✨Jim Andrews from Vancouver included my poem “Lethologica” in his wondrous See of Po series: https://seaofpo.vispo.com?p=pk. And on Jim Andrews’s manifesto, manual, and magazine, https://vispo.com/writings/essays/Sea_of_Po2.pdf: P. 61. For Sea of Po, I wanted to write a language poem that would lend itself to animation, to movement, to be read in swirls, side to side, and yet form couplets. Hence, Lethologica, so that the word is not lost in Lethe’s forgetful current, but is re-imagined as image, as colour.
✨Forthcoming Publications
✨ Spring, 2024: Interview with me by Richard Capener, Hem Press
✨ Wednesday, June 5, 6:30-8pm. Black Mallard Reading Series features Penn Kemp and D.A. Lockhart, Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N., London. World Environment Day! Penn’s reading is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts. Free. https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home.
✨ Saturday, June 15, 10:30-11:30am. Sounds of the Forest: Music and Poetry Reading at Meadowlily Nature Reserve on the south side of the Thames River between Highbury Avenue and Meadowlily Road, London, ON N6G 2N5. Passport to Nature in support of Thames Talbot Land Trust, https://www.thamestalbotlandtrust.ca/passport_to_nature. Free.
✨February 25, 12:30-1:30pm EST. Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky read from INTENT ON FLOWERING with cellist Luc Julian in Heeman’s Greenhouse, 20422 Nissouri Road, Thorndale Juna Guetter writes: “Just returned from this beautiful event! A lovely poetry reading with Katie Jeresky and Penn Kemp along with the musical accompaniment by Luc Julian celebrating Spring! Great to see and hear such talent weaving together in sweet collaboration! Many thanks!!! 🙏😍”
✨February 10, 2024. Book launch and poetry reading from Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent on Flowering, with three poets: Penn Kemp, Katie Jeresky and Jessica Lee McMillan. On the Lunar New Year! Missed this lovely weaving of voices? Here it is https://fb.watch/q7u_oWXOJq/ ! Thanks @RoseGardenPress! Special #thanks to @JoshLambier, https://wordsfest.ca/
✨Jim Andrews from Vancouver included my poem “Lethologica” in his wondrous See of Po series: https://seaofpo.vispo.com?p=pk. And on Jim Andrews’s manifesto, manual, and magazine, https://vispo.com/writings/essays/Sea_of_Po2.pdf: P. 61. For Sea of Po, I wanted to write a language poem that would lend itself to animation, to movement, to be read in swirls, side to side, and yet form couplets. Hence, Lethologica, so that the word is not lost in Lethe’s forgetful current, but is re-imagined as image, as colour.
✨Upcoming In-person Poetry Readings
Sunday, February 25, 12:30-1:30pm EST. Join Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian in Heeman’s lush tropical greenhouse for a special in-person poetry reading of Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent of Flowering. Heeman’s Greenhouse, 20422 Nissouri Road, Thorndale, ON N0M 2P0. Grab a tea, coffee, shake or sundae when you arrive at the in-house Cafe Beanery and join us in the houseplants section! RSVP by sending an email to katiejeresky@gmail.com. Free. Chapbooks available for purchase.
✨ Monday, April 22. Earth Day.
✨ Sunday, April 28, 2-4pm. Poetry Reading among the Alpacas by Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian. 2211 Egremont Drive, RR5 Strathroy ON, N7G 3H6. Contact: Thandi, info@timbuktufarms.com. Celebrating National Poetry Month on the theme of Weather. By donation.
✨ Wednesday, June 5, 6:30-8pm. Black Mallard Reading Series features Penn Kemp and D.A. Lockhart, Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N., London ON. It’s World Environment Day! https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home. Free.
✨ Saturday, June 15, 10:30-11:30am. Sounds of the Forest: Music and Poetry Reading at Meadowlily Nature Reserve on the south side of the Thames River between Highbury Avenue and Meadowlily Road, London, ON N6G 2N5. Passport to Nature in support of Thames Talbot Land Trust, https://www.thamestalbotlandtrust.ca/passport_to_nature. Free. ✨ “Celebrating the Forest of Forest City”, online exhibit launch, Embassy Cultural House, London ON. www.embassyculturalhouse.ca. Curators Emmy Meredith, Ron Benner, Jamelie Hassan and Olivia Mossuto: embassyculturalhouse@gmail.com
Now up! Intent on Flowering, anthology, Rose Garden Press, 2024. Contributing poets: Katie Jeresky, Penn Kemp and Jessica Lee McMillan. This remarkable collection is curated by Rose Garden Press for their handprinted book. Contact: hello@rosegardenpress.ca, Michelle Arnett and Michele Vanderwal @rosegarden_press. To order: https://rosegardenpress.ca/intent-on-flowering/
Kevin Spenst, “Chuffed About Chapbooks” on my project, “Poem for Peace in Many Voices”. SubTerrain issue #95, 2024.
Recently and Recording ✨Virtual Book Launch: Saturday, February 10, 2024. Book launch and poetry reading from Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent on Flowering, with three poets: Penn Kemp, Katie Jeresky and Jessica Lee McMillan. On the Lunar New Year! Missed this lovely weaving of voices? Here it is https://fb.watch/q7u_oWXOJq/! Thanks @RoseGardenPress ! Special #thanks to @JoshLambier https://wordsfest.ca/ @PHWestern
Recently Read... January 17, 7 pm. Antler River Poetry, Celebrating small presses! Karen Schindler and Rob McClennan. With readings by Katie Jeresky and Penn Kemp from Intent on Flowering, Rose Garden Press, hello@rosegardenpress.ca, rosegardenpress.ca
What holds Sorrow and Joy in its lap? ‘Setsunai’ implies what has faded from brightness, what can’t quite be recalled, beyond knowing that everything passes. Snow dropping on snow-spangled trees.
We share this deep new reality for which no words suffice…maybe one in Japanese, expressing the loss of ten thousand things. Something quiet in the snow, snow, the silencing snow.
Join us Thursday, April 27 for poems of joy with Penn Kemp!
The fabulous Blackfriars Bistro joyously celebrates National Poetry Month, #npm23. Come at 6pm for dinner, a drink or dessert, and stay for poems on the theme of JOY! Or come for poetry at 7pm.
Penn reads from odes to joy through the ages and her own recent poetry along with community readings and participatory sounding of odes:)! Admission is free but reservations are necessary if you are coming at 6pm: call (519) 667-4930.46 Blackfriars St, London N6H 1K7 https://blackfriarsbistro.com/. Contact Penn pennkemp@gmail.com, www.pennkemp.weebly.com.
Surprised by Joy
Blessed be here. Blessed be clever cardinals who vary their song into language only other cardinals interpret. Blessed be red squirrels who scold all intruders into silence below.
Blessed be hostas and fern, the mix of wild with cultivated. Blessed be the cultivated soil that allows for splendid fluorescence. Blessed be the breakers upon the shoal.
Blessed be hushed wing of crow and after landing on spruce branch, a raucous caw. Blessed be the interchange of story, space to be alone together. Blessed be the quiet.
Blessed be haecceity, an expanse of time. Blessed be completion. Blessed be night that covers the cottage in a moiré spread and seeps into warm dreams of possibility.
Blessed be old bare black cherry, dead in winter’s past blast but ready to turn now into fire’s best wood, slow-burning, hot. Blessed be the poets whose refrains
run through their still too busy brain, still listening, till dawn chorus bursts into joy. And celebration of the daily begins again in jubilation, in improbable hope, arising.
“Surprised By Joy” has been chosen as the League of Poet’s poem for JOY in National Poetry Month #npm23! It is featured April 28 on https://poets.ca/poetrypause/.
Adapted from “Surprised By Joy”, River Revery, by Penn Kemp, Insomniac Press. The poem is dedicated to Catherine Ross, much loved, much missed.
Forthcoming Reading Celebrating National Poetry Month
Thursday, April 27, 2023, 7 pm. London’s first laureate Penn Kemp reads from recent poetry, free. Come for dinner or desert and stay for poems on the theme of JOY! You need to reserve a place @ Blackfriars Bistro (519) 667-4930, 46 Blackfriars St, London, ON N6H 1K7. Contact: Penn, 519 434 8555, pennkemp@gmail.com.
Forthcoming
“Surprised By Joy” has been selected for Poetry Pause: JOY for April 28, 2023, during National Poetry Month. https://poets.ca/poetrypause/
Tuesday, July 18, 2023, 7-9 pm. Minstrels & Bards Summer Soirée 2023 Edition. With Bill Gilliam, featured musician. The Living Room at The TRANZAC, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 2M7. Host: Brenda Clews, Minstrels & Bards, minstrelsandbards@gmail.com.
