I woke up this morning with a sound track…

“Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why aren’t you doing what you love?”—Danielle K. Gregoire

I made a simpler, more streamlined menu for the website here and deleted the whole menu and could not get it recovered. Rebuild. Fine. There goes that afternoon.

I made a poetry file ready to upload for free download and it is too big to upload. That fits the day perfectly. Perfect to chase a night with vertigo. And I’m cold again because I let the fire go out. Somehow power cable around my legs and yanked computer off the couch as I got up for kitchen timer. Not actually killed it. This on top of spilling water in my keyboard by drinking and missing my own mouth, and later cutting my hand with tin foil, all of which brings royal us to nominate today retroactively into shoulda stayed in bed.

I tried reintroducing a tiny amount of nightshade to my diet. A few potato chips. My body’s joints immediately swelled and inflamed. That’s a no then.

Sometimes you think you have data, but not quite a complete set. I did not actually sleep 2 hour nights and vastly improve. I consecutively forgot to charge my watch so it kacked before morning.

At least I could write some. Averaging 250 poetry words per day, but most of the time is editing and cutting old words and seeing if there’s anything salvageable in bounced manuscripts.

I could learn mellow from this mouse.

In other news, Al-manach, a new anthology with risograph printing, showcases writing of les collines/the hills of Gatineau. It launches on Friday February 6th at 6:30pm at the Wakefield Public Library.

Deadline extended to Jan 31: Have you made a chapbook of haiku in 2024 or 2025? Or tanka, renga, senryu, sequences, haibun, and visual haiku? Send to the Marianne Bluger contest.

In the next pivot of attention…I like the ability of the internet to connect people of like minds or experiences and far distance. I like the critical thinking skills of people who make rather than only consume.

I like the free exchange of ideas and people who are curious to learn. People who declare they “don’t want to be influenced” worry me for that alone and for the mindset of proprietary insular ideas instead of community and growing together in an interdependent way. Aren’t we each isolated enough without deliberately avoiding listening to one another? It’s never made sense to me.

Further to the open access vs. capitalism, I present, the Mozilla Manifesto, which lists 10 principles which Mozilla believes “are critical for the Internet to continue to benefit the public good as well as commercial aspects of life”.

1. The internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
2. The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
3. The internet must enrich the lives of individual human beings.
4. Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
5. Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.
6. The effectiveness of the internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.
7. Free and open source software promotes the development of the internet as a public resource.
8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.
9. Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

[via “Mozilla Manifesto”. Mozilla. Archived from the original on 24 June 2020. Retrieved 11 July 2020 via Wikipedia.]

Also from Wikipedia,

According to its founder Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons’ goal is to counter the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture that limits artistic creation to existing or powerful creators. Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products.

Patterns that suck, suck. Break the status quo. Let’s make a better, kinder, world step by step.

(Got a comfy seat? This is a long one. Skim as you see fit. Or get a cup a cocoa and hunker in. )

Part of social media is to share what is useful, whether book lists, beautiful vistas, or safety information. To connect with dispersed people of shared interest or concern. It also means people of shared propensity to hate can get isolated together as well. It’s never the tool but the use that’s the key element.

This week I start to understand the people in the 1940s impelled to conscript against the threat to Europe as a threat to all. I hope in my lifetime there remains a Canada. I selfishly hope not to be personally bombed back to the Stone Age like so many places on this wee marble. I hope within 2 years the US has resumes dignified quality of life for those in the widening deluge of abuse. Trying times for the heart.

What to do, to do more for justice? For choice, connection, informed thought? How to live a more just life of worthwhile connection and help?

Often when I was crestfallen or angry a friend would cut me off and ask, what are you going to do about it?

How to move ideas and people is a concern.

We need to change the 1% and the pollution rate, and the incarceration rate and the zero sum solutions. And to think together without state threat.

Paper is a solution. An inane podcast whose name I’m redacting reported in the US 16% of people are readers and declining. The source they ran with (picked up under clickbait headline at People magazine) showed things more complicated than that — polling 200,000 people over 20 years, people read for longer at the end than the start, and there were regional, age and race shift disparities. I don’t know where to find the analogous figure for Canada.

