Pearl Pirie’s lists, reviews, interviews, etc. since 2005

Cash Value for Time

None of this enter a contest for free business. MyTimeHasValue is kickback against the government competition to design a logo for the anniversary of confederation. Bet that surprised the planners of the feel good about your country campaign.
It fits in nicely with a poem I’ve been ruminating through.

The economics of time is money
“distance is dead” ~ Amy Clampitt
in 3 hours we could be in Cuba. beach and back
in the time it used to take by horse to get to the homestead.
not that I’ve done either. it would take 18 hours
to bicycle home or I can call and fold time.
we’ve made, from a page, a paperless airplane.
poke. it nosedives against your forehead.
its wings are still with me across the city. instant.
like a door thru space. the everyday miraculous.
space may be dead but time is very much kicking
divided across territory left slack by space, doubling
at least, the province of time. the workload.
time as a colonial power is more harassed.
we’re sharecroppers of time. my space pokes you
leaves a trail of x and x and x across your eyes
yet drunken and alive, we live apart but space is moot.
this is not time’s fault. time is off managing time.
the email is unattended, will sit until forgotten
in knotweed clocks and comets of long grass, suckers
of tree’s spring closing over its meaning left derelict.
what’s this big green thing blocking mental space? it’s time.
so the light bulb is out of stock or not carried
in walking distance shops. distance is dead.
China is equidistant with Home Hardware
hometown pride. a skew where ease equals time.
it doesn’t matter who delivers. it is the doing and done
not the personal who. it’s the pace not the place. we’ve
given away our “l” and live in a post-haste-heaven of time.
UK or US or here are equal so long as it’s looked after.
a bookstore is a forty minute bus ride each way
plus the lost geometries of rearranged space.
dead to me. the map of sections changed places.
clerks on breaks. an hour and a half or a click of time.

If we value our life in opportunity cost of dollars, there’s a certain predictable fallout, outsourcing to places with less secure protected labour force, where the cost of living is lower. Labour is the most expensive part of a product because we don’t place much value on non-human lives. In Hollywood some animal actors are paid to a fund to ensure their retirement and health rather than the money going straight to the owner. But all kinds of new considerations in these systems we support.

The State of the Writing Industry

Have you read Pasha Malla’s report?
Some interesting thoughts in his 27 thoughts on CanLit including,

7. Part of the reason for this dismay is that there seems to exist a tacit, unchallenged compact among those of us who work in the literary arts that we are all on the side of good[…]
9. Is a book somehow innately good just because it’s not an app? How does reading a book that extols the virtues of, say, Pol Pot, or regurgitates the same old vacuous narrative and thematic clichés (“unlikely friendships,” “the power of the human spirit,” “World War Two,” etc.) in lazy, insipid sentences, or seems a deliberate ploy to win a prize, qualify as best practices over watching The Wire on your iPad? Is a book still good even if it’s a bad book?
[…]
27.. I do think books are good—but if they are to continue to be written and published and read, even in a negligible way, they must offer something that other media cannot. Movies will always do a better of showing-not-telling. The Internet will always allow for greater direct involvement and agency.

The idea that if it poetry it must be healing or building society or new futures is a lazy thinking. It depends. Some isn’t done to those ends but to reinforce the familiar, to comfort in confirmation bias that all is well and divine-purpose-driven. Literacy can give options but it closes options. It shifts things culturally on individual level.
Writing is just head from inside the head as stuff outside the head, not anything more. It’s not more curated any more than everything is, presentations, sense of identity tribe. It isn’t distinct and apart from the any of the forces driving every other conscious and unconscious expression.
Developing a market for reading, for books, why? People read more than any time in history. Text comes in every direction in junk mail, in signs, in phones, in work, at home. People are reading on screen earlier than before, coming to school literate so what is the school to do? Not ABCs to start. What are we aiming to make? Self-reliant beings with the cognitive equipment to make distinctions, be self-informed, to up the collective game to fix the problems without introducing an exponential load of more problems. To be critically aware. The physical book is a lovely useful, no-electricity, potentially untrackable cultural package to move around ideas but the bigger scene is to share information, in a format that people can digest and access. Call it a book, call it a blog, call it an essay, call it a-text, extract cash from it if you can. Fighting over the idea of book is too basic tho.

Morris and Babineau on CKCU

Tonight at 6:30pm on Literary Landscapes: two poets livestreamed or on playback at CKCU 93.1fm.
Tracie Morris is my first guest this evening. She’s at AB Series,

Jan 15th
The Ottawa Art Gallery | La Galerie d’art d’Ottawa
2 Daly Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6E2
8pm-9:30pm.