Saturday, October 21, 2023, 7:00-9:00 pm. Workshop, Words Aloud, Owen Sound ON. Sunday, October 22, 2023. Performance, Words Aloud, Owen Sound ON. The October festival will feature Kim Fahner, Penn Kemp, Janice Jo Lee, Sarah Lewis, Dan Lockhart, Stuart Ross, and Brandon Wint. Contact: Richard Sitoski <r_sitoski@yahoo.ca> See https://wordsaloud.ca!
Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch How can such a short novel feel so padded? The eponymous Elizabeth Finch herself, teaching her inspired course on “Culture and Civilisation”, is fascinating to our narrator. Elizabeth Finch describes the death of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Roman emperor, as the “moment history went wrong”. Julian B’s academic essay on Julian the Apostate, stuck arbitrarily mid-section, is interesting in itself and witty enough. But Julian on Julian? The self-referential trick becomes self-indulgent. The repeated phrase, “Getting its history wrong is part of being a…” nation? Religion? The dread monoculture? So Barnes proclaims. Meanwhile, despite bequeathing all her notes to the narrator, Elizabeth Finch in death as in life evades his attempts to pin her down, and so evades the reader. 2.5
William Boyd, Love is Blind Who can deny such a pleasurable epic read four stars on a snowed-in afternoon? But who is Lika / Lydia aside from her physical attributes? We know so little of this enigmatic love interest, because she is a “Russian actress”, a term used disparagingly to explain her. Well, love is blind: and our hero Brodie can only see through his Franklin glasses, bifocal. The ethnographer Paget is much more of a well-drawn character, though she appears only first page and the last thirty, Part VII, set, bizarrely, in the Andaman Islands of 1906. ***1/2 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5319776289?
Geraldine Brooks, Horse How beautifully Geraldine Brooks interweaves the story lines of Horse, as if she herself were articulating bones for display as her character Jess does. So well researched and written: “a beautifully unified studio portrait”; “this horse had an exceptional anatomy.” Cf. Thomas Scott’s painting of Lexington. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5316937712
Emma Hooper, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky Hooper’s epic travelogue set across the Roman Empire is more fun and more inviting than a hagiography. This highly original story only bogs down in the middle for a bit. Hooper’s lovely language, with hypnotic rhythms of repetition, is almost musical, even when conversational. Nine twin sisters and their diverging stories: none of them Virgin Suicides, though one becomes a Vestal Virgin in Carthage, another a saint. Brilliant. O St. Quiteria: you are FABulous. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4969743932
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperfield A tour de force: Demon Copperfield stands on its own, engrossing and propulsive. And yet it’s firmly based on David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, names of characters as well as the plot.
Laurie Lico Albanese, Hester Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese is a study in synaesthesia’s repercussions over the centuries, read in a lovely Scots brogue in Hester’s voice. A as the Scarlet Letter! One more way in which I’m a witch, and lucky to be alive in this century. Love the naming from grandmother to grandmother in a lineage of red-haired girls I can claim, as my grandmothers had red or auburn hair. Nathaniel Hawthorne is… well, at best a man of his times.
Anna Maxymiw’s Minique Witches are getting quite the splash lately in novels like Hester and Anna Maxymiw’s Minique, a brilliant new book set in New France. A girl with synesthesia in 17th C Montréal! What will she become? Brilliantly unfolded, the story lingers in mind. Anne Lamarque, the witch who knows how to survive, and her grimoire also feature in the new Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities! Coincidence? Read Minique alongside Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese: another girl with synesthesia in 17th C. Scotland, from a lineage of red-haired witches. And Danielle Daniel’s Daughters of the Deer, Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches and Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4776346617
Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese is a study in synaesthesia’s repercussions over the centuries, read in a lovely Scots brogue in Hester’s voice. A as the Scarlet Letter! One more way in which I’m a witch, and lucky to be alive in this century. Love the naming from grandmother to grandmother in a lineage of red-haired girls I can claim, as my grandmothers had red or auburn hair. Nathaniel Hawthorne is… well, at best a man of his times. Witches are getting quite the splash lately in novels like Hester and Anna Maxymiw’s Minique, a brilliant new novel set in 17th-century New France.
Witches are getting quite the splash lately in novels like Anna Maxymiw’s Minique, a brilliant new book set in New France. A girl with synesthesia in 17th C Montréal! What will she become? Brilliantly unfolded, the story lingers in mind. Anne Lamarque, the witch who knows how to survive, and her grimoire also feature in the new Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities! Coincidence? Read Minique alongside Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese: another girl with synesthesia in 17th C. Scotland, from a lineage of red-haired witches. And Danielle Daniel’s Daughters of the Deer, Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches and Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4776346617
Okezie Nwoka, God of Mercy For Black History Month and on. Magic realism and real magic in a beautifully imagined Igbo village that has not been colonized, as opposed to the next town over which has been, under the power of a fundamentalist church.
Heidi Sopinka, Utopia Heidi Sopinka’s new novel is a searing study in power and performative art: who is seen, what is shown, who dominates. A study in disappearing into light and heat; into falling; into black holes and event horizons; into boundaries and communication. Oh and a haunting, as in Rebecca. How far have women artists come since the 70’s? “Everyone is in position, a slight bending of vision already happening in the desert heat. The hills bleached out in their faded moth colors edging to pin, cut gem-like against the infinite blue. Paz sees the sky all around her, not just above her. The desert surroundings have become a stage.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5266738839…
In a time of loss and transition, I read instead of writing or editing. A book is so contained with its beginning, middle, and end. Covers we can close with a sense of accomplishment and of completion.
Yes, I read quickly! And yes, books are my refuge. I read instead of grieve…and I read instead of write… or do the dishes😊. I’m a proud librocubicularist: a person who reads in bed. Audio books are included in the list, as I often listen and then read the same book to catch up. . My list is sometimes annotated with quotes and includes the very occasional film. Almost all these books are in the beloved London Library, so if your book isn’t below, ask the Library to order it! Themes include reflections on the natural world, on witchcraft, and ancient mythology. And 31 books of poetry for August cap off my list!
“Though reading is a solitary act requiring privacy and quiet, I feel bound to other readers by an invisible thread of words, a kinship without speech.” Kathleen Winter, Lost in September
The Books
Angie Abdou, This One Wild Life: A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir. In her dedication, Angie Abdou hopes the reader will receive the book like a long letter from a good friend. And it is: a sweet, endearing, sometimes heart-breakingly honest memoir. But earlier, the price of being so open was a devastating social media attack: Abdou describes the effects in this memoir of healing. We learn what it is what Abdou plans to do with her “one wild and precious life”. During the Pandemic, it’s a lovely treat to hike in the mountains vicariously with her. And oh, I loved her cottonwood!
Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety “There was no money in poetry; it is the wasteland of literature.” A fine romp, more like her detective fiction than her metaphysical traipsing through many lives: none of that here! A hedonic product.
John Banville, The Singularities What a superb stylist John Banville is. I relished his latest, The Singularities, just for the elegant writing. Yes, another grand country house, but so well done. John Banville is Prospero writing this metaphysical meta-circus of a novel, a “tease of Luciferion dedication and inventiveness”. Two words to look up in one sentence, hmmm: “so intense seemed the reality, the—what is the word?—the haecceity, of the places and objects he encountered, and so palpable his presence among them… as alive as life itself, out stravaging the freedom of the fields”. John Banville wears this extensive vocab. jauntily as he stravages along.
Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel “to return to your origins, you first have to die. You are born and fill your lungs with the earth’s air, and then you are free to flee. Your entire life becomes a tale of abandonment and flight right up to the end of it, when you are finally allowed to return to where you took that first breath. To where your memories started being born.” Reading two elder male writers, both superb stylists: life review novels by Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel, and Ian McEwan’s Lessons. But the wife in each book, though ostensibly essential, is a cipher with few lines and fewer lineaments to her character, despite her work being portrayed by the husband as better than his. Taking male privilege for granted: a generational assumption to be outmoded? I hope so. “He perceived pure being in all things… And in the being of being he perceived his own.” “so intense seemed the reality, the—what is the word?—the haecceity, of the places and objects he encountered, and so palpable his presence among them… as alive as life itself, out stravaging the freedom of the fields”
Matt Bell, Refuse to be done: how to write and rewrite a novel in three drafts “One thing to fix in the morning” “you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words” -Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town
Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19 Consciousness talks to itself, confirms, denies, digresses and replies. Not to be read for plot but for language: her copious lists, a poetry reel spinning wherever the words lead, by sound as much as sense. A book in love with the physical act of reading and writing. “blazing through the furrows of anyone else’s mind in order to dazzle the intimate blackness at its core into rapid extinction.” “there might have been a sentence, just one sentence, of such transcendent brilliance it could have blown the world away.” “the quickening revolutions of my supremely aberrant imaginings.”
