IMG_7361The novel Clio’s Mobile Home is a facet of my creative work. Several characters in my novel write poems; I am serious about writing poetry. I also work on short shorts, and short stories. They are all modes of thinking about identity, transcendence and beauty in contemporary life. Art keeps us aloft, but it is more than decoration. Its force can be astounding. The artist becomes an instrument, and art lives to tell the tale.

Posted on May 17, 2014 by jillbpearlman | 50 Comments

Thanksgiving Dreamed My Poem

Posted on December 1, 2025 by jillbpearlman

The poem I’m wrestling with
wrestled with me all week.
My dreamlife gave me these ideas:

That pungent vinaigrette in the little dish:
pour the rest over the poem. 
It will taste delicious.

Push that boulder which is also a word
over the poem’s hillside.
See how much moss, grass and other worlds it gathers.  

Read this dream article on your subject.
We offer you your essential point, in dream
language. Use it.

That shovel. On the blackish background.  
In the center.  Here, you.  Dreamer, poet, person. 
Start digging.

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The New Thanksgiving Travel

Posted on November 23, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Thanksgiving Travel

You used to see the Bay; now on the way to SFO
a bevy of clashing billboards, all blood-bright graphics

and codes incomprehensible to the AI-dumb among us.
Dumb and dumber.  

Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted 
to rote smiles as they correct operating intelligence.

Job description: To Oversee the Blundering
Machine.  But as any parent knows, kids grow

competent; they turn 30, don’t need reminders
to pack and get going. The message is bright and bold:

they are replacing us. But AI ain’t flesh and blood,
the workers’ smiles tell you that in one second.

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Be Here Now, California (gaps included)

Posted on November 16, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Imagine, at this age, to have brought beginner’s mind to California.  Where have I been?  In the land of the skeptic, in France.  But what luck to have had California before me.  Full-on sensory discovery.

Enthusiasm has a way of being boundless. (Forgive me for walking naively into known mythologies.)

Rocky cliffs and water that rolls with a steady rhythm that gathers, then completely releases with an assured swagger, somehow embarrassing the Atlantic. 

Painting after painting in a grand sfumato that no matter how many times you clean your glasses, is real and before you.

Sad lady of the lake and her plangent guitar at a hillside café.

Looking, looking, I became entranced by planes and screens.  Modern buildings of glass walls, the Pacific floating off the right and left screens.  The Bay Bridge with its cables marking, but not separating the rolling fog of the bay.  These planes evoked canvas of time: Because Rachel was turning 30, we were bathing in retrospection –images appearing, fresh, flush with color and scent.  Parts of the whole, reflected, refracted, overlapping. The past like a sliding door that crosses into the present.  Reflections of sunset ricochet with the same intensity as her baby face, the nurses suggesting I dress her in doll clothes (she was premature); bars of music we’d hear as we rounded the bend each day driving to maternelle. 

Even riding in the backseat of the car as the kids, now adults drove, I began to act up just like the children they were.

As poet Rick Barot wrote, “Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body from one end of time to another.”

Be here now, and everything in between.

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To Rachel, at 30

Posted on November 16, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Rachel is ecstatic, sparks of static electricity traveling
to, from and between her and us 
She may have rubbed her back on a charged shag rug

Yesterday her last sunset in her 20s
5:04, only the sun’s orange cap, 5:05, cap sinks into purple haze,
Sky smolders

In French, the anesthesiologist and I critiqued the Deer Hunter 
since I grew up in Pittsburgh
and there was no time for pain killers

The other doctor caught her

Her perfectly etched rose lips
in minuscule

A child who droops at crepuscule.  The 
partial darkness, the haunted transition.  
A child attuned to melancholy.

Though she could stand in a blue wooden door
and shout at the wind: Va-t’en, va-t’en!

Born under the sign of empathy 

She went to neo-natal
I went back to my bed, sighed; 
picked up Crime and Punishment

She’s always opened me up

Simultaneity: that brown baby gaze pouring itself
into its beloved (at three months), again, now, 
those soft defenseless gazing eyes

Haze is creeping on one side, as if everything we are seeing
is through memory

Are we getting sentimental
Trees wear their fur-lined glove inside out
Eternity parallels the horizon like orange crush

No beginning or end at either end

And all the dusk netting, then night netting

The sister weavers do their work by feel
Drunken shafts of light filtering through the weave
of cypress

Monterey, to be exact

As she paints her burger with an exactitude of ketchup,
she wipes each plate as a fresh daily canvas. 

 

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On Seeing Kara Walker in Mary Janes

Posted on November 10, 2025 by jillbpearlman

I was curious about the guard when she came over.
There was a gap between her teeth, coffee-skinned, 
in museum guard clothes. 

Around us the monstrosities of race, freestanding 
caricatures of the enslaved with robotic nerves – 
a man strives after a severed limb; a girl whispers to a doll.  

The guard asked if my shoes were Mary Janes. 
They were cute, she said, the shiny black texture, 
the heel thick as a potato.  Retro, updated. 

And look at the platform, I said. For all the floors 
she stands on – wood, marble, slate – a thick sole 
provides resistance. The man without his arms 
was still grinding. 

The artist said she wants to create a better world.  
I rolled a scene where I gave her my shoes; only I
was the hero. Instead, I smiled; she smiled. 
Survival of the human face. Maybe 
she’ll come across the store in her travels. 

