Jim Perlman, founder of Holy Cow Press, discusses collection of poems "Beloved on the Earth" from Duluth based publisher. The book focuses poems about grief, mourning - and celebration.
Segment also includes interviews with friends/collaborators of Perlman’s that assisted in producing book.
EUAN KERR: Beloved on the Earth is a book which arose from a specific need. Jim Pearlman lost his mother two years ago. As a poetry editor, he naturally sought out poems to help him through a difficult time. He found some, but it struck him there was no collection available that filled his need to grieve his loss and celebrate the life of his mother. As the founder of Holy Cow! Press, Pearlman decided to do something about that.
JIM PEARLMAN: So we put out a public call for manuscript submissions. And over two or three months, we received work from 695 poets from all over the country and overseas, and that totaled about 2,000 poems.
EUAN KERR: It was overwhelming. But then three of Pearlman's friends, Deborah Cooper, Mara Hart, and Pamela Mittlefehldt stepped in. They are all writers and teachers, and they helped him work through the pile. They threw in a few extra poems by other writers they came across elsewhere. Even with four of them, it still took a year to read them all. Yet Deborah Cooper says selecting the poems for the book wasn't hard.
DEBORAH COOPER: We all read every single poem, and then we rated it. And when we got together to go through the poetry, we had enough poems that all of us had given top rating to.
EUAN KERR: The final compilation contains 150 poems. The editors stressed that many of the poems they didn't choose were excellent, but they dealt only with the loss of one specific person. What they were looking for was work, which, while possibly referring to an individual, had a larger scope, specifically grief and gratitude. Pamela Mittlefehldt says the gratitude for the life of a deceased friend or relative is very important.
PAMELA MITTLEFEHLDT: And for me, one of the things I look for in the poems was, how do you do that? How do you celebrate in the midst of grief? How do you honor a life when you're so devastated by its loss? And I think these poems overall do that very powerfully.
EUAN KERR: When asked to select a favorite, Jim Pearlman doesn't hesitate. He chooses Late Fragment, a poem Raymond Carver wrote shortly before his own death.
JIM PEARLMAN: "And did you get what you wanted from this life? Even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved. To feel myself beloved on the earth."
EUAN KERR: The collection gets its name from the poem's last line. Pamela Mittlefehldt chooses a poem by Lisel Mueller about how hard it is to mourn at the height of summer when everything is teeming with life.
PAMELA MITTLEFEHLDT: "I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatience and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me."
EUAN KERR: Beloved on the Earth arrived in bookstores a few weeks ago, but Pearlman says he's already hearing it's being used by local clergy in Duluth, both for funeral services and as an aid and comfort for grieving families. Pamela Mittlefehldt says the book is also going further afield.
PAMELA MITTLEFEHLDT: I've given it to my doctors, and they've started using it. So I think the books, as Jim said, speaks to such a wide audience.
EUAN KERR: The book is now featured on the website of the American Hospice Foundation. Holy Cow! Press is arranging readings around the country, including tomorrow's event at the Loft in Minneapolis. Jim Pearlman says it was only after they'd been offered the Friday night date that they realized it was September the 11th.
At first, they wondered whether they should do it. Then, in the spirit of the book, they decided it was an opportunity to take the grief and sorrow in the aftermath of the attacks and try to turn them into something more positive.
The Beloved on the Earth editors say working with these poems for so long has been an intense experience, and they've become very close as a result. For Pearlman, whose mother's passing set this all in motion, it's been an important lesson.
JIM PEARLMAN: I found a sense of healing that comes from knowing that you're not alone in grieving a loss.
EUAN KERR: It's a message all the editors of Beloved on the Earth hope many people will hear. Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio news, Duluth.
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