the ottawa small press book fair : home edition #2 : phafours press,

Pearl Pirie with fellow exhibitor Seymour Hamilton : photo by Stuart Ross

phafours press, is meant to spread wider what delights me, or moves me. Sometimes thar’s social conscience, or haiku or surreal. I’d like to publish poetry with the importance & tone of the stories in Shut Up You’re Pretty. But who wouldn’t.

Online it’s at www.pearlpirie.com/phafours or you can go to Twitter but tweets are fewer than leaves on a winter oak @phafours

Pearl Pirie’s fourth collection, footlights, comes in the fall 2020 from Radiant Press. Her newest chapbook is Not Quite Dawn (Éditions des petits nuages, March, 2020). Her epistle haibun chapbook, Water loves its bridges: Letters to the dead, is due out in Dec 2020 from The Alfred Gustav Press by subscription.

Q: Tell me about your press. How long have you been publishing, and what got you started?

The idea(l) of a press with the power of means of production in hand appeals. I like self-reliance. I made chapbooks since primary school.

I thought online meant anyone could access but sites get lost in the billions. I wanted “real world” copies of my online chapbooks at pagehalffull so made mini chapbooks of those online around 2000-2003 & dropped them guerilla style in library books, at cafes, and in newspaper boxes like I saw homeless people doing with their poems.

I wanted to make a poem sampler, yes, I called it that,  for a small press fair in 2007. That was when the press started because I started looking beyond my own poems.

It seemed it needed a name so I picked phafours (fa’ forz) for the PHA4 gene which governs the pharyngeal cells, gonads, sphincter and may relate to longevity. I thought it was funny. Plus it’s a homophobe for favours.

I wanted to publish poems of the Rubies & boost other poets around me which I did. 2 years after that I took a bookmaking workshop with Terry Ann Carter and discovered flutter books. I started asking friends if they’d let me promote them with this format & dropped them about willynilly after the style of rob with his poem broadsides.

I did a few anthology chapbooks,- some co-published with Tree Press, but mostly single author. Some were experiments in fancy hand binding like Monty Reid’s Kissing Bug with the sepele veneer cover.

One anthology had all funds going to the Guatemala Stove Project so poetry funded stoves for 3 families. That’s something I’m most proud of. Real world change.

All in, 57 titles.

Q: How many times have you exhibited at the ottawa small press fair? How do you find the experience?

I’m not sure. Maybe since 2011?  15 times? I could be wildly wrong. I missed a year at least as an exhibitor due to concussion. I probably went since 2006? Sometimes I tabled with others. The past is a coastal country of fog.

The fair is the biggest social of my year & my biggest book buying blowouts. I like seeing the new faces & familiar ones with no where to be but chat. I feel at home among like-minds. 

My fav part of readings is the chatting and this is that without having to aurally absorb poetry. I’d rather read.

Q: Would you have made something specific for this spring’s fair? Are you still doing that? How does the lack of spring fair this year effect how or what you might be producing?

Not this time, but I had hoped to sell my newest chapbook from Éditions des petits nuages. In the fall i hoped to sell my Radiant press book as an author but probably 2020 fall fair is off too? Maybe quarantine will last 2 years.

I haven’t had an open call for a couple years. I try to solicit women poets, check in for years, but get put off & get out of the blue from retired white guys. Even after I put up notice of closed for submissions. but that’s industry standard reflection of societal gender behaviour.

There were a few chapbooks in my wish-queue last year that I got out there.

I haven’t decided whether to produce more or not but a few years ago I decided I won’t be acting like a commercial press anymore, making new wares for spring & fall seasons. I will publish when there’s energy & sometimes I can’t resist trying to signal boost.

Q: How are you, as a small publisher, approaching the myriad shut-downs? Is everything on hold, or are you pushing against the silences, whether in similar or alternate ways than you might have prior to the pandemic? How are you getting your publications out into the world?

Everything is winter molasses. I hear that is common in Spain on grilled eggplant but since I have no eggplant, make of that what you will.

Pre-pandemic I closed the etsy endeavour since it cost more than it made in fees. I updated my massively (3 year) out of date author site. www.pearlpirie.com. I made a few chapbooks as free downloads under resources. People buy from there. De facto every dollar paid for my chapbooks, i go around & buy twice as much in books. (Oops.)

Mostly I’m reading & working not writing & publishing.

I’m designing new online courses with an ever sliding schedule of launch date.

Q: Have you done anything in terms of online or virtual launches since the pandemic began? Have you attended or participated in others? How are you attempting to connect to the larger literary community?

I will be doing my first zoom reading  7pm on June 12 with Ellen Chang-Richardson, Chris Johnson, Conyer Clayton, and Christine McNair as part of the inauguration of the House Party Series. Contact to register & for details at: RSVP with housepartypoetryseries@gmail.com.  Book sales & hat pass all goes to Black Legal Action Centre.

I have attended three Zoom events, and attempted to attend a couple more but didn’t get through. 

I often don’t have enough internet here to connect even for a phone call where in we both don’t sound like Darth Vader, but I’m more curtailed by how much I can absorb. 

I suppose twitter remains my main hub for what’s going on in literature. And books themselves.

