famously began one, extending the line by including the literal rendering of the German kompositum.
In the years that followed, after my graduation and abandonment of literary studies in favor of what I thought of as more the work of the world, we stayed in touch. Eventually, I returned to poetry, finished a graduate degree at NYU, and began a teaching position in the Hudson valley. Pierre came up to read in the series I had started in Beacon, where I was living at the time. We stayed in touch, seeing each other in other cities, other seasons, always surrounded by friends and the sounds of poetry.
I never saw Pierre sad, nor angry. He was only ever always having a good time, no, not just a good time, really always having: the time of his life. Most of the remembrances of him by people who knew him touch on that: he liked to have fun. Poetry, literature, language, life: to Pierre, it was fun. Yes, indeed, he was all the things people say about him—a capacious poet, brilliantly musical, a supreme translator, a kind and generous human too, but ALSO: a charming rascal, a jovial rogue, a shifting trickster, a nomad, a whirling dervish—Pierre was tapped into the chaotic energy of creation in a way I have rarely ever seen. He was gleeful with the advent of the internet, seeing in it the place he had always dreamt of: rootless, planar, ever-present yet nowhere: he loved the concept of the ‘home page.’ He called his own original one the ‘Homad Page” and had on it a graphic of nomadic tents. The metaphor of life as a “desert” to be traversed, journeyed through, remained constant for him.
In fact, ironically (or perhaps really not), the last time I saw Pierre was on a screen. Jerry Rothenberg had passed away the previous year and we were doing a memorial for him at UCSD that Michael Davidson had organized. I had seen the program in advance and said, “We have to have Pierre there,” but Pierre had been advised by his doctor that he couldn’t travel. In short order, we arranged for him to join us by Zoom. He tenderly remembered his friend and collaborator of decades, saying that, in his work, “geography, as it is always traversed by history, can never be a purely Euclidian space, or obey Euclidian laws of linearity. All places/spaces are mixed, they touch & cut through all other spaces.”
Yes, to you too, Pierre, nomad who wanders the desert and oases finding the poetry in between and in the in-between places and spaces of language. You, who wrote not in your mother-tongue, you are the one who knows where poetry falls is where everything else fails, in the fale, the space is wound through, both inside and outside at once. As you said to Jerry that last time I saw you, I say to you, “Thank you, merci, gracias, vielen Dank, Hawi’ne’, villmools merci, a sheynem Dank,” and I add: shukrun, shukria, merci mamnoon, minnat waar, in all the languages, Pierre, genius, mentor, poet, rascal, friend.
I imagine you still in the ether, wandering the back alleys of heaven with Jerry, looking for a party, drinking with the devils, reciting poetry to all the angels and djinn who live past the maghreb, editing the stellar anthologies of the eternities.
Kazim Ali
San Diego, September 2026
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water.