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

Awards

(cross posted )

The Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist sounds pleasing, having heard a few read excerpts at the writers festival. It’s structure and aim seems clear, with 14 people assessing quality and importance of work and then giving writers cash to do more. It seems to more promote what to read as well.

I’m not sure whether to be happy or sad about the Quills Awards short list. Shortlist of Collins and Angelou, Oliver and Neruda and an anthology of Good Poems for Hard Times? They self-described their awards point as to “pair a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz”.

What is the Quills Awards goal? If everyone already knows and market saturation is reached before awards, what does publicity do for who, and what does it do for Pablo Nerudo now? (It’s a translation but.) It seems to promote who to like (I mean really really like…) rather than guide what exactly to read. Is it to reach more non-readers by making poetry more mainstream? Perhaps that’s it. But they’re already all household names and have been for decades (or am I just Ameri-centric?) Or maybe it’s to make something like a paparazzi industry /sex symbol of poets?

Brian Campbell points to this CBC article on the GG awards

fibonacci sequence III

(cross posted )

You know fibs? Fib poems are structured on the on the Fibonacci sequence which is the basis of the golden rectangle, perfect proportions. So the sequence goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, adding each of the last 2 numbers together. Phi is the golden ratio of 1.618… and part of the equation that makes the Fibonacci sequence. I played a bit and made,

phee!
phi
foe fum-
bled digits;
golden rule of thirds
stolen down beanstalk from giants

tanka quote

親は子を育ててきたと言うけれど 勝手に赤い畑のトマト
Parents say their child is a creature they have raised, but the fact is this : each has ripened as it pleased, a red garden tomato.
A tanka by Tawara Machi
Haiku is becoming a generic word. Like sushi becoming indistinct from sashimi. What is the difference between the senryu and haiku according to Elizabeth St Jacques? (found via George Swede of, among many other poetic places Simply Haiku where he looks top-down and bottom up at what a haiku prescriptively and descriptively is)

Timeless classics?

Some poems time travel better. Translations can update the linguistic wardrobe I suppose.

Night Thoughts

I cannot sleep. The long, long
Night is full of bitterness.
I sit alone in my room,
beside a smoky lamp.
I rub my heavy eyelids
And idly turn the pages
Of my book. Again and again
I trim my brush and stir the ink.
The hours go by. The moon comes
In the open window, pale
And bright like new money.
At last I fall asleep and
I dream of the days on the
River at Tsa-feng, and the
Friends of my youth in Yen Chao.
young and happy we ran
Over the beautiful hills.
And now the years have gone by.
And I have never gone back.

Lu Yu (1125 – 1209) (translated by Kenneth Rexroth in the 1950s)

The New Directions Anthology of Jacket Magazine review pointed out this Kenneth Rexroth to me. Now I’m inundated in books. Poetry I requested from the library at all different weeks is coming in at once.

I wanted to read again Marianne Bluger‘s Tamarack and Clearcut and Lucille Clifton’s Next poems. I wanted to read more of this Rexroth fellow and more of Wallace Stevens in Collected poems, but not all at the same time. A pressured proffered blessing.

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