Author Archives: Pearl

Pierre DesRuisseaux, poet, editor, translator and authority on Quebec popular culture, has been named the new parliamentary poet laureate and took office this week. In the tradition of bilingualism, the poet laureate for this 2 year term is French. He has 14 books of poetry since his first in ’79. Hopefully as Poet Laureate, DesRuisseaux […]

Patti points out Wislawa Szymborska‘s A few words on the soul which remarks comically on what an unreliable lag-about the thing is, It usually steps out whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled. For every thousand conversations it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence. Yay, for humour and […]

Telling Stories is the call for the next issue of Magma. (Submissions due by July 15.) According to the guest editor of the issue, Clare Pollard, Finally, I’ve also chosen the theme because I feel too much contemporary poetry is self-indulgent – concentrating on self-expression to the point where it forgets it has an audience. […]

From the prompt of 1. haiku 2. poem about haiku, I got distracted into zips. Have you heard of zips? Addictive little form. A caesura like an open zipper between the parts. I like them best when they can read left to right or a column at a time. found the red book         on the […]

I had a few ideas going into the workshop about what to do to get past inner obstacles to make a spark. They are below. At the other blog is what the brainstorming and wisdom of crowds came up with for strategies to encourage writing. So can’t write, what to do? Nothing to Say, Visualize… […]