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

95 Books for 2014, List 3, Vividly Living

I’m at least a dozen or so behind in my listing books completed. I’ll try to chunk these into smaller lengths so each instalment is only a few instead of pages of scroll.

  1. The Hottest Summer in Recorded History by Elizabeth Bachinsky (Nightwood, 2013)
    It feels more like a book than most, not in the sense of lineated novel because the common thread is Bachinsky and the stories and tones vary a lot but they add up into bookness. Some individual poem alone make for good light-hearted reading. Others only make sense as part of the plaid criss-crossing other bits. The poems have an offhanded casualness that isn’t sloppy and wrinkled. Dogs, houses, drunk, texting, and hotels. Tributes to places, writer friends and mentors. They’re bouncy and enegetic and sound like her voice. My favorite might be Horse (p. 14-15) for the affection for the horse and the place as she pans back further and further in space and time. She makes a list poem that looks spiffy.

    Eleven Things Treena Could Lift After Her Emergency Surgery to Remove a Thirty-Two Pound Fibroid Tumour
    for Teena Chambers
    Sixteen full grown gerbils
    Eight Mars bars
    Sixteen baby chicks
    Chihuahua puppy (three weeks old)
    At least one hundred gerbera daisies (flower tops only)
    One newborn polar bear cub
    Half a September Vogue
    Ninety Quarters ($22.50)
    One cup of tea
    $450 dollar bills (any denomination)

  2. The House is Still Standing by Adrienne Barrett (Icehouse poetry/Gooseland, 2013)
    Compellingly brisk, sharp and dark it feels like a memoir one stepped removed into the language current. There’s wonder and fear evoked but also delightfully delicious sort of language. Instead of flat language there’s some plumbing symbolic. The trope of dream poem has more control and weight than usual (p. 30) reminding its not the subject but what you do with it. Here’s the second half of “Inukshuk”,

    laying stones in a wall. The stones
    spoke to one another with different
    voices, but they were all me. One
    my stomach, one my head, yet
    only stones. The stone that is my knee
    has given away, I hear it creaking.
    The stone that is my head
    is weeping. There is a cleft
    runs down her back,
    where the armour comes round
    to meet itself. Her baby, her own
    miniature, nudges between hind legs, urgent
    to suckle what moisture
    seeps from a cairn. But Truth:
            she isn’t brittle, she
    will not crack. She sighs
    and her sides expand.

    Lovely to see a dream where there’s the direction across tide towards resilience, even to the level of unconscious. Waking to life, hope. Throughout the language is tight and confident, alert with lively turns with some killer lines. There’s a sense that the writers is interested and curious about subjects. And she proposed a god who is low-function autistic, not fully culpable for his acts. That tickles.
    Fresh and occasionally funny (p. 60-61) “The divine, as children” where “He picks us up, each/in turn, like parsnips//he’s found soaking in the sink”.
    I haven’t read this poem before.
    It is a language that resists sparringly but is considered as well, not shallow. “No more clues; I’ve given/ everything you need. You guys/ would write an obituary/for a wadded up serviette.”(p. 65).

  3. Laws of Rest by David B Goldstein (BookThug, 2013)
    Prose sonnets with some lines (most lines?) that make one marvel at how a mind got there. In a way it feels like its jerking the reader about, and the self. What is it jerking away from? It seems twitchy. But then you have to be in the right mood and frame to read. It took me hours to get a couple pages one day and another afternoon I zipped thru 20 pages in an hour.
    In “Paysage” p. 38, “A bird flew overhear in the shape of a bucket of water” then later “You made up your mind with mascara”. You have to set aside a need for it to mean, or try to read it as one allegorical story. There’s a humour in foiling and deflecting away from any expectation. There’s a refusal to make conventional sense and be seatbelted into the hackneyed plot arc and be dropped down the mechanically geared ride. Moving to stanza 4

    I’ve never seen a falcon tear off the rood in a service in quite that way. They say that only when the sun is mishandled does it speak of God, yet the midtown Holiday Inn was the scene of such revelry. I can only guess at what made the rest of it vanish.

