I'm a completist about some poets (Monty Reid, Phil Hall, Donna Kane, Ross Gay, Jamie Sharpe, Nelson Ball, Kay Ryan, rob mclennan, Rae Armantrout, David Groulx, etc). I enjoy the internal consistency and the shifts. Each chapbook or book is a way station. I like the long game of following what a writer does next by the context they themselves create.
This leads me to consider my own root/route cause. Where I was, stuck at one point, I felt for Indiana Jones, Temple or Dooms(day), walls closing in. I was compelled to shake off the medieval to 1800s landscape I was born into. I ran at anti-narrative, anti-meaning, sound, oblique jangle to refuse and to leave no room for the semantic defaults until I was safely clear. In retrospect, this was defensive. I had to induce a tectonic shift.
Poems were pushed out, like structural pillars pushed by Samson, to force the house to fall because so much cannot stand as was. Lines of anger that were a donkey's jawbone to slay old selves with. Informed in part by being nervous to well-gone-anxious, and overstimulated and in an urban clamour, jammed with unprocessed. This resulted, in part, in the manuscript Thirsts (Snare, 2011). Rushing Dusk does not come from the same captive house but miles beyond it.
I bent to surreal to reimagine the world, to take ownership of how I was to perceive, to give permission to play, and again, to refuse internalized givens and stretch beyond my usual range of motion. A certain amount of destruction of expectations needed to make room. A stanza, set aside for curative chaos.
Within a couple manuscripts of haiku, the constraints are cinched hard to the form, with different blinders on or microscope up. Eyes are still in freeze response, darting, averting, hyper-focusing. The poems can be more and will be but they may have to have been that range of mental motion first.
I read a meme somewhere that if a child is given no privacy, every thought they allow to form is for public consumption because they have no healthy boundaries or navigation skills. It might explain. It might not. Desire to connect with opaque word-shaped-poetry or with open-faced verse. A person needs down time, not all made for public consumption. Lines, lines, where to place.
With later manuscripts I tried to own up to my history, with a step to the side, doing haibun of my dad. And a manuscript that I got a grant for of understanding where my mom was coming for and our complex relationship. (Some bits of these are published.) This is an assessing and reframing of remains stage. This might be the practice of during panic attack to relax your brain stem response by looking around, behind you, moving your eyes and body.
All things are part of the whole travel. (Okay, clearly, yes, transparently, I'm avoiding honking the trope-horn of the word "journey".) The love poem suite, the health poem suite, the vector poems are gathering from past, to present to what-can-I-make-of-the-future. A bunch of these poems are looking for their poem-people in what comes out of my head.
Rushing Dusk is a rebuilding phase, and part of the same overall book-look of rain's small gestures (Apt. 9, 2022).
Some of these poems are more minimalist than others but they are trying to not bury the lede and amuse and distract and hop and point over-there and run away. It is allowing self to sit and permit myself to admit the profound and meaningful is possible without breaking faith with truths. They feel more tentative than frantic or frenetic.
They poems are feeling their way with their feet in
dusk, more than feeling with hands and tripping fool-self in the dark, or in
bright morning light on those tricky patches of smooth floor with shadows to
stumble over.
These are poems after anxiety meds, after living in the countryside, while walking the woods, while sinking into slower sound, while having dealt with some shit. They are poems permitting metaphor and story back into the fold. The poems are more clear-eyed and vulnerable.
I'm walking at my own mortality instead of running away from it in these poems, conscious of how much life is a blink of the eye.
Pearl Pirie's fourth published trade poetry collection was footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures (Apt 9 Press, Sept 2021) is her chapbook of minimalist poems which won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize..
After decades in Ottawa, Pearl Pirie now lives in rural Quebec where she reads, reviews, carries stones and wood, builds and writes. She is a volunteer librarian for the Wakefield Public Library and a volunteer sorter at a thrift shop. She is on Instagram and Patreon. Her author site is www.pearlpirie.com
Pearl Pirie will be launching Rushing Dusk in Ottawa on August 10 as part of the above/ground press 31st anniversary reading, alongside Mahaila Smith, Gil McElroy, Chris Banks, Carlos A. Pittella and Shane Rhodes; tickets available here.