Jill Bialosky, The deceptions: a novel Jill Bialosky’s new novel is deceptive indeed. Does the male-dominated world of the ancient gods confirm her sense that men have always controlled everything? “The chorus intervenes: What if women no longer desire to satisfy the privileges of what the patriarch has built? They’ve been telling and writing the same stories for centuries. What if a new story begins with gentleness, negotiation, intuition, femininity, how would the dynamic shift?” As transference figures, the Greek gods express her own feelings: they “deploy tricks to get what they want.” “When I compare my narrator’s woes to Heracles, I am half laughing, “and yet that’s how she’s feeling as she considers the male appropriation of women’s work across history. This theme manifests in the novel’s complex twists and turns of plot. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the narrator says, “I know I’ll find the answers if I don’t give up.” “Athena, looking sternly. You must rewrite the story, she says.” “Does he not know that my mind spins and spins with nowhere sensible to land?” Jill Bialosky writes, “I turn to poems when I want to push the limits of language and bring alive the unconscious. Prose is more fluid.” She cites Hope Mirrlee’s experimental Paris: A Poem, 1920, published before The Wasteland, 1922!
Natasha Brown, Assembly Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Bernardine Evaristo walk into a bar… and meet Natasha Brown. Assembly is honed stiletto-sharp, not a hair out of place, however the protagonist feels in classist, racist England. “Unfair”, whine the various white men who confront her in this short, perfect novel.
Sharon Butala, This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life. Always brave, honest and necessary writing.
Ada Calhoun, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me Who is “Also a Poet”? Calhoun’s father, art critic (and poet Peter Schjeldahl. Her memoir twists upright out of a failed biography or two of Frank O’Hara. I knew Bill Berkson, protégé of Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers, wild man. Met Edward Gorey lurking in The Gotham Book Mart!
Julia Cameron, Seeking wisdom: a spiritual path to creative connection: a six-week artist’s way program Write a question. Write an answer. Write yourself a letter from your god(s). If god had no limits, I’d ask help with… “Unfold your own myth.” Rumi Writing from a spirit of service, her writing took off.
Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG Cumberbatch! THE POWER OF THE DOG was spectacular, a marvel. I don’t feel visually competent to grasp at one viewing all the nuances, and I seldom watch anything twice… so I was glad to hear director Jane Campion discuss the film with women choreographer and actor, and the composer. Truly wonderful how the landscape, the sound, the costumes all feed one another.
Clare Chambers, Small pleasures: a novel. So many charming pleasures: beautiful writing, engaging characters and utterly engaging plot. A delicious read and reprieve from current events.
Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial “Marguerite Porete—a beguine from Hainaut who, in 1310, was burned for heresy in the Place de Greve, in front of Paris’s town hall—rang the death knell of the tolerance these women had enjoyed, for they were increasingly ill appreciated due to their ‘double rejection of obedience, to both Church and husband.’” Feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage “inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-on-law, L. Frank Baum.”
Leonard Cohen; edited by Alexandra Pleshoyano, A ballet of lepers: a novel and stories More than juvenilia, less than the poems.
Stephen Collis, A history of the theories of rain: poems Superb “Notes on the Derangement of Time” “Thinkers understanding the universe liken rain to eloquence” “I feel the depth in the name of things”
Diane Cook, The new wilderness: a novel How would we adapt to wilderness? And our kids?
Guillermo del Toro, Nightmare Alley Nightmare Alley disturbed my dreams and my sleep with its unrelenting neo-noir inquiry into parent child love/hate, leaning toward hate in brilliant Art Deco geometries and ancient Greek nemesis. My son worked on the set up for scenes in Ontario so I had to watch…
Carrie Lee Connel, Written In Situ: poems Poems in honour of Artists’ models in “The Rossetti Suite”.
Jaclyn Desforges, Danger flower: poems The poems ricocheted, reverberated, resonated. “Thank you so much, Penn! That makes me so happy especially coming from you! I appreciate your kind words so much.”
Dave Eggers, The every: a novel Ironic to post a rating on “an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle”. You can only buy THE EVERY from indie stores (in English, in hardcover). But now the paperback is available from Amazon… How to push a behemoth off a cliff. Fun, febrile, fertile and frightening, if a tad too fat a book.
Oddný Eir; translated by Philip Roughton, Land of love and ruins I’ve been reading about the Irish monks in Iceland who were chased out by Vikings… and the Celtic women slaves the Vikings brought in! Ah, the Irish diaspora: here I am:)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger; translated by Reinhold Grimm, Lighter than air: moral poemsMouthed the words in German alongside the English translation: FUN! “With her thimble she gropes for the holes of the world and keep mending and mending.” “The Great Goddess” Love the sound of the German rolling around my mouth: Fingerhut! So visceral and specific. “Mit ihrem Fingerhut tastet sie nach den Löchern der Welt und flict und flict.” “Die Große Göttin”
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence Louise Erdrich herself reads the audiobook in a delicious rendition as funny as it is powerfully poignant. And the novel includes a bookseller called Louise! A ghost story that starts on Halloween 2019 and progresses through that annus horribilis till Halloween 2020: one long sentence of the present. Glorious!
Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story “I am her ghost, I inhabit her vanished being.”
Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa Ferrante quotes Emily Dickinson: “Witchcraft was hung, in History, But History and I Find all the Witchcraft that we need Around us, every Day -“ “The writer has no name. She is pure sensibility that feeds on the alphabet and produces an alphabet within an uncontainable flow.” “What we call ‘inner life’ is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing.” “As Eckhart in his writings absorbs the experience of the Beguines, so Dante could have reinvented Beatrice poetically by looking at the scholarly women who were commenting on the Scriptures [like] Mechthild OF Magdeburg, Hildegard of Bingen, Juliana of Norwich, Margherita Porete, and Angela da Foligno, magistra theologorum. He does it naturally by bestowing on a female figure scientific, mystical knowledge… in that inleaiarsi, so to speak, entering into becoming her—he ventures to imagine, with his mystic-leaning rationalism, with his visionary realism, what is possible for women.”
Cal Flyn, Islands of abandonment: nature rebounding in the post-human landscape Conjuring Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World in eschatological disanthropic stories where nature regenerates in sites to perilous for humans. And so, the last dream of the year after reading Cal Flyn’s Islands of abandonment: December 31, 2022: This California desert refuge is hidden from all comers but the solitary man who lives among the ruins of a deserted town, poisoned by pesticide and salt calcification. Except that the one man who also knows the route in is now leading another guy to the place. Wheeling marks obliterate the track, but the two men keep on trekking, wearing broad brown hats to ward off the sun. The desert bird frantically wheels about, its huge wingspan stirring up dust to hide the trail, to no avail. And on the outskirts of the nearby town, outside an old age home, a group of people are dancing in a circle. When I zoom in, it’s apparent that these are the elderly in a fitness program they usually dislike. But now several white-haired women are laughing, enjoying the dance. “You are actually laughing!” one says to the other. Some of the disgruntled elders break off for freedom, intent on heading out into the desert to live the rest of their days in the abandoned ruin. What will the disgruntled hermit do now that his refuge has been discovered?
Nina George; translated by Simon Pare. The book of dreams: a novel Fond of Sam, the young synaesthete, and his perceptions,“In Persia we call the meeting of two opposites bar-khord. Bar-khord happens when two strong elements touch and something new forms… the highest bar-khord is dying. When death and life meet in dying, they create…”
Louise Gluck, Faithful and virtuous night O glory worthy of the Nobel… I wrote ‘novel’! That too. Louise Gluck, American Originality: Essays on Poetry. Essential and astonishing reading and re-reading for any poet and reader of poetry. “What remains is tone, the medium of the soul.”
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mind Delighting in natural histories like this, histories that are so preciarious now, to be treasured.
Vivian Gornick, Taking a long look: essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time Essential sorties into our feminist past from one who was there.
Hiromi Goto x Ann Xu, Shadow life This graphic novel features a sassy old woman who lives as she chooses. Yes!
“shuddering done, no lift or fall, no, no interval, no thought, no whispering of thought, no. Noticing blends with light. Seeing is light. No trouble in the gaze even as the
gaze gazes upon stillness and is stilled. Where is the motion I know. Where. Any breeze and I’d be human again. Swirl of leaf and I’d see it again. The vacancy. The crust afloat above the thing itself. There being no further than this as-if hallucination. The hallucination of no as-if. The end. What is utterly. Is this
ancient. Is this. As if a huge pity but entirely and only made of matter. Where has motion gone—it has taken time fate need. All lies here now in the seen. Not seen as such just there entire in the laying-out of itself in the which-is. No if. That’s it. The stillness of no if. Dear friend, you cannot cross here
This is the visible world, I have seen it in this my life, by accident, just now, I have recognized it. I do not know that I will glimpse it again in this life, I assume it’s my one life, my mind roves over it all tapping, trying words, again words. The poem is built for this. To come to this limit & see in & fail. It is built for this particular
failure. This wakefulness that wipes out the waking. This muteness which is the heart of what. It is not silence. Now each wick is lit as the planet moves into the end of the visible. The spiderweb is played string by string by the sun. Waits. Error. Nothing waits.”
Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know Well, yes. We know that.
Lauren Groff, Matrix: a novel “Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.” Loved this celebration of mediaeval visionary Marie of France!
Tessa Hadley, Free Love “It seemed such an abject fatality for women—to be split apart in agony, bringing forth the new generation. Males were sealed at least into their single stupid bodies, which ended, thank God, when they did. This was bound to make essential differences between the sexes.” Glorious, nuanced prose. So delicious, evocative of London, 1967. I was living there then and this book transported me back, Of course the young in the book are reading R.D. Laing… we were! David Cooper, Kingsley Hall, your cat:) Our London commune’s group psychiatrist was Morty Schatzman, who wrote SOUL MURDER: Persecution in the Family, one of the gang of three at Kingsley Hall. Those were the days, my friend:)
Matt Haig, The Comfort Book “In Tibetan the word re-dok is a portmanteau of the words rewa (hope) and dokpa (fear), acknowledging that both coexist and both stem from essentially the same thing—uncertainty.” “I cannot escape death but at least I can escape the fear of it.” Epictetus Other than a few gems, fatuous comfort.
Alexandria Hall, Field music: poems Like elephants mulling over the dead, music is a handling. Listen to the sounds of a touched thing: a body, the panpipe” “Syrinx”
Joy Harjo, Poet warrior: a memoir In these quotes, you can experience her voice directly as written: “And the voice kept going, and Poet Warrior kept following no matter Her restless life in the chaos of the story field.”“Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff. This is the first world, and the last.”“The imagining needs praise as does any living thing. We are evidence of this praise.”“When you talk with the dead You can only go as far as the edge of the bank.” “Frog in a Dry River”
Frank Herbert; with an introduction by Brian Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune What a Buddhist take on the multiworld realities of Dune: like the past lives available to Tulkus; leaping through the Bardos. Cf. Read just after Buddhist George Saunders’s wild Liberation Day. “Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.” The Zensunni Whip.
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour The protagonist Mira’s name means Look! in Spanish, and Pure Colour is perception incarnate, phrase by beautiful phrase. This so deserved its GG! One of my very FAVES.
Charlotte Higgins, Greek Myths: A New Retelling You know: Euterpe, lyric verse. Erato, love songs. Calliope, epic verse. And the Winds Boreas north, Zephyr west, Eurus east and Notus south. She expounds upon Euripides’ Helen in Egypt while her replica made of clouds is in Troy. Wish we had 6th C. poet Stesichorus’s version. “In the old myths, weaving was women’s speech, women’s language, women’s story”. Carolyn Heilbrun, “What Was Penelope Unweaving?” “Earth, sea and sky as three dissimilar elements that are texta, woven together. Texere is related to the Greek verb tikto, which means to engender, to bring about, to produce, to give birth to… related to the Sanskrit takman, child, and taksh, to make or to weave.” Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe. “Tiresias had a daughter called Manto; her powers of prophecy, which she honed much later at Delphi,…so beautiful that poets would write them down and pass them off as their own.” As Homer took her verses. Mantis is Greek for prophet. Hence mantic and praying mantis. She was known as Daphne too. It turns out Pyramus and Thisbe is Babylonian. Her blood stained the white berries of mulberry red.
Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions “Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration… We honor their presence by naming the legacies they leave us.”
Emma Hooper, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky More fun and more inviting than a hagiography of a little known Roman saint, with hypnotic rhythms of repetition that are almost musical.
Susan Juby, Mindful of Murder Laughing & loving this Buddhist butler mystery:) & more to come. A novel based on Hollyhock, Cortes Island BC. And a series to follow! I want to BE Helen: more scrutable than Jeeves:): a sequel to Helen: yes!
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. Epigraph in Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead
Amitava Kumar, A time outside this time Oddly titled, as this novel is so much of its time, ours, just passed. More of an extended essay than a novel, but relevant; it holds the reader’s interest in its examination of fake news. In Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith “remembers the past, which has been obliterated. A time outside this time. Is that why readers went looking for 1984 after Trump was elected? Literature as an expression of a tiny will to freedom.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of the Sacred Deer October 31, 2022: How fitting a dream for this autumn quarter day! For several days now, Gavin and I have eaten at a Greek restaurant downtown. This morning, he drops me off outside the place so I can order the meal while he returns home in our blue VW to collect whatever he forgot. Looking into the restaurant, we notice that the sun fills the open back door with intense rays all the way east through the entire town. How remarkable! But, I learn, the restaurant doesn’t open for meals until 5:30. When I enter, the mustachioed beefy owner greets me more quizzically than warmly. Sitting down, I understand why. Sex videos to a full house, this early in the day! On stage, a man and woman are kissing enthusiastically and expertly, the image enlarged behind them on screen. Though at first I think it’s a video, the couple bow to their enthusiastic audience after the exhibition. The owner’s young daughter comes down the rows with her little sister to present me with the Halloween gift of seventy-five cents in change, as a thank-you; I don’t know for what, but we smile lovingly at one another. My gift to the owner is the knowledge that his place is in direct alignment to the rising sun at the Equinox. For sure, it’s the morning sun in the autumn. Though he’s not unduly impressed, he asks me to write a concise note that he can use as a plaque to attract tourists. A difficult process, to condense and clarify my description: no metaphors! The daughter is from Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of the Sacred Deer. She presented an essay on Iphigenia to her class! Cf. Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis. Her plea to be the one sacrificed and her mother’s suggestion that they could always have more children reminded me of the grisly pleas of Ugolini’s children starving in Dante’s Inferno: eat us, father, for you have given us life and can take it away.
Clarice Lispector, An apprenticeship, or, The book of pleasures; translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler; afterword by Sheila Heti; edited by Benjamin Moser “arithmetic came form ‘arithmos’ which means rhythm, that number came from ‘nomos’ which means ‘law’ or ‘norm’” “the great freedom of not having ways or forms” “in this dream-glimmer state that she dreamt seeing that the fruit of the world was hers… hanging in the dark space”
D.A. Lockhart. Go down Odawa way. Kegedonce Press “Shemu Sipu” for Deshkan Ziibi “the first gift of creation is the turtle shell we tread upon. Water the certain cut of motion on this land, the divine that leads us ashore, to places life finds us.”
Wonderful onomatopoeia in the Lenape Southern Unami Dialect (ul) Nishnabemowin (Nish) asukwkana songs (ul) awenik people (ul) awentetak little people(ul) chikenemwi turkey (ul) chiskukus (ul) robin chulensak birds (ul) gaagaaglishib cormorant (nish) kwikwinem duck (ul) maxkalaniat red-tailed hawk (ul) neneskakw red bud tree(ul) winkimakwsko sweet grass (ul) nushemakw willow (ul) waawaashkeshi white-tailed deer(ul) Waawiiyaatanong I loved puzzling out the Lenape Southern Unami Dialect words for creatures of this land, often onomatopeic: chulensak birds (ul) gaagaaglishib cormorant (nish) I thought you’d like his poem for our “Thames”, the Antler River, the Askinassippi: “Shemu Sipu” for Deshkan Ziibi “the first gift of creation is the turtle shell we tread upon. Water the certain cut of motion on this land, the divine that leads us ashore, to places life finds us.”
Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays “It is as though the act of concentration itself draws out something latent, or, if time becomes a dimension like width, something that was there all along.” “geography was making its way back into history” “the land’s guiding specificity” “When an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences,” “remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening—resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand… Indigenous people observe. They pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects.” “a verb, the gerund ‘bearing.’” “to prefer to live a metaphorical life—that is, to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings” “If I simply accept my limitations and push on with the research, I frequently find that the disparate pieces self-sort and come together on their own, merging like iron filings” “I gravitate toward environments of uncertainty like this—the intersection of cultural and physical geography” “I continued to rely to believe, too, in the immanence of the Blessed Mother… a female bodhisattva… the Black Madonna”
Jeanette Lynes, The Apothecary’s Garden: A Novel For sweet literary Romance, I’m enjoying The Apothecary’s Garden: A Novel by the fire. Something between Jane Urquhart and Helen Humphreys: not my usual cuppa, but perfect comfort fare. Glad to have outside complete, whew, and to be cozy. A fine literary Romance devoted and dedicated to Common Magic!
Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fayne “Hermione looks around the unfriendly room, she glimpses a girl with eyes like “star sapphires”—the hypnotic Fayne Rabb. With our heroine’s identity split into shards by her academic failure, her lover George back from Europe, and Fayne’s eyes “slanting rain blue” in her direction, the stage is set for a debate between heterosexuality and mystical erotic sisterhood.” From H.D., HERmione: Frances Gregg and Ezra Pound https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/hds-art-of-failure? Fain: willingly under the circumstances. Lord Randall.