    There are sour digs “Sure if you don’t mind vegans fixing your carburator” “The second movement was Oprah’s fist hitting his gullet”. The whole first section on Lucy is kind of tiring, even dressed up snazzily with some great lines like “When I woke up,/ I recognized I had become a pulpy novel, its covers curling in the damp” (p. 20) Instead of poetic voice in solitude or cacophony there’s the sense of two developed voices and personalities at play so that’s a bonus that many books don’t have in the great Poet Against the Universe Solitude that often prevails.
    “We worked on our foam bicycles and tried not to go outside, all the while trying to restore physicality to our education.” (p. 37) That made me laugh aloud at the absurd-true. What is it that we build in our mental workshops, inside our media-fed brains, our ideas world while there’s an imbalance to life. How does one create a single page. I can’t imagine the wild mind stamina and disciple to make a book’s worth. There isn’t a line where I want to red-pencil syntactic bagginess or obvious or cliché.
    Rich, dense, soundy but signifying too. Poems demand attention as they cavort. Blink and you’ll miss something odd or funny or perplexing. What does it add up to? What are the glimpses netting out to in aggregate? I don’t know if I’m missing the bug picture, pardon the big picture when I see the bug picture: “Every time we visit is like a spider holding everything she loves with her legs.”//You have forgotten my birthday more times than I’ve one one. My intimacy with you is exhaustible.”(p. 30)
    Oddly delightful manic yet controlled and flowing in its own irregular way. Does anything signify or just sound like they should in a way similar to the wisdom lines of pathos of the last couplet in trad lyric verse?
    How is it put together. I’d imagine some would see the text as working against, not cooperating, but each individual is at a place. If there is a distance, people are the animate things that can move. A text doesn’t cooperate or not cooperate. Elements don’t fit together like a business but fit. They non-sequitur like end-to-end koans, and are about intelligence. Could it run as one long poem with no significance to each particular page being a separate poem. Not sure. Is there an itness to each? That might be a question for a re-read. While I may whip through a good ole boy or gal memoir in poetry in an hour it may take hours to go a dozen or two pages. Still, glad I didn’t miss this one.

  4. Incarnate by Juleta Severson-Baker (Frontenac, 2013)
    The poems aren’t complex for complexity’s shape but allow complexity in. You can’t predict where a poem will go but it fits when you are brought there, Lake, (p. 41) I don’t want to make a spoiler but it is an able hand.
    “At the Reservoir” (p35) and “Between Us” are love poems that don’t become sentimental; a hard mark to hit.
    from later in p. 35 to the end, which I presume to be prose-wrap lineated although it’s a ragged right margin.

    Behind me rosehip, kayak, three kayaks passing it’s going to be a wet one the lady in the middle calls and it takes a minute for me to understand. The dry sky and blue, then my perspective shifts into hers—chop of waves against the hull—the splashes on her hands. Isn’t that the way? So much of the day we are inside ourselves like a fossil in a rock, locked and set, just hollowing away beautifully; takes us time, even if we try, to see another’s life. My son with a log, Mom look, look Mom, he heaves it and the droplets reach my blue shoes where they rest on a certainty of wide grey stone, and opening to the oxygen and honesty of the afternoon, I let myself remember how to love my husband. It has been too much about schedules and plans and honey, could you please. I let it take me all at once—he is in me like a fossil in a rock. Together we are very beautiful.

