Mischa Pearlman
Poet Mischa Pearlman grew up in Kent, in southeast England, in a town known by name to anyone even glancingly familiar with English literature: Canterbury. But it was neither Chaucer nor any of the local legends, from Christopher Marlowe and Aphra Behn to Joseph Conrad, who unlocked poetry for him. It was the Beat Generation.
“My love for it came from my dad,” Pearlman explains. “When I was about 16 years old … he did a concert with a piano player friend of his called Frances Knight. It was basically an evening of beat poetry. He was onstage reading Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, while she improvised piano over it. I was just blown away.”
That night’s reading of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “The World Is A Beautiful Place” was the catalyst for a life in poetry. Pearlman say it’s “still my favorite poem of all time.”
““The purpose of art in a wider a wider scope, is to find a little bit of solace and comfort in the world. Whether that’s sad music or happy music, doesn’t really matter, as long as it makes you feel makes you feel alive and understood.””
In 2009, Pearlman returned his father’s favor with a gift of the 50th Anniversary reissue of A Kind of Blue along with one of his own poems about listening to it — the poem, cool blue new, later appeared in Pearlman’s debut book, Night in Negative. His father shared the poem with a friend who hosted jazz poetry nights in London. That friend invited Mischa to sit in for a night.
“We did a couple of rehearsals with his band and chose I think, three poems, including the one that was for my dad,” he says. “And then I kind of realized, oh, maybe I, maybe there's something in this. Not that it was a lucrative career, obviously, but maybe I can write something that people actually like.”
Over the years since his watershed Beat moment, Mischa Pearlman has established himself as a music journalist, writing for Kerrang!, Vice, Flood Magazine and more. Along the way, slowly and quietly, he built a body of work as a poet.
“I’m not very prolific. I’m really horrifically not prolific,” he laughs. “I just decided a couple of years ago to put the first book out, which was this collection of everything I’ve written pretty much for the previous 10 years.” The collection, Night in Negative, draws deep on his Beat influence, but also on a decade of restlessness spent traveling from London to New York to Portland and points between. A decade of the nightlife that is a young music writer’s world — gigs, smoky clubs, crushes, nights that blur into mornings, arrogant rockers, earnest songwriters, making the rent and the ever-looming deadline.
In 2020, he followed up Night in Negative with it starts in winter and it ends in winter and you walk between the darkness because there’s nowhere else to go: a year in haiku. It’s a tidy, pocket-sized edition, reminiscent of the old Pocket Books series with an aesthetic straight from the early New Directions paperbacks, including moody black-and-white photographs by Katherine Alex Beaven.
The book is, as the title states, a year in haiku. Pearlman wrote a haiku every day for a year. “I literally just tried to get whatever I was feeling out, you know, and it was a very, very strange, turbulent year,” he says. “I started off in England, back home for Christmas. And then … three friends died that year. I went through a breakup … I went back to New York briefly and then went to Portland to look after my friend's dog for two months. And then back to New York. So it was just it was very, very peripatetic … very turbulent. And it was, it was a good year to to write in Haiku form, I guess, because everything was happening in different places.”
The result is a zen-like assemblage of images and passing moods, snatches of memories. Haiku requires discipline, shaving ideas and impressions into 17 syllables broken into likes of 5, 7 and 5 syllables each (typically). It’s an act of distillation. Pearlman’s success with the form lies in his commitment to the distillation combined with a refusal to take himself too seriously. Here we have hangover haiku, grumpy poems, self-pitying poems, moments of doubt, of hilarity, of complete blankness. It’s an unsentimental diary with each day polished down to one very fine gem.
On May 10, we have:
stayed inside all day.
the revolution can wait
until tomorrow.
Exactly one month later:
silent car journey.
you squeezed my hand so tightly
but you still let go.
In the depths of November:
subwayed, graffitied.
can’t escape the winter chill.
even your heart froze.
Whether we choose to read these linearly, to interpret them as part of a single ill-fated love story or just series of impressions spread across continents, they keep their individual wholeness while contributing to an abstract expressionist calendar — bold strokes, mottled spots, faded patches all blending to an untranslatable but understandable whole.
The reasons we come to art, both as creators and appreciators, are always personal — driven by needs to feel connected, to be diverted, to find a larger truth or to revel in beauty, to name a few. Art meets needs. And, in this global moment, we have a lot of needs to meet.
“I think it's just a way of not feeling so alone,” Pearlman says. “The purpose of art in a wider a wider scope, is to find a little bit of solace and comfort in the world. Whether that's sad music or happy music, doesn't really matter, as long as it makes you feel makes you feel alive and understood.”
“I have a friend who sends me songs by text all the time,” he adds. “I haven't heard this or I have heard that, and it's just a really nice way of communicating. He sends me these things, I send him one back and it's just a lovely kind of like exchange of, I guess an exchange of hearts. You get to do that with people that you care about.”