Tracie presents her work extensively as a poet, performer and scholar around the globe and has presented, performed and researched in almost 30 countries and 37 US States. She has contributed to, and been written about in, several anthologies of literary criticism including I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women, American Women Poets in the 21st Century  (2011, Les Figues Press). She also leads her own eponymous band and is lead singer for Elliott Sharp’s group, Terraplane. Tracie is the recipient of NYFA, Creative Capital and other grants, fellowships and awards for poetry and performance.
Eco-language Reader and An Exaltation of Forms. Her most recent poetry collection, Rhyme Scheme, (Zasterle Press, 2012) includes a sound poetry CD. She is also the author of Intermission (Soft Skull Press, 1998) Her next book, Eyes Wide Shut: A not-neo-benshi Read will be coming out in 2015 from Kore Press.
She’s talking about new book, Kubric and performance. In the second half of the show Kemeny Babineau talks about starting in small press and how he got to writing a chapbook about Paul Blackburn. He will be launching The Blackburn Files (2014), his second above/ground press chapbook o the 9th.
He’s Babineau edits an independent literary rag called The New Chief Tongue that appears courtesy of Laurel Reed Books. Babineau’s most recent work is After the 6ix O’Clock News published by BookThug. Kemeny Babineau has been doing Laurel Reed Books since the mid-90s. The bookseller, micro-presser, and poet is reading tomorrow as part of the next Factory Reading:

– Kemeny Babineau (Brantford)
Jason Christie (Ottawa)
+ Chris Johnson (Ottawa)
Friday, January 9, 2015;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

What Writers Say

Eric Folsom is the Poet Laureate of Kingston. On finding your way to a new poem he advises,

“To start, you want to look for a poem-shaped hole.  Choosing a subject, looking for inspiration, doing piles of research, that’s all well and good.  But what you aim for is the poem and the poem is a wily, elusive creature.  Spend your time watching and waiting.  Look carefully at your surroundings.  If you’ve got the patience you will perceive a space where the poem ought to be.  Just the right shape, the right moment, the perfect environment.  For unexplained reasons, some poem that ought to exist, right there, doesn’t.   That’s what you’re looking for, the missing item.  The poem that deserves to be.
Forget that nonsense about finding your voice.  Who told you that you only had one?  Who said you’d lost it?  You are not finding your voice, you are finding your freedom.  The voice will be ready and waiting for you when you need it.  Trust.
[…]
While you’re composing the latest and greatest you, bear in mind the following tiresome, unnecessary identities.
Although you love to party and tell yarns afterward, you are not Charles Bukowski.  There was only one. He’s dead.  Trying to imitate him just makes you look like Rob Ford.
You are not Gertrude Stein.  Modernism is 100 years old, dude.  The phrase “Make it new” first appeared during the Shang Dynasty in China.  (Translation: a long, long time ago.)  Don’t worry about making it new, make it better.  Or better still, make it beautiful.”

You can read it in entirety: Eric Folsom On Writing
Over at the Rusty Toque Gary Barwin is interviewed. In the question on process:

I do find that I get energy from jumping from one kind of writing to another. Prose reminds me what poetry can do and vice versa. Sometimes, though, I do need to burrow deep into something to give it time to develop—this was certainly was the case with the novel—but then after a long writing session, or sometimes intermittently in the middle of one, I’d write something else as a palate cleanser, on a lark as a diversion, or as a kind of footnote to the main project.
I think I write a lot because writing serves many purposes for me. It is a way of figuring things out, a way of working through things, a way of knowing, of experiencing things, of exploring. It is an entertainment, an obsession, a mode of social engagement, of doodling, of spiritual practice, of trying to become a “better” (more thoughtful? more compassionate? more observant?) person, a way of creating, experiencing, and responding the energy and possibility around me and in language.
In terms of process, I don’t know that I have a single mode of creation. Often it is the slow accumulation of work, chipping away at ideas or larger forms. I don’t know where I’m going. I have a place where I start writing, but I always consider that the writing knows more than me so I trust the process of writing itself and where it is taking me rather than my ideas for the project. I try to listen to where it is going. I means lots of revision and recalculating. 

In its absorbing entirety: Gary Barwin Interview at The Rusty Toque
Over at Hazlitt a rare new poem by David O’Meara,

I’m still. That’s how it feels.

I wait all winter for the animal to die,

raise its chin, look

into time. I

lack sun and Lord Tequila. I wonder

where good comes. Here in my head

I’m a herd of one, and rage, slosh unease like brine.
[…]
I’m home, low-ceilinged. I too

would grow an avocado, my wooden core

a seed.
[…]

If only we were issued writers hats I’d hang up mine at poems like that. Or that stanza. As is have to continue.