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

Formative Pressures on Poetry

We are creatures of action and reaction. We have little choice but to react to our constraints even if we don’t know what they are consciously. It’s like responding to tone or body language. There’s an intuitive response.
We learn to use what we have to work with. If conversationally we know we may be able to slide in a uh-huh through the unending speech (that miraculously by some science unknown to me does not cause hyperventilation on the part of the speaker). We don’t form long replies. If we learn how to speak 1-2 minute presentations in a second language then are told to do a 15 minute talk, we aren’t practiced and trained for it any more than writing haiku trains us to be the next great hope novelist.
Ron Silliman (May 9) was talking about how the internet pressures us back to left justification since HTML can’t do any fancy fontwork. After a decade of typing the format becomes ingrained, second-nature, cognitively structured almost.

I had had to forego the machine for maybe three weeks back in 1968 when it was in the shop – a key broke off – and I tried to handwrite my poems on legal tablets. Later, when I typed up these manuscripts, they were almost all exactly one typewritten page long.

I have seen myself doing something similar in page. In diaries, somewhere between conscious and unnconsciously scanning the page, the clockface and figuring out how to maximize a chunk of thought in the space existing, forming the narrative by my constraints.
What if we took off the constrainsts or changed them? Would we change what is produced? Or shock ourselves into numb silence? For a while we would be stunted, just like our productivity may dip as we take on a new job, new role. Then do we exceed our previous box’s level? Can’t know until your try.
Also from Ron Silliman:

According to a survey by the Book Industry Study in 2005, Under the Radar, there are some 63,000 small presses generating $14.2 billion in sales. By comparison, as a result of industry consolidation there are about six large publishers today. And according to the Association of American Publishers, based in New York City, overall book sales hit $23.7 billion last year, up a slim 1.3%.
$14.2 billion out a total volume of $23.7 billion. That’s more than half. Isn’t it thus time that a majority of book coverage – and book reviews – concentrates on small and independent presses rather than the big six?

Poetry can be business but it’s also a buyer’s market
Joseph Bednarik in The Law of Diminishing Readership said

In a statistical mood, I once estimated how many “good poems” were being produced by recent graduates of MFA programs. Keeping all estimates conservative, I figured there had to be at least 450 poets graduating nationwide each year. If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems—not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate. New poems, poets, and manuscripts are added to the inventory every year.

mandate expansion

This journal is languishing with my only putting up the subset of poems that I wrote which are not dreck, which may be of interest to others and yet cannot be sent to market immediately.

Therefore I’m going to pad. ahem, that is expand my mandate.

The thought is I will include what poetry I’m reading, perhaps even what lit I’m reading generally and thoughts on that. Not to take it to the extreme of book discussions or literature reviews. Heaven forbid my making that much work for myself. We’ll see how it goes.

At the moment my head is reeling (in a good way) from the books I picked up at Baico books.

Since I should decompress after an exciting hockey game, poetry isn’t any better than chocolate for the need of the hour but if we stuck only to needs and excluded desires, whereever would we be.

I really should be asleep for an early start tomorrow, I’ll only mention this topmost thought:

Letters on Birchbark are poems of Quebecois writer Uta Regoli in translation by Henry Beissel which have the inner sing of walking deep in the woods as the mind clears and some amalgam rhythm of heart, pulse and footsteps come into music. That may be an entirely internal way of describing it but let me quote a bit and see if you can hear that something beyond words or word choice in a way, beyond concepts. Something like spartan, something like lyricism. I don’t even know if I’ll hear tomorrow but now:

City In March

But in the backyards
there is snow
and broken pieces of plastic
and the wings of seagulls
or paper
caught in wires
and ice […]
But up above
in the tattered clouds
geese cackle louder
than the acid breathing
of this stone animal.

Where I'm from

Written March 2005 based on the poem Where I’m From by George Ella Lyons via Fragments from Floyd. Tweaked to shorten and update today.

(huuuuuuugely long and somewhat depressing but meh, another day, another crack at it with dawn instead of nightfall’s gathering darkness prevailing.)

I’m from a township no longer named on maps

Memory lane has been overgrown
the pavement cracked open by goldenrod
and moss that only seems to do nothing.

I am from savannas of sumac scrub brush,
the backcountry, the bedrock, where the fissures
are crying *finally spring*, where small operation
farmers complain that having topsoil is just cheating.