I am deliberately insulated from the news cycle. (Being informed vs. sanity debate.) I want to live with intention and clarity.

I saw here and there recent notice of publishers saying they will no longer ship to the US. I noticed new difficulty and time to get books from the US. And finally the rigamarole of trying to mail books there myself, and consequently, I’m thinking, I like ebooks. They have advantages. Paper is not the problem. Context is the problem. 

Ebooks are easily transferable. Pay nothing or pay the same as print they are instant exchange. An unimpeded flow of ideas at a distance. Was that not the prime value of usenet and the internet and speakers corner in parks? Unlike talking their contents don’t undergo a telephone game.

It gets me thinking.

A recent poll on small press was money talk, income, a lot of key marketing lingo. The idea of art as pitch and product. The idea of conversation as paid subscription. Doesn’t feel right.

I will pay for a movie because it required hundreds of talented people, costing millions of dollars. 

What is the real cost of a book? Labour per hour isn’t measured. Volunteer labour by nature. A contract gives a symbolic gratuity of $500, if that. Reading tours may give more income if the series pays, with grants requested by writer and series. On a CV of publications and awards, the real income is peripheral to writing, editing, residency, teaching. All of which prevent one’s own writing. 

These impediments to moving books, this idea of small press as part of the real commodities economy jostles me about.

It reinvigorates in me the idea of poetry as shared life process, not saleable goods. Is poetry 50% hustle? Sholn or share alike?

Conceive hook and impact of a poem or work to place it in “the market”, as a frame, makes a poem an interchangeable widget. This is problematic. It objectifies something tender, careful, playful, vulnerable, ephemeral. An auction block doesn’t honour the spirit of poetry. 

Saw an ad for how art is not the main act if one is to “succeed” as a gallery — it has also taken the kool-aid of capitalism. Capitalism, which is to say to siphon money from working class to the rich, to accept hierarchies as is, to be isolated, specialized, part of the amused, obedient masses. 

Poetry isn’t always sticking it to the man. It is grown within systems. Selling and buying it seems shamefaced somehow.

So many conundrums to solve. 

Traditionally I tried to buy as much from poets as I could, spread an abundance not scarcity model. We are interdependent free-thinking equals not beholden to state, church or corporation.  We need to support one another.

Yes, we all have expenses. If we are subsistence farmers we are displacing time to write, and perish the thought, market, promote, and sell.

How to get Poetry to the People, apart from Wally or Stuart standing street side handing it out to those who don’t yet know they want it. 

If we as writers are low income we don’t have the disposable income to buy poetry at $25 a pop. Another conundrum. 

In isolation we are in the position to reinvent the poetic wheel because we aren’t educated on that the culture has moved to jets.

A solution is the trade economy, making and swapping. 

The trade economy isn’t a financial planner’s wet dream of continually arcing interest and ROI, scarcity model of hoarding driving up “value”. Some of us are habituated into understanding our value through the translating medium of money. If we give for free we are not valued or not honouring ourself with value. A trade economy is community over commerce. This is good. 

Freely offered time and help is automatic human culture, and allows society to cohere or at least be aware of one another.

As much value as there is in “Pay the Artist” if you can, free is also valuable. Libraries, gifts, Little Free Libraries, trades.

We are two people here. My partner works but my biggest personal income is dividends off a life insurance my parents bought when I was a baby. And I’m in a bubble economy. My local thrift store means I buy jeans for $2, a hot cocoa package for 50 cents, a bundle of pend for 15 cents, a winter coat for $10, books for 25 cents,  while out there… well, you know. 

Paper books are a pleasurable gratifying thing and can travel surprising distances,  but, looping back to initial concern, they are onerous and expensive to move. 

I badly want a bunch of the Red Moon Press titles from the US  but with shipping more than doubling costs, it hurts. $50 for an hour or two of reading. That’s not sustainable at my consumption rate. That’s an opportunity cost of a week of food. True it may feed the soul, but it also might vex the soul. 

Is poetry for connection? Transformation? For the underground alternate next culture or to sell pleasantries?

Haymarket Books and AK press and Microcosm Publishing press for distributing ideas in book form rather than selling a product which is books.