Q: Has the pandemic forced you to rethink anything in terms of production? Are there supplies or printers you haven’t access to during these times that have forced a shift in what and how you produce?

I usually print from my home printer anyway. A lot of sales are direct by mail so no big changes there.

It’s more an examination in how I wish to spend my time. I like layout & design but not fiddly bits of assembly or the baffling art of promotion & sales.

And I question the point of publishing to absorb loss. The economics are harsh. I want authors to make money from poetry. Maybe that’s me being commodity-minded which is the wrong model. Many authors often give their copies for free to people I would have sold to in order to get back material costs. I don’t know how not to lose money & for the author not to lose money.

I don’t know how to sell ideas that I’m jazzed about. Maybe I bite down too much on my enthusiasm and assume the brilliance of these works are self-evident?

If authors are already good at self-promo marketing, what value do I add with my stamp? Anyone can publish. If they are not good at sales, i don’t think I can move stuff to the degree they deserve. I am flummoxed Grumpy Cat.

Q: What are your most recent publications? How might people still be able to order copies?

The morning becomes azaleas/
Le matin devient azalées haiku by Paul David Mena
Evacuate: poems by Mohamad Kebbewar
Occasionally Rational Human by Stephen Brockwell
Savior of the Western Wor(l)d by Pearl Pirie
Cough of a Sloth by Claudia Coutu Radmore

Everything is at www.pearlpirie.com/phafours with prices. People can email what they want & we can work out etransfer or whatnot from there.

Q: What are you working on now?

In theory a novel. (Maybe more practically a thumb puzzle. )

I’m trying to read as much as I can. Currently: Shut Up You're Pretty by Téa Mutinji, Motel of the Opposable Thumbs by Stuart Ross,  Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, The Devil by John Nyman, The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde, and The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power by Desmond Cole.

Talking Poetics #7 : Pearl Pirie

talking (Ottawa) poetics

Running on the red line made for a lot of words. My emotional intensity came across but people often had no idea what I was saying. I write very little now, compared to before anxiety meds.

I used to be “sent” by anything; a phrase, a concept, a scrabble board word combo. I’d riff or recant who I was reading. I would search notes for a electrical pulse and connect up all the pulses, organizing by energy rather than (conventional) sense. I wrote to focus so I could hear just one train conversation at a time instead of the whole busy train station. To that end it did its work. I went intuitively impulsively against the currents of gravity wells I pushed this vessel to solid ground. I want to look at the how and why more than the what, what, what.

Whereas I was diverting a lot of energy to shields and to monitoring communications arrays, now I’m a cartographer.

Before, if I let myself write automatically, I feared it would reinforce the old ideologies I wanted to eject. Mechanical procedures of poetry were an out, to redirect and retrain the brain not to entrench along old easy paths. Even prepositional phrases were suspect because of all the grammatical branching hierarchies. Phrases, fragments, insistence on partial understanding, and process allowed the self to move freely, explore.

I used to worry that I’d lose vital inspiration in the shower or as I go to sleep, but a poem nags at me for weeks and I have to honour that with space and time.

I’ve become aware of how little I contextualize myself, how I jump in mid-way. I’m trying to use the potentially slower pace of writing to my advantage to work out what is relevant to convey. I aim to map what I want to carry forward with me, what matters to me and others. I write as a practice of mindfulness. I’m largely editing to understand what I wrote, 6, 10, 15 years ago. This substantive editing is a kind of writing.

I explore the loss of my father. A third chapbook length of that is underway. I explore the theory of mind of what my father’s experience would have been, now that I have the neural space to see past my own inner fireworks show. That involves a lot of working physically and letting understanding come vulnerable to me, then find words to chart so others can see what I saw and offer that.

Pearl Pirie’s 4th poetry collection, Footlights, comes in the fall of 2020 from Radiant Press. Her haiku and tanka chapbook, Not Quite Dawn, comes from Éditions des petits nuages in spring 2020. This chapbook of haibun, Water loves its bridges: Letters to the dead has another epistle with Eldon, letters (above/ground, 2019). She can be found on twitter at pesbo, and at her author site where she offers resources and conducts poetry courses at www.pearlpirie.com

Recent Reads: "The Sourdough Collaborations" by Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie

The Sourdough Collaborations by Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie

Published by Phafours Press, 2015.

The Sourdough Collaborations is a rare consortium: an exchange between two poets that is chronicled in evolving drafts as well as informal discussion about the applications and results of each approach used. To put it another way, The Sourdough Collaborations is the making of The Sourdough Collaborations. And seeing as how authors Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie have lifted the curtain, explaining their various intuition and internet-based means of manipulating text, I’m essentially writing footnotes on footnotes.