Alexander MacLeod, Animal Person On a glorious afternoon, strolled down to Gibbons Park in London, read Animal Person, story to story from park bench to park bench all the way home:)! Didn’t arrive back till 6 pm. Sweet! Came across clusters of Concord grapes, so am making juice. I love how MacLeod takes the specifics of a story and reaches an abstract in the last sentence.
Hilary Mantel, Learning to Talk: Stories Hilary Mantel describes Learning to Talk: Stories as “autoscopic. From a distant, elevated perspective, my writing self is looking down at a boy reduced to a shell, waiting to be fleshed out by phrases. Its outlines approximate mine, but there is a penumbra for negotiation.” “words are not enough; my early world was synesthetic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which reemerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.”“But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art. There is a poem by WH Auden, called ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’: The glacier knocks in the cupboard The desert sighs in the bed And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead The purpose of my first lecture is to ask if this lane is two-way street. In imagination, we chase the dead, shouting, ‘Come back!’ We may suspect that the voices we hear are an echo of our own, and the movement we see is our own shadow. But we sense the dead have a vital force still – they have something to tell us, something we need to understand. Using fiction and drama, we try to gain that understanding. In these talks, I hope to show there are techniques we can use. I don’t claim we can hear the past or see it. But I say we can listen and look.” https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/what-wisdom-do-the-dead-offer-us-the-reith-lectures-by-hilary-mantel- “When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.” Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost “Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed & prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself—slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon?” Hilary Mantel
Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future 2022 Not to read alone in bed at night. Truly scary and scarily too true.
Anna Maxymiw, Minique A girl with synesthesia in !7th C. Montréal: to be read alongside Danielle Daniel’s Daughters of the Deer, Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial and Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. AND Kathleen Winter’s marvellous Lost in September. Innkeeper/herbalist Anne Lamarque and her grimoire also feature in the new Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities where she was tried for witchcraft in 17th C. Montréal! Coincidence? A plethora of witches this year!
Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book The Hero of This Book for me was not Elizabeth McCracken’s ostensible hero, her mother, but McCracken’s lucid, pellucid style, especially her notes on writing. Her play between genres presents us with oxymorons: the novel reads like the memoir she denies it is. “Why are you writing about me? Because otherwise you’d evanesce, and that I cannot bear.”
Judith McCormack, The Singing Forest “They should have known something, of course. They did know. They didn’t know.” Why haven’t we all been reading Judith McCormack’s all too relevant The Singing Forest from Biblioasis? Blurbs by Kim Echlin, Shaena Lambert & Caroline Adderson Caroline Adderson enticed me. Her prose held me throughout even the most terrible events.
Ian McEwan, Lessons Lessons ranges throughout the trajectory of a century and the lives of Roland and Alissa, who becomes a novelist at great cost. What counts, writing or family? She, determined and ruthless; he drifting and passive. The committed writer leaves motherhood behind: genius and/or monster. The granddaughter, Stephanie, is Evangeline. “The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.” Reading two elder male writers, both superb stylists: life review novels by Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel, and Ian McEwan’s Lessons. But the wife in each book, though ostensibly essential, is a cipher with few lines and fewer lineaments to her character, despite her work being portrayed by the husband as better than his. Taking male privilege for granted: a generational assumption to be outmoded? I hope so.
Stephen Mitchell, Joseph and the way of forgiveness: a biblical tale retold Loved this by Byron Katie’s husband. “How do you honestly and deeply ‘interpret’ a dream? By dreaming onward.” Thomas Moore
Melody Moezzi, The Rumi prescription: how an ancient mystic poet changed my modern manic life “Through the song of the nightingale you may learn to compose, You still can’t know what it sings to the rose.” “You’re like a pearl asking where the ocean lies, All the while soaking in its tides.” “Listen to how the reed flute sings its song, Lamenting a separation gone on too long.” Rumi, Masnavi Molana: our master Another interesting twist on memoir, incorporating all she learns from her father and Rumi: Molana: our master.
Sy Montgomery, The Hummingbirds’ Gift Raising abandoned chicks and releasing them into the wild! Sy Montgomery, The hawk’s way: encounters with fierce beauty Ah to find one’s inner hawk: that ferocious focus! Sy Montgomery, The soul of an octopus: a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness Listening to Sy Montgomery read, her enthusiasm is contagious.
Lisa Moore, THIS IS HOW WE LOVE Difficult to read only because the characters are so well-drawn and the writing so superb, yet their situation is harrowing and poignant Moore never holds back. The characters have their own voices: the painter’s is painterly! And oh that Newfoundland weather: a song against so many storms, literal and emotional. A perfect House of Anansi book.
Virginia Morell, Animal Wise Also depicts animal consciousness: so many interesting new studies in animal perception!
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell “Mukherjee employs the literary equivalent of a massive zoom lens, both tracing the history of physicians and scientists who parsed living beings into ever-smaller constituents … and then zooming out to the paradigm shifts in our understanding of ourselves that this knowledge required.” Vincent Lam
Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: the Subversive Power of Literature in Trouble Times “the root of word in Arabic comes from another word: wound.”
Kristen Nef, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive. My Inner Critic transforms to Inner Compassion when ‘they’ are awarded a gold star for good work through the decades and promoted to Inner Compassion😊 What a relief into more spaciousness, fuller breath!
Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. How apt and appropriate to read Maggie Nelson’s lucid On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint these days when the definition of Freedom has escaped all known boundaries.
Claire North, Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1) An opinionated re-telling of The Penelopiad from Hera’s encompassing perspective: “Listen to my voice: I who have been stripped of honour, of power and of that fire that should be mine, I who have nothing to lose that the poets have not already taken from me, only I will tell you the truth. I, who part the veil of time, will tell those stories that only the women tell. So follow me to the western isles, to the halls of Odysseus, and listen.” I couldn’t resist such an invitation and Claire North followed through.
Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry: overcoming in uncertain times December 9, 2022: Flying home from Washington, I take the direct route to Vancouver over to Toronto and then London, rather than stopping over in Chicago. This way I beat the others and am able to retrieve my things from the locker before they arrive to check. While listening to Michelle Obama read her new book.
Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities #18 is the most rewarding in the series, as Penny was a CBC journalist reporting the 1989 murder of 14 women in Montréal killed because they were women. In Minique, Anna Maxymiw develops even further the historical herbalist/innkeeper, Anne Lamarque, who was tried for witchcraft in 17th C. Montréal.
Tom Prime, Mouthfuls of space “I was a small town— almost happy”: poems of dissociation and surreal dislocations.
Colm Tóibín, Vinegar Hill “Orpheus will go to the cliff And call the dead to come To us from the sea where They have been swimming. ”
Molly Peacock, Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door. A lovely study of painters and painting. Tonalists “connected light both to emotions—and to the sounds of emotions. Using musical vocabulary, like nocturne or symphony, they suggested that emotions could be heard through paint”. “tap into childhood to find the ‘transitional object;” as D.W. Winnicott calls it: “‘Our first adventures into reality are through the objects” with “vitality or reality of its own.”
E. Alex Pierce, To float, to drown, to close up, to open How I hear Daphne Marlatt’s rhythms, her influence, especially in the first poem: “where the great artery rises and crosses, coming so close to the larynx, the lynx in larynx, the animal voice in his first low growl” The first section opens whole areas of consciousness that I haven’t seen articulated before: truly transforming in its in/sight! It turns out we’re close in age as well: I was born in 1944: war babies. “And in that space of summer afternoon, the image born of sound and light inhabits all her blood and bone, the mind ignites. See sees the fire—space for her is stage now, theatre is the flame” Yes, to context, though context for me is the nest for the fledgline (I meant fledgling!) and in prose. The gift wrapping round the jewel, nugget, pearl of the poem. Daphne Marlatt’s long rhythms underscore the first pages. Imagine reading this book (again) along with Jorie Graham, Runaway: new poems! Especially, “WHEREAS AS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN” stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light.” Seeing into the space of light. of sound…! I so identified with Pierce’s piano pieces: I got to Gr. 9 and gave up… I could never keep time but was ‘expressive”:) much to the nuns’ chagrin… Those Preludes, though! That war haunts us war babies, conceived in such chaotic times and imprinted as a lurking shadow. E. Alex Pierce’s Vox humana awaits me soon.
Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory Dr. Mark Collins: “When patients have vestibular dysfunction, the same parts of the brain that control emotional functioning get affected… an autonomic reaction where their heart rate increases and they develop anxiety” circular feedback, f;lux.
