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

ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS: An Exercise in Poetry

Presented by The A B Series and The Ottawa Art Gallery Thursday, January 28, 2010. Doors open 7pm / Reading at 7:30pm
Club SAW
67 Nicholas Street
Ottawa
Free admission / donations accepted
Poets perform works inspired by Michèle Provost‘s installation ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS in the context of the exhibition Fibred Optics
Featuring poets:
jwcurry
John Lavery
Pearl Pirie
Carmel Purkis
Sandra Ridley
Grant Wilkins
Hosted by Max Middle
For more information: AB Series

fw: Call for Stephen Harper poems

fwd – call for submissions
Comrade poet!
Since Parliament has been prorogued, you’re probably just sitting on your hands, bereft. But things are looking up!
You are invited to submit a poem for consideration for a new anthology to be published by Mansfield Press just in time for the reconvening of Parliament on March 3.
The collection is titled Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. We’re looking for poems of up to 75 lines: your tender musings on Stephen Harper.
We have to move fast. The deadline is midnight on Tuesday, January 19. Payment for your contribution is one copy of the anthology. It’s gonna look good and it’s gonna be full of good poems.
The editors of Rogue Stimulus are Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell and Toronto/Cobourg poet Stuart Ross. Denis De Klerck, publisher of Toronto literary house Mansfield Press, is oiling up the machinery for quick action, to ensure the anthology’s timely release.
Please email your poem (preferably as a Word attachment) to:
harper@mansfieldpress.net
We look forward to hearing from you.
Stephen and Stuart
—
P.S. I add, what angle? what position and response to take to this government? Satire? Unheeded it loses the points of the teeth.
What’s the role of emotion and poetry in the comments section is discussed at John Pass’ blog [via Brenda]

“The only lasting emotion, the one that stays true for all time for everyone, is grief, and tragedy remains art’s bedrock. Larkin is great not for his despondency and despair but for the tragic chords he rings from them. […]Anger alone, in its linear, fervently directional focus, is incapable of this breadth.[…]the practice of poetry, like any art, moves the practitioner quickly past the easy moral certainties that anger asserts. And anger is not communicative, is destructive of relationship, of metaphor.” – John Pass

Also from the comments, a link to a speech on the war in Afghanistan where Jaribu Hill says, there’s a protest fatigue of the perpetual war, but war is red herring from poverty, inequity, health care.

“We can’t now go into peekaboo mode.” […] “We all want to paint flowers and trees but we have to deal with the bombs that are still coming.” –Jaribu Hill, Exec. Dir. of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights speaking on the panel

Where does the mandate descend from? As for any dialogue, we need first to ready self. If not in that position of steadiness, what can be gained? At whose feet, delineated issues? What’s an effective word? Who needs to articulate what, how and where?

Bywords Warms the Night

Bywords Warms the Night
the Dusty Owl/ Bywords Quarterly Journal Launch/ Fundraiser for Cornerstone shelter event
Sunday, January 17, 2010
2:00pm – 3:00pm
Dusty Owl Reading Series
Swizzles Bar & Grill, 246-b Queen Street
Ottawa, ON
dusty owl bywords Launch of the winter issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal with poetry readings by
Stephen de Paul
Mike Fralic
Anna Lee
Christine McNair
Luminita Suse
and the editors of Bywords who could attend.
If you can’t attend, please donate to the shelter. they had a fire recently and need funds even more than usual: Cornerstone
P.S. It raised $420 for the shelter and pictured is Mike Fralic who dropped some lovely lines, something about over the shingles, moss grows. the houses grow crooked and the children grow up and move on and here I am, thru it all.
The Open Mic will be dedicated to Steve Sauvé. This Sunday marks one year since the much-beloved poet Steve Sauve passed away. Come out to the following event and congregate, remember, and toast Steve the way he would have liked it — laughing, possibly drunk, at a poetry show with an altruistic bent. Bring out your poetry and/or smiles, people.