Pearl Pirie : coda

Coda Q: What do you need poetry for?

Short Answer: Writing poetry is a way to process. The constraints are tools and frames for seeing in manageable size bits.

Long Answer: With poetry as folk medicine it can try to treat many things. A need to connect, to speak up and out, to educate, to frustrate, to calm, to make beauty, to break beauty, to narrate differently, to sort out ideas, to make a thing, to make fame or immortality. (Though, I’ve never believed in the last 2.)

If delivered well, and the right randomness to the right moment, it may make a pattern discernible somewhere else or to someone else. It’s a way to publicly speak and build a like-minded community. It provides closure and control to state something which gives permission to let go. A book as a casket for thought and all that. Or poem as a urn.

But what do I need of it? Maybe nothing? “Necessity is an individual sport” said Matt Wiele. But an individual is in constant change. What do I need now?

And is poetry the best route or the practiced route? Real solutions can be self-talk, frank dialogue, direct action, following one line of thought deep and long, medicine, to retrain thinking to not gaslight oneself in solitude, to learn physical skills, exercise, listening instead of speaking, confronting issues within and without. Poetry can be like slacktivsm. Or a start, rather than an end. A way to question, not with answers in hand, or to question to question, but to get somewhere.

Pearl Pirie : part five

What poetry books have you been reading lately?

Short Answer: The joke of the same $15 making its way around the small circle and trade economy of small press fairs across Canada seems to fit here. I read what falls across my path.

Long Answer: I generally have a few dozen books on the go— science, essays, architecture books, novels (on a Catherine Asaro kick). Currently, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca Letters to a Stoic, and a few poetry collections, Shake Loose my Skin by Sonia Sanchez, Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar, 89 Objects of Happiness Arrayed in Ascending Order by Mike Finley (Kraken Press, St. Paul, 2017), The Deep End of the Sky by Chad Lee Robinson (Turtle Press, 2015), Different Conversations: Short Poems and Literary Fragments by Alexis Rotella (on Kindle), Nobody Move by Susan Stenson, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry ed by Valerie Mason-John and Kevan Anthony Cameron (Frontenac, 2013). Upcoming: This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Mêmewars by Adeena Karasick, and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Also on tap, Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit by Lynn Gehl, No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe, The Inner Life of Animals: Grief, Love and Compassion by Peter Wohlleben, Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery (Simon & Schuster, 2015). The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, and What is Architecture and 100 other questions by Rasmus Waern and Gert Wingårdh, trans John Krause. Sample of the last “Uniformity can be incomparably handsome, but it has a kind of built-in insensitivity.”

Pearl Pirie : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Short Answer: The editing is harder than the writing but it isn’t the main difficulty. It is hearing the pen or inner voice out respectfully and curiously.

Long Answer: One difficulty is finding new parts of world and self to observe more keenly, more compassionately and understand more deeply and then convey in a way that can be felt rather than giving a lecture of summary notes, but to be with the reader as an equal. Part of putting process over elevating self as an authority is trusting that readers will engage with what you express, to listen loosely when you speak loosely, to listen carefully when you speak with care.

It is difficult to express oneself in words but it is harder to live optimally for yourself and for community and for wider social duties. That is the hardest part and the part that matters. As Leonard Cohen put it, “I’m grateful to get a poem. I don’t question the sources too carefully. For me poetry is the evidence of a life and not the life itself. It is the ashes of something burning well. And sometimes you confuse yourself and try to make ashes instead of fire.” (15:00, Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen)

Pearl Pirie : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

Short Answer: Generally with a rhythm and a sense of blockage and nausea.

Long Answer: I’ve led workshop groups on and off for 15 years. I’ve been in one workshop circle or another for most of the years since 1986. A few years ago I was in a few concurrent workshop groups, 1 online continuously, a couple seasonally, 1 face-to-face weekly. I have internalized the typical feedback of the aesthetics of each group, and the usual lessons each offers.  There were several people I sent poems to as first readers for clarity or editing checks.

Now there are a couple people I send the occasional poem thingee to but not for feedback, just as a way to communicate. I’m in a quarterly group of KaDo but as much for the social and seminars.

I suppose that change reflects a shift in proportion to output. I used to make 1-5 poems a day and now 1 or 2 a month, if that. Or it reflects that I have a growing sense of the effect(iveness) of my words. Socialized for a finer theory of mind? Everything is speculation.

Pearl Pirie : part two

What are you working on?

Short Answer: Carleigh Baker on Feb 27 (follow her on twitter @CarleighBaker) captured it:

Sean: How's the writing?

Me: Good!

Sean: How's the writing?

Me: Good!

Sean: How's the writing?

Me: Bullshit, it's all bullshit, REVISING EVERYTHING.

Long Answer: Ah the dreaded question. “What are you working on?” can be a jostling for status, a segue to humblebrags, an attempt to look professional. It might be a failure of any other common ground to make small talk. In rare hands (I can think of one case), it can be an ambush to take measure of a person.

Or, optimist shoved in front, it can be bonding shop talk with people who “get it”, the drive and struggle to be a maker in a genre that accumulates debt instead of income. It can be asking a real conversational question, formed because writing must be something that the person cares about, because no one writes poetry or attends events except by their own choice as a priority, taking an opportunity cost of what else they could do. It might even be an offering to let each other pick their brains about what to do with the newest ungainly creation that is taking shape.

I’m in a “fallow period”. I’ve been spending my energies trying to promote other writers since 2009, in one place or another, and to keep life balance. The desire to write is the lowest it’s been since I was 10 or 11 years old, when I was making my first chapbooks.

It’s a choice now, rather than artesian welling. Which is probably good nor bad, just a thing.

I am editing older poems, putting together a full-length collection of haiku and tanka — my first attempt to make a book of them. I’d put that ambition on the 10 year plan. Then did it a couple months later.  I figure do it to the best ability now, and again when given more time.

Pearl Pirie : part one

Pearl Pirie has 3 collections published and a bunch of chapbooks. Pirie was director of the Tree Reading Series and is president of regional haiku group KaDo, is on the organizing committee for VERSeFest and the board of Friends of Wakefield Library.  www.pearlpirie.com or on twitter @pesbo.

How did you first engage with poetry?

Short Answer: Each moment is the start.

Long Answer: I always was around verses. I was reading the stuff in textbooks of the 1920s-1940s which I grew up on. It was in the antique books I collected, in the bible tracts that fell like plucked geese feathers around the house. In books given to me, the Fireside series from my father’s aunt.

The notion of Poetry is a weird one. Silence is poetry when well-timed. Jingles, songs, headlines, well-written dense prose, a well-phrased story or joke, all can have the same essence as poetry of dense musical ideas. Poetry constructs a need then meets it. A propaganda that soothes and/or stirs to action.

Poetry engages me when it stretch me with something I think I know, paired with something I think I don’t. It is something half-offered or fully offered that risks something that it doesn’t need to risk. Or offers a parable that needs reinforcing, such as: order or compassion or beauty are possible.