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

Maybe, done

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.

Poetry Techniques Workshop Series

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.

VerseFest Today

4 days: VERSeFest, Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, returns for its fourteenth year.

Poets/performers will have copies of their books/chapbooks/cds on hand to sell. Please support them directly!


Thursday, March 21, 2024: Avant-Garde Bar, 135 Besserer Street, 7pmAnita Lahey, Monty Reid, Marjorie Silverman, & Laila Malik    hosted by Jennifer Baker / Arc Poetry Magazine,Daniel Groleau Londry, nina jane drystek, MayaSpoken    hosted by Allison Armstrong


Friday, March 22, 2024 : Happy Goat, 35 Laurel Street, 8pm

Amanda Earl, DS Stymiest, IAN MARTIN, Mary Lee Bragg    hosted by Stephen Brockwell

Susan McMaster, Sneha Madhaven-Reese, Shane Rhodes    hosted by rob mclennan

Saturday, March 23, 2024 : Redbird, 1165 Bank Street, 8pm$12 for the evening: available via: https://www.simpletix.com/e/third-night-session-1-and-2-tickets-163041

Jaclyn Pudiuk, Chris Turnbull, Mark Goldstein, Derek Webster    hosted by rob mclennan

Sandra Ridley, David O’Meara, & Madeleine Stratford    hosted by Zishad Lak


Sunday, March 24, 2024: Spark Beer, 702 Somerset Street West, 8pm

AJ Dolman, Myriam Legault-Beauregard, & Otiono,    hosted by Madeleine Stratford

Jason Christie & Klara du Plessis/Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi    hosted by rob mclennan

Love was the theme at Poetea

Co-host Gillie Griffin (in kick ass boots) welcomes people to the poetry for a snowstormy night.
I read from 3 chapbooks of love and sex: Adding Up to This  (Catkin Press, 2023), A Couple Sumerians  (Turret House Press 2023) and  Sex in Sevens (above/ground, 2016)
Mary Lou van Schaik, who with Ilse Turnsen, is part of the local lovers and reciters of poetry, shared a few favourites.

Oddly by chance three of the open mic people chose different poems by e.e. cummings. Who knew he was such a hands-down winner at love poetry?

There was a fantastic open mic, even if it took a little coaxing to break the shell of shyness off.

I missed getting a shot of Ilse Turnsen but got most of the rest of the open mic, including co-host and actor Julie Le Gal who read some poems by others and one by herself.
Tamsyn Farr read a fabulous poem of her creation in the lovely community space of the library.

Behind, you can see the gift bags of cookies I made up, some gluten free, some gluten-rich each with a poem from Adding Up to This attached. I made 60 or cookies (gingerbread, freezer cookies and thumbprint cookies), some of which made it so far as the event. 30 bags and I took no pictures.

Some book sales were made and donations, which is sweet and encouraging.

I test read a couple poems from a new manuscript which went over well. And one of Gertrude Stein because never pass up on a Stein.

Gillie read from her collection, Warm Bodies, Foreign Parts (Loxwood Stoneleigh, 1996)

All in all, a good night. There were two sessions last summer but this is a new iteration.

Save the dates for the next sessions: March 21st, April 18, May 16, and June 20 at 7pm @ Wakefield library, 38 ch de la Vallée-de-Wakefield, Wakefield, Québec J0X 3G0