Clare Pollard, Delphi What I’d like to remember: “Stichomancy: Prophecy by Lines Chosen at Random” “In the second century AD, Artemidorus, a Greek physician who lived in Rome, wrote that there were two classes of dreams: the somnium, which forecast events, and the insomnium, which are concerned with present matters. His Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams) is a dream dictionary.“ The Sibylline Books, oracular prophecies “bought from the Sibyl at Cumae by the last king of Rome, Tarquin” John Dee “advocated for the founding of English colonies in the New World to form a ‘British Empire,’ a term he coined.” “a triad of sisters called the Thriae, with heads like aged women’s, besprinkled as if with white pollen, and the lower bodies and wings of bees… buzzing with gossip, nectar-eaters, swarming, the potential to sting. They were nymphs of the springs of the Corycian Cave of Mount Parnassus. Pan’s cave” at Delphi “the tragic hero has a moment of anagnorisis. A change from ignorance to awareness.” Accelerationists “want the digital and the human to merge. They call that the Singularity” Patternists. Human “patterns will be transferred into robots” Barbarian, from the Greek barbaroi: babbler, an onomatopoeic word for foreigners whose words sound like” burbling.
Justin Phillip Reed, The malevolent volume “I am the kind of cautionary poem that no one anymore has the peacetime to memorize. In my marrow screams a horse- drawn savage. I was loved, to make matters worse.” “The Whiteness of Achilles” “We are the dead. We set the tone death. We climb their sleep like bellflower horns, and blow.” “If We Must Be the Dead” “I sleep in the wilderness of my losses.” “The idyll was a metropole of violence. Verses from the vantagepoint of frost were purely blank, not free.” “the lazy laryngeal runnel” Astonished by Justin Phillip Reed’s The malevolent volume: the beauty in horror, dismembered by memory.
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 Well, a mixed bag because of so much necessary but heavy-handed messaging, even though I agreed with the author. Ideas in action don’t necessarily make for a compelling read. I did learn more about economics and trading than I thought I wanted to. Quibble: the kids easily read the epitaph on a tombstone near Melville’s grave, but only learn to read some hundreds of pages further on. “an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality.” “We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communication. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Stuart Ross, You exist, details follow: poems “Love me. Tender my loins. Through all this, a life wandered.”
Yusuf Saadi, Pluviophile You don’t have to love rain to enjoy “The Place Words Go To Die”: “Primifluous was there and wandered murk-eyed /in the river’s bones” … flowing first, doncha know. Saadi lives inside words, as in: “Strange how we retain pieces of language, the way Yeats holds terrible for me, as in terrible beauty, or Rumi beloved for you, as in beloved let me enter.”” And in “Is the Afterlife Lonely Too?”: “…do the dead hide inside poems, in the corridor between stanzas, curling fetal In a b’s womb? (Are you here, now?) When the dead speak do words signify perfectly with presence?”
Samanta Schweblin, in Seven Empty Houses “I fished for the paper in my pocket, put it in my mouth, and as I swallowed it I repeated his name in silence, several times, so I would never forget it.” “An Unlucky Man”
Elif Shafak, The island of missing trees Features a wise old fig: “For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its silver-white bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins.”
Shyam Selvadurai, Mansions of the Moon Dreaming August 28, 2022: Waiting to figure out what to do next, we hang out in a friend’s flat. Anne’s delicately crocheted wool scarf is wrapped around my neck as protection. We should head from Bloor St. down to the lake, walking the long blocks, passing her house. Before we set out, I realize I’ve left the scarf on the floor of the apartment. So I sneak back in to retrieve it, hoping not to be detected. Inside, poet Marvyne Jenoff has picked up the scarf, examining it closely. If Anne’s name on it, I will be incriminated. Though I think I’ve escaped without notice, Marvyne calls me out, specifically noting Anne’s telltale scarf.
The white scarf is a kata, which the Buddhist practitioner offers the teacher at the end of an empowerment as an emblem of surrendering the self to Reality. The scenes come from a novel I just read, Shyam Selvadurai’s Mansions of the Moon, about Buddha’s wife, Yaśodharā and son Rāhula. And the kata, from Lama Lena’s profound Dzogchen teachings, next:
Shabkar, The Flight of the Garuda: Dzogchen Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Translated by Keith Dowman. “Ordained as a Gelug monk, the itinerant yogi Shabkar was renowned for his teachings on Dzogchen, the heart practice of the Nyingma lineage.” August 27, 2022: At the conference centre, I have been asked to give an hour long talk on Dzogchen, though I am very much a beginner myself. The organizer, Ione, a small woman with short black hair and bangs, encourages me. What would Ione be short for? Something classical. When I arrive at the venue early, a few people, mainly men, have already gathered around the long table. I introduce myself and ask for their names, thinking I’d be able to remember the ten or so here. But as I begin speaking, more and more people arrive until even the balcony is filled: an audience of around a hundred. “Enlightenment is easy,” I remark.“The trick is to stay enlightened, not to be deterred by distractions. One of you might be enlightened right now. It can happen in the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger in any moment of presence. Watch!” I snap my finger, looking directly at one of the men hanging over the balcony rail. “Maybe it’s you!” He startles. “Wake up! Enlightenment is your natural birthright. All you need is to uncover and release thought. Let it go. What is behind, below your thinking, your feeling?” I continue for an hour, the audience with me, though they have had little prior experience of meditation. They shuffled out, talking among themselves, men off the street heading back. Ione comes in to congratulate me and to clean up, asking for the donation box. I’ve forgotten to ask specifically for dana, though the box is in plain sight. When Ione asks me to speak again next week, I agree, wondering if I will be paid or if all the money goes to the centre. I know most of the audience will return. I should pass the hat to ensure they donate something, even a pittance. Listening to Lama Lena’s eloquent, heartfelt Dzogchen progression of 22 talks on The Flight of the Garuda, as she elucidates the text and skillfully responds to questions. “What is behind the thinker, the perceiver? Search for yourself. Find your mind,” she exhorts, knowing that there is no ground but emptiness. “Follow the instructions,” she insists. I do. And she discusses the five Dhyani Buddhas!! https://www.learnreligions.com/the-five-dhyani-buddhas-4123189 The dharmata/dharmadatu of Nirmanakaya, Sambhogakaya and Dharmakaya. “dharmakaya is like the sun, sambhogakaya is like the rays, and nirmanakaya is like the rays hitting the objects on the earth.” The Three Bodies of Enlightenment – Lion’s Roar https://www.lionsroar.com/the-three-bodies-of-enlightenment…. “dharmadatu (chös-kyi-dbyings in Tibetan) can tentatively be translated as ‘the expanse of phenomena.’” “a Sanskrit term meaning “realm of Truth.” It is derived from the Sanskrit root words, dhatu, meaning “dimension,” “sphere’”.
Ann Shin, THE LAST EXILES: A NOVEL Her Korean heritage and history brought vividly, poignantly alive.
Daniel Siegel, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence–A Complete Guide to the Groundbreaking Wheel of Awareness Meditation Practice: Listening to Daniel Siegel read from his book. His exploration of consciousness parallels Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mindin tracing consciousness not just to the brain but to the far older nervous system. His model of the wheel, with its hub of being and the rim of thoughts and feelings is a good one.
Richard-Yves Sitoski, How to Be Human This poet has found his stride! “I am Sappho constructing an authorial persona to be revealedto Anne Carson in poems composed as fragments to begin with.” “Conclusions” “revealed to be the author writing themselves into being.” Richard-Yves Sitoski, Wait, What? Throughout Wait, What? the poet is utterly present, witnessing with exquisite, unflinching acuity his life, from conception to now. Wait, What? articulates keen perceptions on every page with finely honed lines that are an intense delight. These poems give the reader pause (often a jolt) to ponder what it is to be human. A fearless, often funny stylist, Sitoski is a poet to watch.
Elizabeth Strout, Lucy By the Sea “It’s odd how the mind does not take anything in until it can.” So engaged in the characters’ lives, I’d read on and on!
Angela Szczepaniak, The nerves centre A ten-act cast of characters: poetry in performance, poet performing! A study of anxiety, her titles from self-help with dramatis personae. My fave: Mime Heckler. Utterly uttered!
Lisa Taddeo, Animal: a novel Animal: a novel is a ferocious diatribe against male sexual violence. Since the book is dedicated to her parents and she lives with her husband and daughter, I wondered about the story behind the novel.
Miriam Toews, Fight Night Preparing for the cold last night by watching ALL MY PUNY SORROWS: such a literate, poignant and tender film based on the Toews novel! And reading , Fight Night, familiar characters: the grandmother, the girl.
Colm Tóibín, Vinegar Hill “Orpheus will go to the cliff And call the dead to come To us from the sea where They have been swimming.” Fine work, organic and very present.
Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Jennifer Croft, The books of Jacob: or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment I thought of Polish friends so often reading Polish Novel Prize novelist Olga Tokarczuk. The books of Jacob is almost 1,000 pages, so I’ve written out a quote or two about messianic Jacob Frank. To him: “The Maid is God’s wisdom hidden in a painted board like a princess in a tall On alchemy: “do not the words light (or) and infinity (Ein Sof) have the same numerical value?” And gematria. books about light: the Book of Brightness, the Gates of Light, the Light of the Eyes, “the Light of Holiness, and finally the Sefer haXohar is the Book of Splendor.” What an ending! She’s still in the cave, turning into diamond! Worth the wading.
Emily Urquhart, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father, and Me Today, in Emily Urquhart’s The age of creativity: art, memory, my father, and me, I read: “Limitation, necessarily, inspires. Psychologist Robert Kastenbaum, whose scholarly work on death and dying redefined what we know about this stage of life, has written that creativity ‘may be the aging individual’s most profound response to the limits and uncertainties of existence.’ Facing resistance… it is human nature to invent new pathways.” “Alterstil, or ‘old-age style,’… Some cultural critics, Kenneth Clark and Edward Said among them, claim that the same old-age-style characteristics appears…as increasingly abstract, spiritual, or ethereal, and the blurring of formal and informal styles is described as a nod to eternity.” “old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: ‘Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?’” Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
Jeff Vandermeer, Hummingbird salamander. “A dead robin in the gutter, one torn wing spread toward the drain like an invitation to the underworld.” This bird becomes a noir and naiad metaphor for the entire eco-novel’s lament for dying species and genocide in the Anthropocene. Beyond the sylvan felicity of names and family background, what connects Silvina with the Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo? A nod to Borges, Ocampo’s friend and supporter? Jeff Vandermeer, Annhilation
Sarah Venart, I am the big heart “What I can’t lose, I’ve used.” “Chance Harbour
Paul Vermeersch; introduction by Daniel Scott Tysdal, Shared universe: new and selected poems, 1995-2020 Surrealism in colourful play and display.
Katherena Vermette, The Strangers “He’d always talk about being a Stranger like it was a good thing, like it was the opposite of what the world seemed to think it was. ‘Never forget who you are, Margogo, and who you come from. We are warriors, us. We are Métis. We have fought and won our freedom. We’ve never lived by their rules. Aren’t meant to. We have to be free.’”
Martin Walker, The Coldest Case What not to like… murder mystery and French country cuisine cooked by Bruno!
Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock A haunting chronicle of women across generations against the eerie presence of the Bass Rock that silently bears witness to thewomen’s voices.
Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise Nicely structured fin de siècle tome, over three centuries, based on Washington Square and similarly named characters not to mention Hawaiian royalty. Deja vu, David Mitchell!
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.” “The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity… When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.”
Zoe Whittal, The Spectacular Three generations of women negotiating current, changing times. It’s complicated, very. Spectacular, if you’re 21. I’d have liked much more from the oldest woman but it’s a long novel as is. Reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue.
Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow October 20, 2022: The painting by Swedenborg is a swirl of oranges that resolve under closer scrutiny into several figures if you look closely enough. To the right, a person is in profile, looking on at two people of the same sex kissing. Would this have been a scandal too egregious to represent directly in the nineteenth century? A dream while listening toGabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which depicts the image of a magic eye that reveals a hidden icon.
Anthologies Marple: Twelve New Mysteries So much fun! And older women are no longer ignored in these stories:)!
Magazines too numerous to mention!
And my fave 31 books of poetry for August! @SealeyChallenge #31BooksInAugust #31Books31Days #TheSealeyChallenge #TheSealeyChallenge2022
Day 1 Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees. Christine Lowther, editor. @CaitlinPress. Such an evocative, provocative essential anthology! Poets, both settler and Indigenous, pay tribute to trees through reflections on the past, connections to the present, and calls for the protection of our future.@SealeyChallenge #31BooksInAugust #TheSealeyChallenge #TheSealeyChalenge2022
Day 3 Charlie Petch, Why I Was Late “To be performed with dulcimer.” “Things You Didn’t Know about Me” Self-referential, engaging fun Performative poetry like Nerve Centre but stronger.
Day 5 Heartwood: Poems for the Love of Trees. Editor, Lesley Strutt. https://poets.ca/publications/heartwood/. This anthology continues my theme of activism through poetry to raise awareness about our threatened environment.
Day 6 Junie Désil. Eat salt/gaze at the ocean: poems “scudding back & forth through history” “There isn’t a pastness”/
Day 8 Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony “It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving.”
Day 9 Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry “Lumen means both the cavity of an organ, literally an opening and a unit of luminous flux Literally a measurement of how lit The source is Illuminate us”.
Day 10 Richard-Yves Sitoski, No Sleep ‘til Eden. A poet to watch! Owen Sound Poet Laureate’s collection reaches out from printed word to multimedia, all for ecopoetics!
Day 11 Susan McMaster, Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me Black Moss Press: poignant, powerful & funny a la fois.
I’m delighted that my poem, “Our Kind of Intimate”, is included in The League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause Throwback’s series this winter (Dec 20-Jan 3).
This series highlights top read poems from the past year of Poetry Pause. You can read it here:
My poem was originally part of Chris Meloche’s hour-long 2010 production called The Space Between: A Transmorphous Journey, at Aeolian Hall, London ON.
Penn Kemp: text and performance. Chris Meloche & Richard Moule (Transmorphous Sound Ensemble): soundscapes.
Scaling the Colour Bar: Ecophonics
Transchromaticized by love, by palette of constantly shifting grey shades, we intermittently glimpse vivid streaks, flash on the wing.
Orioles everywhere this year: bright gleams searing the sky impeccably orange and black.
A red-winged blackbird creaks like a clothesline in low gear. The creek it nests by murmurs
bubbles of possibility, ignoring frothing eddies of sodden soap for the fun of funnelling spray.
Spring’s annual utopia of hope collides with dystopian detritus, shoreline picketed by plastic.
As parallel discontinuity, planes scar the blue with contrail puffs crisscrossing innocent as cumuli.
Seemingly disparate elements catch the light and loudly soar co-mingling in cerulean expanse. * Swimming in ether, Kerouac calls, “My witness is the empty sky.” Earth responds; river replies…
“The ground that gives rise to the Word and the Word that articulates the encompassing
ground are exactly parallel.”
An early version of this poem, “Colour Bar” was published in RIVER REVERY, Insomniac Press, https://riverrevery.ca/.
Michael Morris (1942-1982) created the colour bar series I loved in the early 70’s. Where he and Mr. Peanut (Vincent Trasov) lived, in Babyland on BC’s Sunshine Coast, glorious colour bars lit up and littered the gardens: fun and an eye opener for me: Art and the land in action…
My poem, Cancel Culture, is in BEST CANADIAN POETRY 23!
What inspiring company! Everyone’s kidding me about publishing poems from the future.
Cancel Culture
Between earning and learning lies kerning, the name for the space between letters of type to please the eye in a proportional font both natural and polished.
Not to be confused with tracking where spacing adjusts uniformly over a range of characters. And then there is leading. And leading on.
*
To cancel a person now means to remove respect.
Check your Latin for cross-hatching. Words rendered illegible by drawing lines through blacked out offending phrases.
Cancello, cross out. Erasure rules. Redacted. Where do we draw the line?
Leaving mere palimpsest left to scratch literate out of obliterate.
Thank you John Barton, Anita Lahey @Biblioasis!
“‘My goal,’ writes guest editor John Barton of his long career as a literary magazine editor, ‘was always to be jostled awake, and I soon realized that I was being jostled awake for two—myself and the reader… I came to understand that my job description included an obligation to expose readers to wide varieties of poetry, to challenge their assumptions while expanding their taste.’
In selecting this year’s edition of Best Canadian Poetry, Barton brings the same spirit to his survey of Canadian poems published by magazines and journals in 2021. From new work by Canadian favourites to exciting new talents, this year’s anthology offers fifty poems to challenge and enlarge your sense of the power and possibility of Canadian poetry.”
Thanks to Karl Jirgens for reading “Cancel Culture” at the Toronto launch of the anthology!
We are honoured to present our anthology, POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL for @WordsLDN at Museum London on November 5, noon-1:30 pm, in person and on line. Ten contributing poets will read their own poems and others from the anthology!
Poems in Response to Peril: A Gathering of Poets for Ukraine
How do poets respond to precarious events in the world? Poets Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski have co-edited Poets in Response to Peril, an anthology which brings together 61 poems by 48 of Canada’s activist poets in response to the current crisis in Ukraine and other perils afflicting our troubled times.
Words is very pleased to host an event to celebrate the anthology, featuring readings by Penn Kemp, Richard-Yves Sitoski, Robert Priest, Andreas Gripp, Jennifer Wenn, Karl Jirgens, Frances Roberts Reilly, Patricia Keeney, Shelly Siskind, and Susan Wismer. Profits from the book will be directed toward PEN Ukraine’s efforts to provide the Ukrainian cultural community with evacuation and resettlement help.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November!