I’m from where the boys have mostly fled, become city men,
where the nutrient hungry earth sucks as eagerly the blood
from chainsaw kickback or what the oil pans dump. I am from
there, where those that dare remain receive lashes for staying
as a tree falls and brings them down, him a peg indenting this
thin sand, when a logging chain snaps, wraps the scraping bruise
iron links as a bear hug that cracks ribs, a greeting
that is merciful only in speed, merciful in not taking off
his head, merciful in its early warning to leave.

And I am from Auntie’s root cellar, its cool hardpacked floor,
the corral for the pyramid of potatoes, the burps of sump pump,
the toads peeing in hand, the rickety rows of plum preserves,
canned yellow beans, pickled watermelon rinds, indian relishes and jams.
From farm-armed reach at the table and starting a meal with prayer.
I’m from dang, dash, yeppers, hokey smokes, jaypers and “well, Land”.

I’m from free range chickens and home-slaughtered beef, milking
the goats and the cow and soowiiieeee throwing scraps to piggies,
From never scraping up enough cash for relief from the ground
but always having food to eat, and music and family. I am
200 km and a culture away from where I had been.

I am from my father’s “the past is dead
as it should be”, the imaginative mysteries to not speak of.
And I am from the slow creep of the doddering senile Old Man time
who likes to scare small children who were told he died.

I’m from this glistening listening facet of this moment
of this city’s sparkling cement, light on my feet. I sleep
and wake to canned beat of talk radio, drum Chakras and central heat
clicking in and out. I step from basking in steaming sunflower showerheads,
cash economy, vacations of red sand beaches of PEI. I am from
what I make of myself from — breaths, library books. I am from
my husband’s looks lost in mine, from ideas divided across the keyboards.

I am from and become the chances I took and take and press.
I am the internalization of the polestar, northern lights, high desert camping,
the feet on floor in circle dance after potlucks with dahl, lotus seed buns,
and tabouli of friends. I am victorious conversations in Spanish, Mandarin,
French. I am from day tripping Monmartre in cobble-stoned Paris. I am
from shifting the stones of my fence to weigh in closer to future than past.

I am plucked from the strings, not of harps, not of bows, not of aprons,
but banjos pulled from back rooms, spoons played from the drawers
and old bluegrass gospel tunes played from memory. I am from clothes
re-repatched, on sale at Salvation Army, and cleaning cloths that were panties
drying on the rail. I am from aunts that buy art, and cousins with oil wells.
I am from Sunday school fuzzy-backed Jesus stuck to a cloth scene. I am from
being told I was shy and hardworking and an odd bird. I am from overheard

stories. I am I’m from the planted memories of my parents that grew green,
overgrew me until I had to rip some out by the roots to have room
to design the garden to new tastes. I am from meditation. I am trusting anyway.
I am from the pluck of finger piano, the tap of drum skins, from smiles of recognition,
from jot and iota and jots a priori and from strawberries and sorrows, sparrows
and escapades that I later realized were narrow canyons that I shinnied down to
myself and I am the wisdom of taking the gondola back up. I am community.

I am from the sparkle of my parents eyes but as much the steady pools
of sureness of Hers, Susan, my mother’s mother, ever curious and accepting,
being herself who knew she is more than the slur that is Irish,
more than her own illiterate hardscrabble roots. I am from her.

She lived that not luck but hard work has everything
to do with success, the lady who taught herself to read,
once the 14 kids were grown, and she in her 70s
when it seemed the last weren’t going to leave home
so it was time for her to go on and get a hobby.

I am from her 200-strong clan, the results of her eloping
with her chosen man, opinions and laws be damned.
I am from her at 15, lying of her age, sneaking by buggy
with a female cousin to the next jurisdiction,
scheming, meeting, marrying cousin Ernest in the English Townships
of Quebec, them returning home wed, parents agape
with nothing more that can be said, husband proudly behind her,
she *his little red hen*.

I am of them. And I am of Saturday night euchre tables for men,
(sandwich making in the basement for women), us kids
running ragged until whiney or drooling in the coat pile
at the old Orange hall. I’m from the sudden hush from clatter
everything folded up before the stroke of midnight,
so all would be home for the Sabbath. I’m from services
in the morning and KFC on Sunday afternoons
with everyone and their hound dropping in Back Home to Granny’s.

I am faith and I am from being believed in. I am the dignity and indignities
of work. I am the culminative, calmative released hurt. I am my knees
that creak louder than larynx and I am dreams mixed with memories
and actions and I am listening for echoes of gramma’s encouragement
and her sigh and mine as I turn.