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Silent Fall

Posted on October 27, 2025 by jillbpearlman

The frenzy of fall 
after ceding all 
to the sun 

we walk into the pause
rapt, the minus, 
not the slightest jangle
of cicada

silence
sucking down
into earth’s own navel

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Poetry’s “Winged Words”

Posted on October 13, 2025 by jillbpearlman

I’m becoming a real fan of poetry read aloud.  I love to hear words animated.  Silence falls, and the voice, with its hypnotic or musical or walking tones, steps in. Now that I’ve had the chance to read several times from “Diaspora of Things,” I’m fascinated.   Self-conscious at the start, I was careful to put emphasis here, pause between stanzas where I penciled in “pause.”  Then I slid into a rhythm.  The words took over, released from the page.  I hoped those words, riding on the point of a vibrating arrow, attached to wings, knew how to do what they do.  

Homer called it, “winged words,” how poetry is in flight and comes alive, like airborne birds, like carrier pigeons, conveying meaning and power.  In Hebrew, words and things are conveyed by the same word – devar.  In “Diaspora,” things become released “from the gaze of possession” – so why not words?  If they pierce the reader, go directly from one inner self to another, I ask for nothing more. 

Thank you to Kimberly at Symposium Books, and moderator Christina Bevilaqua.

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Road Trip

Posted on October 5, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Along comes the poet 
in her own lane,
seeing a pale moon disk
tickled by fall grasses. 

So much wrestling,
keep beauty and truth
tattooed on the forehead,
as one’s own headlights,
a third eye.  

Tremble. To be so vulnerable, 
yet so powerful.  

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A Short Interview with Myself

Posted on September 15, 2025 by jillbpearlman

A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH MYSELF

Reader:  Your chapbook “Diaspora of Things” stems from the occasion of dismantling your mother’s house.  In the commentary, I read that the speaker moves from inert mute grief and disorientation to a greater understanding of differences and similarities –moving towards a polyphony.  

Author: Excellent reader. I wish I’d said that!  

R: I’m thinking about the word polyphony. You use words that start with “poly” often.  

A My neighbor has a booming voice, and my windows are open.  Her name is Polly. 

R: Right, no A/C.  Polyphony. I keep tripping over my tongue. A rolly poly word.  It seems to move a lot.  

A: That’s its charm!  There is no one way to nail it down.  It’s defined by what it’s not – one thing.  Much or many, from the Greek.   

R: Say it again! First a dog was barking, now someone’s blaring “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” 

A: What beautiful, understandable nonsense.  Qua language.  So polyvocal. If you clear your ears, you might hear trees talking too.  You know, things talk.  Not just birds at dawn or cooing doves or roving cats. 

R: Hmm. 

A: A web of languages; a talking universe.  Communicating. The highwire act of cicadas.  Burbling fountains.  The wind that thumbs plush grass pale, then back to green.  Things valued for their voices.  Things freed of possession. 

R: What, you hear voices of grass?  I thought that’s what schizophrenics suffered. 

A: Of course I hear voices.  After my mother died, I carried her voice in my head, the running dialog we had, for at least two years.  My brain was a loom strung with diverging lines about how to live.   That aside, poets intuit deep into reality.  We scrape away a lot of cliches to use our common language to speak a deeply webbed truth.  It might sound chaos, but it’s our chaos.  

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Diaspora of Things

Posted on September 8, 2025 by jillbpearlman

My chapbook, “Diaspora of Things,” will be coming out in a few weeks.  It’s been a while since my last brush with the publishing world. Poets warned that I wouldn’t have much control. It would be the equivalent of “making a birth plan” – we know how that works out!

The one thing I would have full control over: self-promotion and marketing.  Ugh.  For someone who entertains highbrow ideas such as “what is the self?” and “does the self even exist?” – that’s a curious mode.  But I went about it in a workaday way, emailing contacts and writing draft after draft about myself and the appeal of my work. Getting a slew of pre-orders and organizing email lists and making graphics with ground zero of experience.  

Oh, little self in a big chair.  One day in this glorious phase of book publishing, the brain got tired, the energy dried up and I got stuck in a weird paralysis about the simplest of announcements.

Child’s play to some, it had to be done, it couldn’t be done.  The swirling began.  Cloudy, impenetrable thoughts hovered for hours (in retrospect, like a poem) before a figure came from the shadows: a younger self.  Of course she would show up!  Self-conscious, defiantly private.  Mortally conflicted about bragging and showing off.  I’d thought the anxieties of that introvert had been talked through ad nauseum.  Placate her and give the girl a lollipop!

But of course, selves don’t disappear, they crouch and get layered and hang behind other selves.  This shouldn’t have been strange to me as “Diaspora of Things” revolves around these very themes. Narratively the book is about the dismantling of a family home and negotiating of relationships, it also understands the self as one of those things which is unfixed, wavering as it undergoes experiences, part of a larger ecosystem of things possessed and dispossessed.  As the speaker assesses, she is re-assessed; as she feels, she is felt.    

Liberations happen; worlds open and flutter and evolve, carrying along their traces.  So the book continues to evolve past its fixed state.  Fresh voices arise.  Oh, and by the way: “Diaspora of Things” will be launched in a few weeks.  Check it out!

Diaspora of Things, Finishing Line Press, https://www.finishinglinepress.com

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