A UK haiku press, Snapshot Press, sells paper books and calendars but also makes gorgeous ebooks which have inherent value because of the editor’s eye making a large slush pile.

I see a few people sharing for free:

derek beaulieu’s opened his books for taking, under the tag, #BeYourOwnPirate with downloadable pdfs. He says,

I believe that releasing my writing online for free encourages new and unexpected ways of people engaging and responding with the writing; it  will encourage experimentation and reaction. I encourage authors to scan your publications & release them online as a free PDFs.

–derek beaulieu

Model Press is one you can subscribe to from Ryan Fitzpatrick. It is an online-only poetry micropress now with 39 titles.

standard ebooks offers carefully rendered, typo-free, in good design of public domain, open-source classics, like Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens.

Internet archive could let you borrow millions of texts from before the grievous takedown. I found books there that the authors and presses no longer have. They still are a portal to many libraries.

Project Gutenberg has all sorts of classics. Now that libraries supply the popular rather than archive the important. (No bitterness, much), we can access, at this point over 75,000 books in various languages. Have a 2 a.m. need for Paradise Lost? They got ya.

I have short had a list of resources, for teaching poetry, running a reading series, or laying out chapbooks. But of all titles of mine published or titles only one is listed of prompts. Most you only get to see in person. 

I have long an impasse at my website of covers and prices, but not the technical know-how to give a sample poem for each.

All this leads me to a new model. What if, in time forward, I make some physical chapbooks, but made them available as free downloads for greater accessibility.

I can start with out-of-print and presses that have closed. I have boxes of inventory unsold. I can start with what I do next. We’ll see how 2026 unfolds.

As my insoles profess, “every step makes a difference.”

Okay, new year, tidying, new things. You’ll see the header and its weird spacing is fixed. The pesbo logo has a refresh and isn’t stranded in space up there.

I updated the pearlpirie.com with chapbooks out of mine, and phafours press which I haven’t done in a year or two. Updated my 2024 CV. All sorts of things that probably only I would notice. Erasure exercise of typos. I tried to track down when I received grants. 2010, 2013 and 2014 it seems.

How’d that for burying the lede (my speciality). You can now buy Heat Lamp from me or from rob. I like how the cover and interior turned out.

It’s kind of concrete poems. Here’s a couple examples,

The complement to mindful living is mindful reading. 

I want to learn from what I read. I want to see what others have seen. I want to consciously read what is not standard culture fare. Something more offbeat or deep. I want to learn storytelling and cultural terraforming. 

I leaned more into sci-fi this year. Shocking no one, over half of titles read were poetry but less science and less memoirs, more novels this year. I completed none in French but 9 in translation.

I think I mentioned 49% of what I finished reading was free by library, little free libraries, free downloads, gifts or review copies. This tracking takes credence from the theory that elves sneak books in while I sleep.

In 2025, I read 110 pages on the average day. 

That works out to a book or chapbook every couple days. Although some I picked away at for years, like Bly’s Inferno, And In His Hand a Burning Coal by klikandtuna (AO3, 2025) and Are we meant to read the footnotes by RiaTheDreamer (AO3, 2025).

And some I blast through, like a bunch of Sydney Rye Mysteries and a Louise Penny. 

I read about the usual number of pages as usual for most of the last 5 years, a little lower than the high of 42,000, a little higher than the usual 33,000. I didn’t get anywhere near my goal of reviewing one title for every 10 I read. I wrote 12 reviews to 281 books read, so 4%.

32 were re-reads this year, compared to 24 last year.

I read 72% on paper. (Up from 63% last year). 

Half were published in 2024 or 2025. I didn’t consciously aim to push into classics this year. 

Titles were 143 pages long on average, with range from 8 pages to 1200, with 75 titles being chapbooks.

We read 46 books aloud, so a few fewer than one a week last year. 

I just started tracking British books. For the previous dozen years it was American, Canadian or Other. In rough measure, half were Canadian, a quarter American, a tenth from the UK and the rest other or unknown. I have learned to automatically cub reading American by default. I tried to read what was blank, a stretch or opaque to me, not going so far as to read financial or sports. We have to be reasonable about pushing comfort zones, yes?

