Paul Pearson : part five

How does a poem begin?

For me a poem always begins with the title. Always. I don't approach a blank page thinking that I have something to say, I am totally driven by imagery. Actually, that's not even completely accurate. I am driven by emotion. I don't write poetry to tell you something or to picture something. I write poetry to make you feel something. And I try to do it in as few words as possible. For me, titles are the purest distillation of a poem. Everything after the title is explanation. This is what made the first part of Lunatic Engine so easy to write, the chapter titles in Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, which I took for the titles of the poems in the first section of my book, are poetry in and of themselves. These titles led into the matter in the chapters and I took my direction for the poems from both.

Paul Pearson : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Of course music, specifically rhythm, is an integral part of poetry. I'm assuming that kids are still being taught rhythm and meter in school. What I suspect they're not being taught is that the pinnacle of human artistic endeavour is the music video.  If music is  poetry in to time and visual art is poetry in image, then the music video, which combines both of these, is poetry squared - at least when it's done well. Go ahead, try to change my mind ;) 

Paul Pearson : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. I can't think of anything more perfect than that little book. I don't know how many times I've read it yet it remains an almost mystical experience each time I open it up. There is a magic in that book that defies explanation and scoffs at those who try. All of Brautigan's stuff is fantastic, poetry and prose alike - and if you've never read him I envy the discovery you are about to make, but my life is done in watermelon sugar. 

Paul Pearson : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began? And What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I'd been writing poetry for a few years, had a couple of pieces published in journals and was really getting into doing readings, before I encountered Doug Barbour and through him the world of sound poetry. As a young poet I was so pleased with my developing ability to craft nifty little lyric poetry with the occasional semi-original image that I completely ignored the pure sonic pleasure of language as a thing that can happily exist completely separate from any sense of "meaning." Reading Doug, or better yet, listening to Doug, encouraged me to pay as much attention to the physical sound of the words I was writing as the meaning. He also drilled into my head a healthy suspicion of the weakness of simile to the point where I sometimes have to force myself to use the word "like" in a poem ;)  

Paul Pearson : part one

Paul Pearson is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul has since relocated to Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. Lunatic Engine is his debut collection.

Photo Credit: Oscar Pearson

How did you first engage with poetry?

I've always known that I wanted to be a writer though I always thought though that I'd end up in science fiction, my first love as a reader. I always liked poetry and did well in it in school but I always considered it something you studied, rather than something you read for fun or, God forbid, wrote. Then, in my first-year University English lit class, I stumbled into Patrick Lane, was struck dumb with "Mountain Oysters." Here was a poet who grew up in the bush in the interior of BC, like I did. Here were poems about people I knew: working people, mountain people, alcoholics and men like my father. I had no idea poetry could actually mean something real, something personal, something now. That was it. From that moment I was a poet.