pirie winter poem crops
A new year begins everyday
but New Year's makes it official
Hope that the year is starting out right for you. The narrative starts and ends where ever you choose. Happy ending or ambiguous or ending of loss depends on the cutoff point. Is everything ending or not yet begun? It's funny combing back through poems to the early 90s that some of them have good bones. A little garishly layered but something there. I've set my sights on reviving what I can of those links to forgotten selves. (Isn't literacy magical?)
A lot has happened since November. (What all have I said?) I've put out a collection of poems from Monty Reid called Love Bug. They are poems I enjoy immensely and the wood veneer covers have called all kinds of bee lines at small press fairs.
There's now a phafours shop on Etsy on a 4 month trial and see if I just pay to have a space there or if that makes it easier for some people to buy. So far it has more than paid for itself.
Did you already read the small press profile interview of phafours at Open Book Ontario?
Thanks to the good people of Canadian Poetries, this Questionnaire at Canadian Poetries. There's also Talking with Myself: Poetics Statements where I invite anyone to join in at their blog or log.
In book news, big news, the pet radish shrunken is now available for pre-order(!!) It will be in stores in early March. Buy in bulk and save (probably).
Some great people I admire including Daphne Marlatt, Jenny Sampirisi, Eduardo Corral and Catherine Graham have said some nice things after reading my 3rd full collection.
Mail days are great, aren't they? In the mail recently got copies of a new collaborative chapbook from Laurel Reed Books of A Long History of a Short History of the Vagina Eiffels: Poems by Kemeny Babineau, Pearl Pirie, Gary Barwin and Jenny Samparisi. Each is responding in one way or another to the Royal Regina Rifle Regiment. Kemeny is reading at the Factory Series, Jan 9th with Jason Christie and Chris Johnston at the Carleton Tavern.
On CKCU this week, on Literary Landscape on 93.1fm, I'll be in conversation with Kemeny Babineau and with Tracie Morris who will kick of 2015 with the AB Series on January 15th. She has a doctorate in performance art, her own band, does sound and page poetry as well as being a member of Modern Languages Association.
Also in news, hubby and I built our first bot over the holidays. You can hit refresh until heart's content here or follow what it makes @WellThatPuts on twitter where it delivers matryoshka words like, "Well, that puts the tie in sensibilities."
So far as reading, my 95books challenge update is that I got to 145 books in 2014, (mostly books, a few chapbooks too). I've been listing them at twitter (@pesbo) and hopefully this month I'll do a round up at the poetry/poetics blog pesbo.
Two new chapbooks of my poems have come into the world since the last newsletter but it's more coincidence of timing than turbo-composition. Some of the poems were bound paper-wards for 5 years.
One new chapbook is with above/ground called today's woods which is about bears, real and imagined and little girls of voluntourism and other middle class crimes. There was a reading attached to that launch on Dec 12th with Karen Massey as she launched she erasure poems of Archibald Lampman.
The second chapbook comes out of Minnesota with unarmed press. It is called polyphonic choral of civet tongues and manna. It is paired with Musicmaster's ekphrastic response in collage images.
In closing: Socrates faulted writing for weakening the necessity and power of memory, and for allowing the pretence of understanding, rather than true understanding. It's something that Richard Feynman expounded on as well, the difference between knowing a word for something and knowing something.
It's easy to get caught up in archiving your version or vision, and forget that the life stuff doesn't need artistic intervention so much as living. Try to narrow in the whys too fast and you miss the wisdom.
Try or don't try and understanding will still chase you down like mosquitoes, provided that you breathe, give off heat, and sit still for long enough. The comparison breaks after that. Wearing black or navy won't do a thing to attract the ideas from tasting you.
Until next time, keep laughing, keep lovimg, keep reading and keep writing,
Pearl