    It holds a moment, a reckoning, a quiet in an direct honest way that synthesized the mixture of fear and balance. I’ve not been there but I’ve been there but my stone wasn’t grey but beige and it was a train not kayaks, and I was alone before dawn but it was that same human moment.
    The first few poems in the book miscue. They seem brassy and try to show off sassy but then the poems settle into a more self-assured voice. Once I got to p. 19 it was a different book and far better. Perhaps the cover’s effect wore off by then. Sexual poems with a snake on the cover set me off expecting some female-self-rebelling/blaming Christianity-wrestling thing.
    Poems like “Marguerite” keep only the salient parts, the dense demonstrative parts and build a momentum. They are smart without cleverness standing between the poem and reader. The inner world is present without blotting out the wider world where there’s Darfur.

Cento and Self-Expression

A cento is a poem form where you also don’t use any of your own words. You have stacks of books that get passed around and perhaps on a 5 minute or 15 minute timer you grab and transcribe on your page.
The object is to pull what stands out verbatim and move to the next text, one line at a time from each book, and keep moving. Don’t overthink. Don’t think at all. See something, grab.
You appropriate the whole text to make a collage. No changing other people’s words or springboard or infill. That’s not the starting point but the ending point. As with any poem form it has a sense of coming to completion at some point.
I’ve done the exercise in workshop groups 3 times. In the first 2 groups I wasn’t familiar with what the usual poem for each person was. 3rd time the charm.
In the third group it was startling. Each person made a poem that could have come from their pen and mind directly.
Mary Lee’s bouncy comic social commentary, Frances’ quiet poem of nature longing, Robin’s graceful poem of profound introspection, mine an oddity of all elbows and disjunctures.
Each person sees how they see. We knew that. We know we bring to what we read all that we’ve perceived before but it showed it sharply. We project into what text is in front of us, like blindmen and the elephant.
We all started from the same base material. What pops out is characteristic of us and our bias is really specific. In one case two of us used the same line but how it comes together was completely unrecognizable in effect because of how it came together.
You may record page numbers, poem title and author to cite where it came from but the funny thing is it shows how poems work. A line from McGimsey doesn’t look like his line necessarily. It is how it all moves and comes together.
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Some months ago in a workshop, we did an exercise that showed how individual each vision is. We were to cannibalize a draft, pick random words, of all parts of speech, and write them down in the order spotted, or counting off if we prefer to impose randomness.
It was not to make sentences or phrases, only a shuffled list in a prose form. Reading this random sampling of words, in nonsensical order, it still conveyed a characteristic sense of the person’s perception — the choice of subjects, register of language, probability of pronouns or articles, the density of sibilants, even deconstructed into parts, showed we each gravitate towards a characteristic set of tools. Our voice can’t be disassembled so easily as a poem or a sentence can be. The watermark is there in the components.
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A few years ago in Pooka Press Pub Crawl, we had a stop in the Irish Village in the Market and Warren Dean Fulton pulled out newspapers and magic markers. It was blackout poem time. Some people had done it before, some hadn’t. It’s a variant of erasure poetry. You black out the text leaving only the words you want.
I didn’t know most of the people but knew some. One person there made an utterly characteristic poem of herself from the news pages. Goes to show, wherever you go, even in exercises, there you are.
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Similar is the exercise where you are given a set vocabulary to use and you use all of it, like the CV2 2-day poem writing contest opening in April. Given the same sample, the outcomes are wildly different. We think that’s because of what is added by the person but it’s more the person that is added.
That contest was pointed out by Frances Boyle last night who led the Tree Seed Workshop.
during writing exercise
Here are people around the table thinking. We got 16 or 17 people for that excellent poetry workshop in Ottawa. Lots of ideas and resources, exercises and quotes as thinking points. A few people came up to afterwards adding how great and useful it was.
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What is owned? Not a word.
In no case do we claim ownership of the alphabet. Other languages use it too with variations. We claim etymologies on certain words but languages borrow from each other. We can say a phrase is too generic to be owned by anyone. Despite Nike saying “Just Do It” is theirs. It was before them and will be after them. Some words are powerfully associated.
In “Notes from Gethsemani” (Nomados, 2014), Phil Hall says “Liquefaction” is so loaded with George Herbert in 1600 that it colours any use after it with “as my Julia goes—the liquefaction of her clothes”. Likewise because “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday that phrase has a certain value as currency that informs any use of the phrase to association with lynching. You can’t use it “neutrally” because it is powerful enough it pulls a context larger than itself to words around it.
Every word has connotations. If you are well-read, you will pick up allusions at phrase or line or poem level to parallel classic or contemporary texts.
What can you assume the reader will know or recognize? What is not in the air enough that you have to give a nod to source? After such-and-such by so-and-so. Epigraph would say whose glosa. Where’s the boundary? DO we need to have a boundary? If I hear a joke do I have to cite it? “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar. And doesn’t.”
Do I know Greg Betts made it up? Does it matter? What is authorship? Is it putting it together at book level, word level?
If you use a line from someone else, it likely won’t go how the previous author would have taken it. There’s a danger in using other people’s lins for epigraphs. I’ve seen collections where the strongest part are all the epigraphs which makes the poems pale in comparison like two salesman where the senior sales epigraph collects all the sales and the main salesman who is junior is just getting tired feet.
The spin-off poem wouldn’t be mistaken for the original. There’s no confusion of “the market” as when a brand tries to make a logo to siphon off customers of the competitor. In each case a person is making not a product per se, but themselves from others. The copyright and intellectual property gets fuzzy.
Writing is a dialogue. Or can be when it is not proprietary product.
Each thing that’s already made is made from the maker synthesizing what they heard in a new construction as well. To make a new thing doesn’t harm the original. Does that licence theft or trying to deceive people? No, but it makes the question of dibs and mine look a little silly.
These 4 guys talk about their guitar skill development, learning what is self and what is other, what they owe to who resonated. How they innovated to learn that oh, that was already done by someone else 40 years ago, or 300. DADGAD or the story of Joni Mitchell composing in a tuning she didn’t recognize and it turns out that’s called “standard”.
We may create new works but we aren’t creating from nothing.
If I make a crazy poem that doesn’t reflect the intent or the original context of the person, it might be more dismaying to the source writer to give credit. Is it really their help/fault? Once words or ideas are out there, they’re their own little beings. Thanking those you owe for saying something that encodes your world in a way that makes sense.