Slightly more female at 48% female, 44% male, the remainder multiple or non-binary. 9% queer. 10% BIPOC authors. (Although with AO3 I don’t know gender, sexuality, place, or race.) 

I’m in a privileged spot to go to book fairs, to go direct to authors and publishers, and to have an option to review things.

As far as favs, that’s a hard call. I mentioned some in an earlier post or two. I did a round up on substack icymi, but there’s also a heap of ones I’d read again, or refer to. Divergent Paths: Family Histories of Irish Immigrants in Britain, 1820-1920 by John Herson (Manchester University Press, 2015), A “Working Life” by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2023), anus porcupine eyebrow by Gary Barwin (Paper Kite Press, 2009), The Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the couple who taught America how to Love by Thomas Maier (Basic Books, 2009), Code Talker: The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII by Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila (Penguin, 2011), and Screaming Obscenities at the Sky by Christian McPherson (At Bay Press, 2025),

I was better at dropping books that weren’t holding a spell for whatever reason. Thus I have no books I’d rank 0-2 stars from 5.

I read 18 history and memoir. I read more haiku than usual for me, 25 books or chapbooks.

I start 2026 reading 9 books in parallel.

*

And because someone on bluesy asked my rate of writing…I figured that out.

Some of you may recall I used to calculate poem writing rates but a poem is tricky. It can be 6 words or 12 pages, which break apart and merge so as moving targets are hard to quantify even impressionistically. What does “finished” even mean? At scale of line, or poem or manuscript..? A month’s line, now that’s clear.

Poetry written? This shows an advantage of self-audit. January and March have gone astray. Accidentally deleted? That and a decade of photos backed up to one mislaid DVD. Ah well, each year has its losses.

February: 261 words per day

April: 340 words per day

May: 120 words per day

June: 220 words per day

July: 45 words per day

August: 109 words per day

Sept: 213 words per day

Oct: 107 words per day

Nov: 230 words per day

Dec: 163 words per day

That averages 181 words added to poetry files daily, almost 66,000 words of new poetry in 2025. I have no idea if there’s a bell curve to fit that against. 

I have a lot to revise and send out. (I detest the word submit.) I’d like to get a few in the can for future.  After all, Octavia E. Butler died frighteningly close to my current age. If there’s a time for sharing, it’s while alive…

Incidentally in 2025 I watched 53 movies and series. (Finished not the 5 Christmas movies started for 10-20 minutes for each 1 completed.)

On New Year’s Eve, the Times Square Ball drops for only 60 seconds over a measly 139 feet. What if we extrapolated from that and covered the entire year? Enter the Infinite Ball Drop.

Tomorrow is an another day a new year.

They warned me of this in primary school music class; in Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game. Time speeds up. Cartwheels turn to cartwheels through the town.

People have been piling on to post their end of year reading lists. I do this every few weeks at instagram. I listed some of my favs, but want to amalgamate that and stats into one post. Maybe add snazzy book covers. Maybe tomorrow.

Still a couple days left to read but I’m adding to best of list now,

The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson, illustrated by April White (Brick Books, 2025) which gave so many aha moments on chronic illness and concussion, and consumer culture, and pure amazement at her rendering poems from trash container text.

and from backlist titles,

But Then I Thought by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground, 2023) which impels me to buy her book too. What a crisp, alert alive mind!

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit, 2017) which apparently people know about and love. Onto The Ministry for the Future next.

And for cozy reads, fluffy romance comedy, Christmas in the Scottish Highlands by Donna Ashcroft (Bookouture, 2021) which I encountered in a Little Free Library. She’s got something like 18 novels published. Such a fun one.

*

I will probably update my year’s stats since I might still finish 2 more books before NYE.

I won’t make it through Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (Annotated): or, an excursion through Ireland, in 1844 & 1845, for the purpose of personally investigating the condition of the poor by Asenath Nicholson. Although I did splurge on it, finally. (It dropped from twenty odd dollars for digital to six.) I had read the rather generous length of sample early in the year. Fascinating stuff.

*

I don’t know that I got any usable photos from the PFYC reading, it being dark and me lurking at the back. But it was a cheerful night. It haunts me Michelle asking, (I paraphrase) do we not all write poetry from love? I and one other voice said yes. Did people in the front nod or is it a way minority position?