Tag Archives: Baudelaire

“What Me, Cruel?”

Posted on April 8, 2024 by jillbpearlman

April stares back at us and asks: What me, cruel? Because mournful windowsrattle in my winds and pots tip over, green with rust or lichen? Because hairs on your bare legsshiver like crocus? She finds us in her glassy eyeand springs:  You … Continue reading →

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Baudelaire Walks Pandemic Paris

Posted on November 28, 2021 by jillbpearlman

Walking through Paris in the (imagined) aftermath of a pandemic, I had the uncanny feelings of déjà vu, that things had disappeared and been replaced, leaving behind a residue of scented melancholy.  The gap between then and now ignited a … Continue reading →

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A Flâneur Surveys the Damage

Posted on July 25, 2021 by jillbpearlman

How does the flâneur come back to her city after a war is over, after a breakup, an illness, a chasm, a separation of any sort?  When I’m walking my little city (really more of a village), I find that … Continue reading →

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Shock of the (Post-Covid) New

Posted on May 23, 2021 by jillbpearlman

How distanced we are from faces with their expressive truths, how shocked by the lower halves of faces we’ve never seen.  Put these little jolts alongside big jolts, and you have emotional minefields.  It seems that everyone, upon emerging, is seeing … Continue reading →

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Vertigo, How Real You Are

Posted on May 17, 2020 by jillbpearlman

I saw the clarity of my eyesight turn to soft waves. You know the cliche about writers being sensitive flowers, taking into their bodies whatever is “in the air”?  How the external world becomes translated in various ways into their nervous systems? … Continue reading →

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Cut Me Loose

Posted on August 18, 2019 by jillbpearlman

How freeing to discover the curious way French acquaintances and friends are judging the US.  Fortunately Trump is not sucking out all the oxygen.  While they despise him, they’re perplexed by this passing nightmare and don’t hold it against us.  … Continue reading →

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Summer of Love

Posted on September 5, 2017 by jillbpearlman

  As if I were totally innocent of the question, and the conundrum fresh and unexamined, I asked myself while brushing my teeth this morning: artist: what’s the right thing to do? As if I had not been studying what … Continue reading →

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The Disruption of Beauty

Posted on February 9, 2017 by jillbpearlman

“There is a time to break down, and a time to build up.”  Ecclesiastes, man of the ages, is also man of the hour.  When Francis Picabia painted this picture, he gave it an absurd name – Estanonisi – but … Continue reading →

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Spring for Skeptics

Posted on May 25, 2016 by jillbpearlman

Iris that purple flower that reaches up with ruffled wings, and droops down with falls and beards, mirrored. Its doubled bauble is neither upside down nor right-side up; it looks the same standing on your head as looking from above. Either way … Continue reading →

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With Love & Hate for My February Muse

Posted on February 18, 2016 by jillbpearlman

It’s mid-February.  It’s the dead point of the year, when roots and energy have retracted and nature is nearly still. People who fight back do Florida. Yoga. Extreme sports. Instead of resisting, I’m turning inward. I’m writing poems. That doesn’t … Continue reading →

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