The Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, spring 2024 is Saturday, June 22, 2024 at Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Road (NOTE NEW LOCATION) near Hintonburg from noon to 5pm.

My spring project has been to black out my book of 2010, to turn been shed bore into she or.

I made a pdf version if you want to buy that and we have some way of transferring a 54MG file. Otherwise, see you at the fair.

I’ll also have new haiku chapbooks from KaDo.

7pm Thursday May 16 — Biblio Wakefield Library, the next Poetea event with featured reader Susan Jane Atkinson. Bring a poem to share on this month’s theme “Memory”, bonus if you have written one on the same theme.

There should be a name for stages of done. Manuscript at the point of hope and despair: Despe. Manuscript escaping its own dire suckage: Dirkage Manuscript ready for trusted eyes to see: Peepage. Manuscript ready to send out to a publisher: HahaLastDraft

The problem with editing is that it is addictive. It supplants the need or memory of needing to eat.

Generative Poetics Techniques: Shaking Up Your Practice

The more tools in the box, the better. The more experience, the more automatically we can grab the right tool for most effective manipulation and pleasure of our readers/listening.

We each have our pet subjects, syntax, stanza shapes. How to not stand in our own way?

Poetry is inner work. 

New influences are potentially new questions, new answers, new results, new solutions, new uncertainties, new opportunities. Each poem is a new path, and new possibility.

To start, let’s hear from Korean poet Lee Seong-bok’s book of aphorisms,

The things we’re trying to say are not in our brains but in our words. Relax your shoulders and just say what’s on your mind. Once you see a gap, go straight for the uppercut.

Indeterminate Inflorescence trans. by Anton Hur (Sublunary, 2023), 

Topics covered over 12 weeks, one hour a week in person by zoom along with thinking around a set of principles, examples and exercises:

Principle: Scaffolding Soundly 3
Principle: Let’s Get Rhetorical, Rhetorical 5
Principle: Cinch Sound 7
Principle: Metaphorical Refrain 8
Principle: Watching What You See 10
Principle: Empty Bottles 12
Principle: Rising Action 14
Principle: Double Down on Simple 18
Principle: Thought Units 19
Principle: Giving Props 22
Principle: Discovery Writing 23
Principle: A Poem is Made by Revision 24
Resources: 26
National Poetry Month Prompts: 26

Each week we’ll learn and grow as a group, time to think of ways into better writing to up our games and open up new avenues of inspirations. As well as share and give feedback to one another.

Normally I’ve offered such courses at $200-$250 but to encourage more people who can’t afford, I’m setting it at $120. Payment by etransfer or paypal to pearl.pirie at the gmail thing. [Think my wily way of putting my address will foil bots?]

So far we have half a dozen signed up but room for a few more.

We’ll run at 12 noon EST on Saturdays starting April 20, 2024.