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

Canadian as rhubarb pie, tart pucker sweet stale

Canadian as rhubarb pie, tart pucker sweet stale

there’s no trustworthy holding pattern for happy
veined bluebells timbales evicerate sun
at each unseen dawn they will leak dew

feeling unaccountable well I had an urge
to dock ears, make prosthetics for sows
from the many fine purses of last season

passing graves I stop in, not to stay,
(wrong denomination of death)
behind the sturdy wrought iron

some flush, some mound, some cave
buried under the lisp of wind licked grass
let’s make sexual this teensy death of strangers,

drab: the almost unreactive
silk flowers fade, petals drop
more forlorn for no good rot

judging by what passes as evidence

I browse titles of how to manage toxic people
poetry of skill and terrible import(ance) and think
the solution in my hands,
the books read each other and self-annialiate,
leave me to cleaning the floor in peace,
with time leftover to have friends at tea.
—
O’Hara wrote http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/2006/06/23/why-i-am-not-a-painter/
Why I am Not a Painter, which you can hear at pō’ĭ-trē
—

Gluck

Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good
to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.

In Averno by Louise Gluck, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux
96pp., $22 is the poem, October

It has a melancholy, partial truth to it.

Don’t obey: do good to me anyway. 🙂

proliferation of voices

This is something Silliman has calculated before and I’ll copy it here in hopes I won’t mislay it readily

[A]t two books per week, you could read the poetry books published in the U.S. just in 2006 by roughly 2045. If you read a book a day, however, you can get it done by the end of 2014 or thereabouts. And then you could begin on 2007.
This is obviously where canons, anthologies and selection comes in. You really don’t want to read all 4,000 titles that will be published this year, regardless of what your allegiance is to aesthetic camps. Indeed, you can’t possibly read just the post-avant texts that will be published this year, just because it’s probably the largest single semi-coherent grouping of those titles today. It would not shock me to discover that, of the 4,000 titles, as many as 1,500 can be identified as post-avant [snip].
And the last 1,500 have no allegiance or connection really to anything. Some of these are fiercely independent isolatos, but the bulk are no more well read than are my students this week. These authors are disconnected because they really are disconnected.

Source: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-dont-teach-that-often-maybe-once_30.html