Regardless, I felt like a participant in the chapbook’s playful abandon. Whether they’re putting a poem through a series of translations (in one case: Spanish to Catalan to English to Klingon to French then back to English), riffing on the outcome or each other’s interpretation, Prevost and Pirie share an unguarded willingness to chase fresh writing. To give a broad idea of their interchange, here’s a poem undertaken by Pirie:

(Note: Although it’s customary to share a few excerpts, I must preface to remind that very satisfying context surrounds the creation of these poems. Seek out a copy here.) 

water-mind

sweet chap of bubble-language, nothing else

is in this (refillable) glass but us.

past refracted alfalfa fields, their roots like turnips

we 6 gaze, nod as seahorse steeds

ledge of seashells are Christian bystanders

in 2 hour litany of k’pows, daddy finger-blams

mangy fox, psycho cow, vagrant bear till Emmy holds up

her teddy, asks, would you shoot this in the bush?

an organ grinder in the gut claps, makes terrible

digestion, a useless sluice of gastric;

no bite against junkyard violence. us listing

as a group what gives reflux, cukes, orange juice…

the movement of ripples is a wobble in the plans

in the planes, in the planets

not the culpa of our wet earth.

it’s only you and me here; what matters now?

let us have as much compass direction as a rake.

that APB? never mind. self was never lost but a rain walk. 
(Pirie, pg. 16)

And here is Prevost’s response:

our slow liquid

The original bottle of us, filled and capped

permeates our travels

undersea fields of the kelp-woman

as she rides quiescent undertows

thin calcium armors, whose ridges

foretell an upcoming sparagmos

even landlocked prey will plead

with many-faced little-girl gods

what we stomach laughs out loud

weak acid drips harmless off skin

a stack gathers to attack

a lining that shrugs away

shaken by what should stir

the edge curves around the globe

tides, tidings on this stage

this known story still surprises

the map or mapless number

remains one small-big-whole fraction

that walks from and into fog

as enjoyable as ether 
(Prevost, pg. 17)

Despite appearing surgically removed from their authors’ comments, “water-mind” and “our slow liquid” present the core infallibility of this collaborative unit: Prevost and Pirie are keen readers and listeners, capable of shaping one another’s gambits into sturdy morsels worth pulling apart. Though the exercises seem custom-built for Pirie’s elastic dissection of koan and colloquialism, Prevost proves totally up to the challenge, often distilling these ‘bastard ghazals’ to their imagistic potential. Like any thriving partnership, one person’s strengths must balance the other’s. At various points in-between the peaks of exploration and consolidation, the Ottawa-area poets achieve a single, hybridized voice.

It could be said, albeit unfairly, that the procedures and approaches they discuss outshine the poems themselves – but that’s like saying limitless possibility outshines the closure of a finished piece! At one point, Prevost and Pirie realize their exchange could go on forever:

“As in renga, the poetic conversation starts conservative, safe, and gears up. By mid-point it can go wilder as at the height of a party where speech is most loose. More politics or violence or conflict or general chaos can be engaged with. Likewise with this. Once we were comfortable with the back and forth, we could stretch, throw wilder and assume the other could run for it, catch and throw something back.” (pg. 12)

The allure of possibility is magnetic because it’s theoretical. But these poems, often thoughtful, warm and surprising, double as blueprints of choice, using stream-of-consciousness, linguistic and homophonic translation, a bunch of excisions and intuition as ways of keeping options open. Given the imagination on tap for The Sourdough Collaborations, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine these bakers finding their way into the kitchen for a second batch.

We Who Are About to Die: Pearl Pirie

Pearl Pirie is an editor, publisher and poet. Author of the pet radish, shrunken (BookThug, 2015) and other titles. She runs workshops in Ottawa and online and spends as much summer as she can canoeing and looking for fungi to photograph. The cat attacks her feet presumably to interject the job of cat butler shouldn’t be neglected. www.pearlpirie.com

Where are you now?
In my green velvet wingback. I have wanted a chair like this for years. Whoever said money doesn’t buy happiness is misinformed. Money buys medicine, infrastructure, chocolate, books, roof repair, seasonal fruit, and a chair.

What are you reading?
The Essential Earthman: Henry Mitchell (First Mariner, 1981) which assures us no year is good for every plant or bad for every plant, The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde (Norton, 1978) which packs power, The World, I Guess by George Bowering (New Star, 2015) which is fascinating breadth, each chapter a complete departure in form and subject.

I’m generally spread across a dozen or more books. Also starting:1491: New Revelations of the America’s Before Columbus by Charles C Mann (Knoff, 2005), Fragments de Sofnos par Claire Rochon (Éditions du Nuroît, 2009), Aisles de taule par Éric Charlebois and Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis (Simon and Schuster, 1998).

What have you discovered lately?
Familiar is from the same root as familial. This is finally the season when honey locusts smell like honey. This site on dragonflies: http://onnaturemagazine.com/odonata-guide.html and this is a good policy; no is a good word. save up your yesses so there's room to do what you want & need to.
At Çatalhöyük  archaeobotanists, Ceren Kabukcu found with a microscope that neolithic people ate acorns, tubers, seeds, lentils, pea, grasspea, hackberry, and plums, and one-grain and two-grain einkorn wheat grains and that people burnt elm, oak and juniper wood in their ovens.

Illuminating stories: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), In Search of the Perfect Loaf: a home baker’s odyssey by Samuel Fromartz (Viking/Penguin, 2014), The immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Crown, 2010)

Where do you write?
Mostly in my home office but I scratch down ideas anywhere I am. I mostly edit at my desk. Or sprawled across the floor. I’m making time to keep office hours to make room for rest of life.

