Author Archives: Pearl

Do you compose in snippets? Or need a flat-out stretch of time? Only when alone? Need noise around? I was recently pondering how one functions best in whatever one is habituated to. If one is used to living a narrow grid with corrective buzzers and cutoffs and constraints, one learns a thought habit compatible with […]

A good reading can bump up a weak poem, and a lousy reading can kill a great poem. The tricky bit is correcting that, or at least correcting the latter. If you can entertain for the duration of a weak poem, good on ya. But how not to stand in the way of people hearing […]

At Influency some thoughts on Phil Hall’s White Porcupine is worth a read. I like how the Jenniger Lovegrove poem in the In Other Words column is taken apart in a how poems work way. And this Phoebe Tsang of Tightrope has been leading a fascinating life. Book store and in-person book buys are put […]

Before the writers festival gets underway tonight, I want to mention this Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen reading upcoming. She’ll be featured at Tree on the 27th, overlapping with the last night of the fest. Last week, her third collection of poems, Lean-To (Gaspereau Press) won the 2010 Atlantic Poetry Prize. I’m curious about what the fuss […]

Penguin Books is 75 years going. Design your variant of a cover from their templates and add it to the flickr set. * This is a page of a poem by José Garcia Villa from 1949. I put it online 3 years ago and it is consistently one of my most viewed images at Flickr […]