Anthos

You may have already seen that Patrick White has died. He launched his last poetry collection two weeks before he died. He was the last Poet Laureate of Ottawa.
When I was to see mom last she said she found a paper I left behind. A 1987 Anthos:
Anthos
White organized Anthos, the magazine (“The magazine is produced entirely with an Apple Macintosh Computer and Laser Printer”), as well as the readings series, the publisher, the radio series (“Radio Anthos on Q101”), and the poster poem series.
photo-2
I sent poems to that magazines then, terrible, terrible couplet refrain verses. I wonder if somewhere is still my rejection letter. But, here’s something more interesting: a bit of Patrick White’s poem,
Patrick White
The names were all just letters to me then. In the issue, there were people I would eventually come to meet through Tree, Blaine Marchand, Ronnie Brown and Henry Beissel.
The issue includes people I would come to meet: the person who was judge on the first poetry competition I short-listed for aka first cash from poetry, Tony Cosier; one of my first teachers for poetry in Ottawa, Ruth Latta and someone I would become slightly offset from, Jorge Etcheverry who hosts Third World Players, the show right before Literary Landscapes.
And there’s a Michael Dennis whose poetry book review blog is a year old today.
Michael Dennis
It’s good to see that people writing then are writing still. In it there were poems by other people who are either still writing, or died while still writing: Louis Fagan, Catherine Ahearn (First Poet Laureate of Ottawa), Ralph Cunningham, Patrick Phillmore, Charles Fisher, Robin Matthews, Sandra Nicholls, Audrey Dean Cowan and Heather Ferguson who still does Ygdrasil, Antonino Mazza and Yvonne Trainer.