What are you working on?
Oh my, so many things. Tree reading series fall and next spring line up, grant applications, adding more to a manuscript of minimalist poems, editing a set of 30 years of breast poems (Best of the Breast too corny?) and a manuscript of tanka. Updating the mailing list for the KaDo so I don’s miss inviting anyone to the Sept haiku meeting. Tweaking a chapbook of the sex in sevens series. Letting canvas priming dry. Brainstorming designs for a fall chapbook from phafours, lining up guests for upcoming Literary Landscape and putting away stuff from teaching kids at the Carleton Creative Writing Camp. Feebly cleaning my office before stacks domino and flatten someone, like a cat. Hubby and I are considering shed plans for the firewood, canoe and kayak. Selling the words(on)pages chapbook (ongoing lack of spontaneous combustion) online, and psyching up for Fieldworks where 10 writers go out into a field and forest art exhibition and write ekphrastically and perform the poems within 3 days.

Have you anything forthcoming?
Looks like. A few months ago I’d have said no but promising leads. Shhhh. Sex in Sevens (from age 17-45). Watch www.pearlpirie.com

What would you rather be doing?
Nought.


at 20: lightning sonnets, uncorsetted

How did you make out?

laugh at Friday’s pantomime — my clothes boxed, hidden,
my photo put in a frame to remember me when your parents came.

I was to wait outside, pace out of sight through winter drifts,
arrive some time after they settled in. greet as if we hadn’t just—

I flaked out, waited in the lobby, came upstairs doggedly,
declaring my cold walk, while sweaty and no glasses fogged.

like an English word in a French text, recognition leaps
of truth with cob-nailed soles with its two left feet.

would a latex suit do for passing through the lightning
of your mind, unseen, unstruck? near edge, heightening

to strip on the balcony in front of dark windows, wracked
at heat lightning ineffectually lighting your shirt’s back—

it catches on the nailhead of my pupil, before
rain tickles the thrumming dark on our shoulders.

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Marilyn Irwin on shreeking violet press

shreeking violet press, established in June 2014, specializes in small runs of handcrafted poetry broadsides, books and other papery oddities.

Marilyn Irwin is a graduate of Algonquin College’s Creative Writing program, winner of the 2013 Diana Brebner Prize, and a 2014 Hot Ottawa Voice. Her work has been published by above/ground press, Arc Poetry Magazine, Bywords, In/Words, New American Writing, Matrix Magazine and others. Her seventh and most recent chapbook, waving usufruct, a poetry/photography collaboration with David Emery and Samantha Lapierre, was published by The Steel Chisel in 2016. She runs shreeking violet press in Ottawa.

shreeking violet press will be participating in the ottawa small press book fair, to be held on Saturday, June 18.

1 – When did shreeking violet press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
After being named a 2014 Hot Ottawa Voice by the Tree Reading Series, I decided to make a broadside of my poem “sex at 31” to sell at the reading as I didn’t have much to leave on the book table at the time. Due to lack of time and a big helping of ambition which involved a typewriter, unforgiving handmade paper and needle and thread, I only made 4 (and then 2 more, one for myself and one for a friend who requested it). I realized it was then or never and wrote “shreeking violet press” on each. I refer to it as “Broadside #0”.

Over the next several months, I obtained a logo and went a little nuts purchasing art supplies. I carved different rubber stamps (something I previously had never attempted) and painstakingly hand stamped 150 broadsides and modge podged little fabric wraps (more, if you count the ones that I futzed up) and spent way too much on cool envelopes for the inaugural spring collection with poems by rob mclennan, JC Bouchard and Rachael Simpson. While I treasure them dearly, I realized that production model was not sustainable and that, if I wanted to keep things relatively affordable without compromising my creative itch while respecting and honouring the work people submit, there must be another way.

For the fall 2015 launch, I accepted chapbook manuscripts from Pearl Pirie and David Currie. This time, I outsourced the printing and art which saved immense time and stress and afforded me the time to focus on the layout and design and sewing the binding, etc. This model of production persists and continues to be effective and relatively smooth.

Since establishing the press on a whim, I have been publishing new books and broadsides by some amazingly talented writers in the spring and fall, to coincide with the bi-annual ottawa small press book fair (with the odd one-off). I feel like we’ve figured out our stride for this stage of the press’ lifecycle.

I have learned how to be more patient. I have learned that sacrifices sometimes have to be made for valid reasons. I have learned the joy of helping to bring other people’s work into being and it is rewarding beyond measure.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?
It stemmed out of my desire to create books and nice, papery things which first crossed my mind when I self-published my first chapbook, for when you pick daisies, in 2010, for my first featured reading with the factory reading series.

The desire to make unique representations of work I admire by people I admire occurred to me moments after I completed the project. I can’t really draw or paint but I love experimenting with crafts and I love paper as a physical object which, alone, can reflect a wide variety of styles and moods. I love editing documents and the whole midwifing process. I really enjoy helping to anchor something as abstract as poetry to an actualized, physical form. And there is no better feeling than seeing an author as excited about the finished product as I am after they’ve entrusted me to best represent and showcase their work.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
To assist the author by way of platform in spreading their humble, beautiful, gut-wrenching, devious, burning, important words to the minor masses. To act as archivist.Validation. Encouragement.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
My initial reaction to this question is “I don’t know” simply because there are so many other presses doing their own wonderful things, making their own contributions to the local and further poetry communities. There are many new and established poets and authors whose wonderful, experimental, raw, upsetting work I wouldn’t otherwise know thanks to small presses.

