Author Archives: Pearl

It was a pretty full house, or rather, full basement, for the reading on Sunday. It’s always such a diversity of voices and styles. Amanda with her series spinning off from her Eleanor of Aquitaine series, Grant with his set of gohawk haiku, Max with his verbal disconnects that slip into new arrangements to refuse […]

While it’s impossible for anything to be apart from politics or from chemistry or from what you already know or from embedded ideology, there’s a breathing space in haiku possible. The stringent constraints to brevity, simplicity, immediacy buzzers you? But haiku are completed, like other poems, by the perceiver. If it reaches the right experience […]

I’m not pulling this out as typical or best representative of what she wrote or what 18th and 19th century women wrote, but the poem did make me smile. How sweet to worry about the well-being of the squirrel. Warning, it’s a cliffhanger, no followup poem. It had me from the opening line.. LINES On […]

Susan and Jennifer at One Deep Breath have been prompting short poems for a year now and organizing a weekly carnival of entries to read. Congrats ladies. The challenge this week is Poet’s Choice — pick any theme you missed, do a rerun of best of your own, introduce one of your favorites from another […]

The book I read and talked about here in February won a provincial book prize. Not that there’s any causal relationship there. ;P Ken Babstock’s collection Airstream Land Yacht won the 20th Annual Trillium Book Award for Poetry (English-language category). The Awards are in Toronto tonight. Tickets were only $10 but then there’s gas and […]