As a publisher, I’m particularly interested in work that is equally foreign and familiar. There needs to be that balance of intrigue as well as an appeal to my human experience. If I’m not affected by the work, I won’t be inspired by it and it will be written with permanent marker on cardboard bound with tape. The hope is that all comes out in my choice of authors and our finished products.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?
You know, I bet the internet is probably the answer here; soft copies. We have an online presence and one can purchase our wares online but, for now, I prefer sticking to real paper smell and real paper feel. The paper method might not be as effective at spreading the word as far or making as many sales but, if those were my true blue life intentions at this point, I wouldn’t have a day job. The MOST effective way would be to follow the above/ground method of quick copies on cost-effective paper in higher runs bound with 1 staple. It’s just not what I’ve set out to do. And I enjoy the sewing and the stamping, and the pretty paper, etc., etc., too much.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
Yes. All of that. First and foremost, I only solicit work from writers whose work I genuinely enjoy and admire. I generally assess the individual pieces (singular if broadside), then the project as a whole. I will share my thoughts and suggested edits (if any) but the author retains full control and final say and I’m very transparent on this point.

Some poets will ask for a more in-depth review and others would prefer little to no input. I’m happy to oblige but am careful to pay attention to cohesion, syntax vs rewriting their voice and intentions out when they are game for feedback. My effort really depends on the shape of the work and how nitty gritty the writer (and I) want to get. Some submissions are more polished or clear in their intent than others when they arrive. I try not to get too handsy but will suggest minor edits or, in the case of chapbooks, removal or exchange of pieces if they don’t flow or contribute to the flow of what’s happening around it. I’m game for whatever it takes for both the writer and I to feel proud about what we accomplish and set free into the world by the end of the process.

7 – How do your books and broadsides get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
Currently we have a bi-annual presence at the Ottawa small press book fair and are hoping, time and finances willing, to attend book fairs outside the city in the coming year(s).

We love to daydream about what annual/biannual launches or a regular-ish reading series might look like. We could put our things on a table and call it the book table and see what happens.

Our wares are always available, while supplies last, through our Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/shreekingvioletpress

Runs vary, according to available time and finances, from 50 to 100 copies.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
It is mostly a one-woman affair. I have outsourced some of the printing (and folding) to save on time and headache – especially when deadlines approach. I’ve also worked with some amazingly talented artists such as Angie Nellis and Geoffrey Bates and am always looking to collaborate with artists willing to work on these projects. It is consistently a beautiful time.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
I suppose it hasn’t; not obviously, anyway. I have my tastes and my ways and, while I have noticed my writing style has evolved over the past 7 or 8 or 9 years that I’ve been actively engaging with poetry and the poetry community, I can’t boil down a single “ism” I can solely attribute to my growth as editor/publisher when so many other wonderful experiences have been part of my education and experience as a writer.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
This can be a contentious issue, depending on with whom you speak. I see the argument for and against. I see no justifiable reason why a publisher shouldn’t publish their own work through their own press (considering the amount of time, energy and, presumably, out of pocket finances they have invested in their company) with the caveat that you don’t make your own work the priority or focus of your press’ output. Because that would get old real fast. There is merit to seeing the worth of your own work and not being able to find it a home/mid-wife. There is also the possibility that one needs to further edit instead of self-publish before it’s truly ready for other eyes. And one of the perks to focusing on other authors is all the amazing, never before seen work you get to read and produce all nice-like for the people.

I’ve self-published thrice under the shreeking violet imprint. The first was a run of 4 + 2 broadsides which inspired my getting into action to set up the press.The second was a broadside co-released with a broadside by Ottawa poet Chris Johnson as we were collaborating on erasure poems which culminated in a joint feature for the relaunch of Chrysalis back in December. And, a poem of mine will appear in our first collective effort, due out this spring: “L’dor vador: A collection of poems inspired by other people’s recipes.” This, for the simple fact that I facilitated the workshop which inspired me to create the book and I participated along with the group. These choices made sense to me at the time and I don’t feel as though my name is too pervasive throughout the shreeking violet catalogue. It’s difficult to be objective about how not-me thinks to know if it’s overkill or not but I’m more or less comfortable with the choices I’ve made on this subject.

11– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
above/ground, Apt. 9, Puddles of Sky, Little Red Leaves and JackPine all offered a different and appealing perspective on what small press publishing could mean - and they continue to do so. I’m sure I’m missing another handful of names. There are so many more who make beautiful little books which I’m just discovering. It’s an exciting time to have a toe in the small press world.

12– How does shreeking violet press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see shreeking violet press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
Food for thought! It’s amazing how many opportunities present themselves once you establish a thing or start a thing or do a thing. This type of engagement has not been on my radar, for the most part, due to limited brain space and time for what I want and need to do with the press in its establishing years. I will add this to my daydreams. Please ask again in some years’ time.

13– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
This has been on the backburner for about a year. If I could split myself in three….

14– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
Due to limited time and finances to invest in production and communications to hopeful authors and an ever growing list of people we’d like to publish, shreeking violet does not currently accept submissions.
 15– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
Pearl Pirie’s Reviews of Non-existent Titles was the inaugural chapbook we published on the heels of our first three broadsides. It was the first objet d’art where I didn’t have to create the d’art so it was a much more zenful experience on my end. The description over on our Etsy store reads: “Reviews of Non-existent Titles is a bitingly funny and thoughtful collection of book reviews of books that, well, don't exist. While the books may not be real, Pirie’s commentary beautifully and painfully captures the dichotomy that surfaces when critically examining poetry - especially the kind that makes a reader cringe.”

I’m very excited to be publishing Ryan Pratt’s debut chapbook, Rabbit months, this spring. Ryan is a long-time supporter and reviewer of small press goings-on, namely between Ottawa and his current hometown of Hamilton with a growing list of his own publication credits in recent years. It’s been a pleasure working with Ryan and engaging with his pieces. It’s my hope that this book will help underscore and spread the reach of  his careful skill. Poems like “Nagual” read like someone wise beyond their years with that perfect balance of observation, meditation and intrigue boiled down from a real experience or reaction: “The light is still felt. The word moon / points someplace else.” I hesitate to quote some of his other pieces as his formatting is precise, just as his every word, and line choice as been placed just so.   

L’dor Vdor: A collection of poems inspired by other people’s recipes  is the result of a workshop on “Recipe Poetry” which I facilitated earlier this spring through Carleton University’s English Literature Society. I’m very excited to publish such promising young writers including Ian Martin and Jennifer Greenberg with some beautiful illustrations by Geoffrey Bates. This is the perfect book for foodies and poetry lovers alike. Some recipes are more appetizing than others. It was a fun project through and through and I hope that comes through in the finished product.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

On writing #7 : Pearl Pirie

Use of Writing
Pearl Pirie

What is writing good for? Writing is not a direct path. It may be a lousy strategy. When there are better ones, the point is to get to goal, not to make poetry a gofer. It's not as if poetry will stop unless it gets time to play dress up by the couch. It's the boy scout that will carry indignant middle aged men across the street, given no assignment at all.

Writing is not a gentle-handed masseuse. it is not a therapist of the under(cash-economy)employed but it may play that role in the wee hours with the blinds down. is it pre-prayer?

Poetry might not only be perceptive. It might be another perceptual organ. It feels outwards for resistances and bliss routes, fumbles to retrain the damaged bits and restrain the oafs from smacking their over-energetic limbs into passersby in their clumsiness. Perhaps writing is a parent to the other selves, guiding, caring, adding its higher vantage point or offbeat blown raspberry.

It is there to turn a knotted gut and a deep muscle cramp and resistance into a listening "what?" and a "you seem to mean this" and to discern the difference between calamity and calm and the forced carl of hoping the angel of death will mistake me for a rag mat and keep on going.

Sometimes writing comes easy, sometimes hard. When the body/mind/poem is spent, I leave it. reread it, re-edit. A b.s. buzzer may go off, but at least the body is released from its pent and we can start, body and I. The preliminaries are out of the way.

If you can stop, do. I made my first chapbook in primary school and two more in high school and mostly beavered away thrashing as emphatic as a mute signing to the blind for the next few years. 15 years or so in, I pulled out an exacto and cut myself out from behind a bit of wallpaper and actually talked to some poets, in person. It's fine to talk to yourself. Even helpful to keep the crazies away if you look crazier than them. But writing comes into its glory when it communicates.

I want to make poetry for long enough to begin to not just change stylistically, but improve. Was it Marcus Aurelius who said to make a better poem, you have to live and be a better poem? That confines to incremental increases.

In the preface to Changing on the Fly George Bowering observes how it's pretty common for people to write poems, because someone died or they had a big experience. What's distinctive? "It's just that most people never try to write better poetry; they don't read books of poetry that will teach them how to do it. Even many ones that do drop out early. I have known young poets who write the best lyric poetry of our young years, and then went on to other line of work".

Writing has its focus in reading. Reading is more efficient than going to readings, as useful as it is to talk with colleagues, or have an evening outside one's head. But listening to poetry is like getting written instructions or having to watch a video for them. I can take reading at whatever pace I need for my uptake by similarity to what I know and my energy. I can change streams mid-phrase or read for 5 hours. Why I am I telling you this? You know.

That community to communicate with may be the crowd within trying to sort itself, or shout other parts down. Poetry may be taught articulacy and so instruct the rest of the mob who doesn't give whit for letters but can use the insights into how human nature or nature operates, all the little cause and effects.

Writing is I suppose a sort of companion, to build a better self, to try out ideas, think through words where they are on a digital or physical page. Out there they can be manipulated. They have more solidity when they have sound than when they are just restless pacing in one corner of the mind's busy square.

It's important to me not to let poetry stray too far into making nice stories or florid runs of descriptions without a point. Writing needs time apart to listen and synthesize but it also needs other minds to complete it. It needs a reader to refine how to say things so that it can hook. Unless your internalized ideal readers are so accurate, or your articulacy so great, that you no longer need to touch ground with real people anymore.

I want to make a poetry that I want to read, and that others gain from reading. I want poetry that is alert enough to quip, self-assured enough to joke and sit in stillness long enough to discern the necessity of both play and the essence and wisdom and underpinnings from the general noise and dross. I want poetry that shows me something specific that I didn't know before that is true and said with skill. I want to make a poetry that models for myself how to be with others with compassion despite. With comprehension despite. With thriving despite.

Pearl Pirie authored two poetry collections been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010) and Thirsts (Snare, 2011) and various poetry chapbooks. She has given workshops and since 2009 has run the Tree Seed Workshops. She has phafours micropress out of Ottawa, Canada. She is working on a few manuscripts, or rather, they are working on her. www.pearlpirie.com

Recent Reads: Peter F. Yacht Club #18 and Jill Stengel

#18: VERSeFest Special by Peter F. Yacht Club

tether by Jill Stengel

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

Peter F Yacht Club Issue #18

Unlike TREE Reading Series, The Dusty Owl and many other events that swirl Ottawa’s literary calendar, the Peter F. Yacht Club has all these years remained something of a mystery to me. For a time I’d even presupposed that, whatever it was, the prestige of its title alone suggested that I wasn’t meant to know! But the history of the Peter F. Yacht Club was always available – right here, in fact – and while its membership seems a tricky thing to keep track of, its spoils are perfectly tangible. Turns out Peter F. Yacht Club publishes sporadic compilations (another thing I didn’t know!) of work from its burgeoning network and that, if Issue #18 is anything to go by, the prestige of the club’s title is well-earned.

Unveiled in time for VERSeFEST, Issue #18 pulls no punches, enlisting strong pieces by 23 poets who’ve at some point called Ottawa home. Cameron Anstee’s “Late January” opens the weighty 8.5 x 11 issue on a poignant note, stating “I miss every one who leaves this city / and some who remain”. Besides highlighting a chilly theme that reverberates through wintry and memorable entries by Pearl Pirie and Monty Reid, Anstee’s nostalgia echoes vacancies spotting Ottawa’s literary tradition, in which Peter F. Yacht Club plays a convincing microcosm. (As mclennan mentions in his write-up of the Club’s history, when a hardworking writer leaves a place, their footprint tends to vanish as well.)

Whatever desertions have plagued Ottawa’s literary scene, there’s no evidence of vacancy on these pages. Ben Ladouceur’s “Shuttle” zeroes in on the alien struggle of finding the rhythm in somewhere new. William Hawkins’ “In Memoriam” offers a stark tribute that succinctly wrestles beauty and death. Two haunting excerpts of Sandra Ridley’s “Testamonium” (from The Counting House, forthcoming from BookThug this fall) convey the troubled limitations of loyalty and despondence, while Monty Reid’s command of pace and detail renders his excerpt from Intelligence an inquisitive highlight, probing and countering the smarts of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service with his own.

“I don’t know how many people have to not know

something before it’s intelligence.

At least one.

I must be the one that makes the smart people

smart.

I don’t know if anyone else was watching

11pm, at the Montreal Road entrance, ice fog

clamped around the lights.

I don’t know the what of it, or the risk of the what of it.

But you know what? Around the circumference, fog burns.”

Despite the showcase of singular voices, there’s a strange fluidity afoot – be it quality control or some stately muse each author gleaned from their time crossing the Rideau. Either way the selections here are often crushing; Stephen Brockwell’s excerpts from Metonymies: Poems by Objects Owned by Illustrious People and Meghan Jackson’s “star charts” cast profound shadows which compliment each other's distinct approaches to heaviness. Even if it’s a reunion on paper and not in person, the “support group” ambition that instated the Peter F. Yacht Club ten years ago continues to bear considerable fruit.

tether by Jill Stengel

Besides that collective’s behemoth offering, I’ve been spending some time with Davis, California based writer Jill Stengel’s latest chapbook. Composed of one fragmented long poem and split into sparse stanzas rendering most pages half blank, tether could easily be misinterpreted – or misread entirely – as a quick read. But it’s a deceiving one as well; I could breeze through tether in five mindless minutes if I didn’t feel so compelled to re-read it as soon as I’ve finished. What Stengel has unearthed is a time capsule of infant activity; those recess periods, however indifferent to history, in which we prodded our social and physical limitations.

Such a theme can be appreciated by anyone trapped in the hectic realm of adulthood. After all, nostalgia’s an easy attraction. Yet tether’s such a convincing time-warp because Stengel stirs nostalgia in her readers without wrestling with it herself. By dealing with senses in the developmental stage, Stengel’s abstract details concerning texture and colour resonate on a grander scale than any backward-glancing melancholy could.

“one bounce

the feel of rubber

studded with asphalt flecks

one bounce

running

to spin

one-legged

or hang

either way

joy

even with panties showing

                              exposed

on dress days”

The euphoria of simple awareness – feeling and testing one’s surroundings – is communicated as much through minutia as through motion, running and swooping amidst the confusion of made-up games. As tether copes with the attention span and abandon of carefree id, there’s a growing self-awareness communicating through broken parenthesis. Stengel closes on a satisfying mantra but those breakdowns in momentum offer tether’s best spots to chew on, conveying the confusion of adulthood, reminiscing. 

Smart & Pirie in A B Series at Raw Sugar January 10 2012

abseries.org

A B Series Presents

Pearl Pirie & Carolyn Smart

Reading
8pm
Thursday, January 10, 2012

Raw Sugar Café
692 Somerset West
Ottawa, Ont.

Pearl Pirie has poems in a number of chapbooks and in 2 poetry collections, Thirsts (Snare) and been shed bore(Chaudiere). She has 2 more looking for a good home where they will be fed and watered and taken for walks. She makes mini chapbooks with her micro press Phafours. She been organizing the Tree Seed Workshop Series for the Tree Reading Series since 2009. She tweets, photographs and verbs about Ottawa, the luckiest town for literature in most anywhere.

Carolyn Smart's fifth collection of poems, Hooked - Seven Poems was published in 2009 by Brick Books. An excerpt from her memoir At the End of the Day won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging writers, and since 1989 has taught Creative Writing at Queen's University. Her work-in-progress is a series of poems about the Barrow Gang entitled 'Careen.'

Pearl Pirie w/ Donato Mancini, Beatriz Hausner, Steve Zultanski and bill bissett | Grey Borders Reading Series, Saint Catharines, ON

There’s a lot of history in the scuffed, wooden floorboards of the Niagara Artists Centre. The organization, now in its 43^rd year of serving Niagara’s artistic interests, has hosted countless literary heroes through its Grey Borders Reading Series alone, including the likes of Phil Hall, Catherine Owen, Stuart Ross and Dennis Lee. That eclectic venue in the heart of St Catharines’ fragile downtown earned a few more stripes last Wednesday when Donato Mancini, Beatriz Hausner, Steve Zultanski, bill bissett and Ottawa’s own Pearl Pirie convened for a celebration of wide-ranging poetry.

I was mostly drawn to the event because of Pirie, a familiar face in the crowd of bespeckled wordsmiths and enthusiasts, whose prolific output has always intrigued. After some time for book-buying, booze-finding and a fond eulogy for Raymond Souster, hosts Eric Schmaltz and Craig Dodman gave the brick-backed stage to the evening’s guests.

Establishing an unpredictable tone that would colour the whole event, Donato Mancini dropped a heady gauntlet of philosophical ideas, political buzzwords and household names in self-described “lists” that built up in momentum until they threatened to collapse at any moment. His compendium on Death Row inmates’ last meal choices and Dr Pepper – Texas’ beverage of choice – devolved into a lengthy list of doctors (some real, some imaginary). Flipping haphazardly through pages of his notebook, it was the uncertainty of Mancini’s sporadic jumps that ensured a vital, if occasionally bewildering, reading.

Beatriz Hausner followed with a selection of essay meditations and poetry inspired by her lover “Raccoon” and their nocturnal rites of passion. With her sensual approach to wordplay, Hausner won appreciative nods from many in attendance with “Loneliness of the Fashionista”, a rebuttal on the black leather and metal-pronged ugliness that seeks to identify bondage.

Steve Zultanski offered two rapid-fire examinations during his oft-comedic time onstage: the first, of yawning and its space-time relationship to those who know him most intimately, and the latter entertaining the cause-and-effect possibilities of pushing his friend into a pool. In reaching for outlandish strands of logic, Zultanski’s sly use of repetition and speed-reading unveiled tiny shards of brilliance that rendered his doubts, while dysfunctional, wholly relatable. Knowing laughs from the audience seemed to verify that everyone was strapped in for the ride.

To the untrained eye Pearl Pirie looked the relaxed participant, listening and taking the odd photograph. But speaking to me during intermission, Pirie admitted she was just as actively listening for the crowd’s reactions and amending some poem choices along the way. Her ensuing plan of attack, a loosely tied knot of rogue poems – some new and unpublished – provided a freewheeling test-drive of a unique literary voice.

Whether describing isolation and conversational fever in “We’ll Leave At Night For Thunder Bay” (from her mini-chapbook Sprockets Away) or an evocative landscape that flexes between the earthy and bodily on “River-High” (from been shed bore), Pirie’s language shined especially when read aloud, her rhymes emerging in stuttering successions that countered any straightforward pacing. One of the evening’s highlights was surely a poem (from Where There’s Fire) inspired by SlutWalk, capturing the air of sexual freedom spilling through a metropolis’ etiquette of suits and cigarettes. But just as intriguing were poems assembled from games of Scrabble and snippets of Hollywood dialogue, spun in reverse, which highlighted her creative playfulness. All of the five poets showcased their inventiveness with finished poems but Pirie’s willingness to discuss her work’s origins added to the event’s refreshing openness.

Although I was due to meet friends on the other side of downtown, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to hear bill bissett read from his previously out-of-print, post-modernist/ collagist manifesto Rush: what fuckan theory. It was a joy to behold. And as he chanted syllables around his essay of “the artist as a young man, an outsider” with a shaker in hand, I smiled at the thought of bissett’s revolutionary calls emanating through the NAC’s outdoor speakers and ricocheting down St Catharines’ chilly storefronts. With regards to each of last Wednesday’s poets, I can’t think of a better way to announce the latest chapter in Niagara’s understated literary history.