Our readers are:
Andreas Gripp is the author of Selected Poems 2000-2020. He lives in London with his wife, Carrie Lee. He is the author of various poetry and art publications including Selected Poems 2000-2022 (Beliveau Books, 2022) and still and unstill (Beliveau Books, 2021). Original photos and artwork often accompany Andreas’ writings.
Karl Jirgens, Editor of the enduring and influential Rampike Magazine. Professor Emeritus, Dept. of English Literature & Creative Writing, U Windsor. Karl’s newest book, which he now touring, is titled, The Razor’s Edge (2022, Porcupine’s Quill).
Penn Kemp has participated in Canadian cultural life for more than 50 years, writing, editing, and publishing poetry, fiction and plays. She was London’s inaugural Poet Laureate and Western University’s writer-in-residence, 2009-2010. Her poem, “Cancel Culture” is in BEST CANADIAN POETRY 2023. Penn is honoured to again participate in beloved Wordsfest, presenting POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL.
Patricia Keeney is a poet, novelist, arts writer and long-time professor of literature and creative writing at York University. Her latest novel is One Man Dancing (Inanna). Recent poetry volumes include Orpheus in our Time (NeoPoiesis) – ancient hymns and modern dialogue – and First Woman (Inanna).
Robert Priest is the author of fourteen books of poetry, 3 plays, 4 novels, lots of musical CDS, and one hit song. His words have been debated in the legislature, posted in the Transit system, quoted in the Farmer’s Almanac, and sung on Sesame Street. His latest album of songs and spoken word is Love is Hard. New poems, If I Didn’t Love the River, are out from ECW press.
Frances Roberts Reilly is a poet and filmmaker whose ethnicity is Welsh Romany/English. Now living in Kitchener, she has an international profile as a Romani writer. Her latest book is Parramisha: A Romani Poetry Collection (Cinnamon Press). She is Producer of Watershed Writers on Midtown Radio KW.
Richard-Yves Sitoski is the indefatigable co-editor of POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, published by Pendas Productions and his Laughing Raven Press. He co-ordinated our excellent zoom launch and curates the ongoing Poets in Response to Peril, on his https://www.youtube.com/user/veggiemeister/playlists. He is a songwriter, a mesmerizing performance poet, the 2019-2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound and the Artistic Director of the Words Aloud festival.
Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer and speaker from London. Her first poetry chapbook, A Song of Milestones, was published by Harmonia Press. Upcoming is her first full-size collection, Hear Through the Silence (from Cyberwit). She has written From Adversity to Accomplishment, a family and social history, and spoken at a wide variety of venues,
Susan Wismer is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at south Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog. She is a poet, mother, grandmother, gardener, dancer, hiker, activist and a former professor of environmental studies at the University of Waterloo
Penn’s reading is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts. As were readings from our launch of POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL at Art Bar Poetry Series, Toronto on October 11, to an enthusiastic full house, as seen here:
The war is still raging… if you don’t have your copy of this anthology in support of Ukraine, order it here for $30 plus post: https://rsitoski.bigcartel.com/.
Tuesday, October 11, 7 pm. Art Bar Poetry Series. Our launch of Poems in Response to Peril @ Clinton’s. Readers included editors Penn and Richard and six more poets from the anthology: Marsha Barber, Jay Brodhar, Caroline Di Giovanni, Patricia Keeney, Shelly Siskind with host Kate Rogers. .
Saging: the Journal of Creative Ageing, http://www.sage-ing.com/Sage-ing41.pdf P.2, a full page poster in colour and P. 27, info and a poem by Susan McCaslin. June 28, 2022.
Island Catholic Times. P. 17, info and a poem. June 19. An article is coming out in The Vancouver Sun on Saturday, July 16 as well as in the summer edition of WRITE, for The Writers Union of Canada. Other reviews are forthcoming…
“Ukrainian art in Canada reflects the war and our responses to it”
These passionate, often heartbreaking, poems invoke sunflowers and broken earth; intimacy and grief; falling bombs and the fragility of flesh; AK-47s and a bride’s bouquet. Gathering voices in the white heat of the moment, this anthology couldn’t be more timely or more necessary.
The book continues with an ongoing YouTube playlist of videos submitted by poets expressing solidarity with those afflicted by war (YouTube > Poets in Response to Peril). Profits go toward PEN Ukraine.
June 19, 2022. POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL is out now and it is beautiful… a fitting tribute in solidarity with Ukraine! In solidarity, Londoners came out to help us launch this anthology of urgent poems in support of Ukraine on May 28 at Blackfriars Bistro & Catering, London Ontario.
The anthology has been sent to Canada’s ambassador in Kiev and to several poets and publishers in Ukraine, including Dmytro Kremin’s son, also a poet. Our first three reviews are up!
POETS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, our Zoom on April 2, is now up, thanks to Richard-Yves Sitoski: h4. Truly a labour of love, from Canadian poets to Ukrainian poets and people. What a profound and poignant event, gathering 100 poets and participants coast to coast— holding fast for over three hours of words that we so needed to hear. Poetry is the ability to respond, and the poets did, in voices eloquently and powerfully expressed. This blog is intended to keep that community vibe flowing.
Part 1 of our zoom, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETCb_gHO0R4, features Penn Kemp, Richard-Yves Sitoski, Susan McCaslin, Svetlana Ischenko, Russell Thornton, Albert Dumont, Bänoo Zan, Celeste Snowber, Blaine Marchand and Marsha Barber.
Kudos to Rico (Richard-Yves Sitoski), our indomitable host, along with Owen Sound Public Library! And please take a listen when you can, when you need to hear these poems. Here’s celebrating National Poetry Month, #npm22.
Attached is our cover for POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, designed by Rico.
Here’s to the community of poets! Gathering voices: so many ways of maintaining connection. May the conversation continue! For updates, please see Gathering Voices, https://www.facebook.com/groups/PendasProductions.
Gathering Voices: poets and participants respond to our Zoom
A wonderful event! Still glowing from the sense of purpose generated when poets come together for an important cause. Poetry forever! Marsha Barber
Thank you all so much for what was an amazing event. Penn, Susan and Richard for your dedication to this cause, and all the poets and audience. It was deeply moving. Yvonne Blomer
– it was deeply moving, and healing. Thank you all! Kate Braid
It was an extraordinary afternoon hearing all the poets read, relating to these dreadful events in Ukraine. The strange thing is that I didn’t realize how I needed to hear the human reactions, responses poetically—Facing this issue head on (through poetry) is, to my mind, part of the eventual reconstruction of world community. Holly (& Allan) Briesmaster
Richard/Penn: Congratulations on an impressive Zoom launch! Of all the Zoom events in the past few years i have attended this was the most high profile and meaningful with poets caring about the Ukrainian crisis. Plus so many other topics that they are passionate about. I am so heartened Canadian poets are deeply engaged in the tragedies of the day. I look forward to seeing the anthology and am proud that when the history of these times is written there will not be a blank page for the poets. David Brydges
Today, I spent almost two hours in zoom poetry reading for “Poets In Response To Peril” as organized by Canadian Poet Penn Kemp. When the invasion of Ukraine began, she wanted to put together a chapbook, but instead, the outpouring of Canadian voices created a full-length book.. within days. This is a really remarkable and quick effort, and the reading had me in tears as a poetry and people lover. My cat enjoyed the reading as well. 🙂 The proceeds of the book sales will go to PEN Ukraine. Please consider purchasing this book in support of the voices of Ukraine and PEN Ukraine. email inquiries and orders to:r_sitoski@yahoo.ca Sarah M. Daugherty
My sincere thanks to Penn and Richard and the Library Zoom meister for arranging a truly astonishing afternoon of poetry, coast to coast. It was an honour to take part. Our poems now go out like prayers to Ukraine and , sadly, other places in our world where people suffering in peril may find a measure of comfort in our words. Poetry does have power. With love, Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni
Our time together yesterday reminded me of a statement I made years ago. This is it: “Time is the storage place of our memories. And the human heart is the storage place of our tears. I have gone to that place of memories and visited where tears are kept. What I retrieved was the notion that poetry is delightful to the human spirit.” I hope your Sunday is restful and emotionally uplifting. Albert Dumont
Congratulations on this impressive mobilization of poetic force in support of our allies and fellow artists under attack in Ukraine. Neil Eddinger
These poets…so amazing…all of them. Kim Fahner
What an event dear Penn, and such variety and diversity and even Ukrainian spoken! Brava! A huge life-changing Poets in Response to Peril event. Brava/bravo Richard and Penn!! The variety, poignancy, astoundingly creative and delightful videos all contribute to a masterful, memorable production. Katerina Vaughan Fretwell
We were particularly interested in your latest book since it also benefits those affected in the Ukraine. What a beautiful endeavour that helps shed light on the dreadful situation expressed with poetry. It is so beneficial and of course, our residents love reading poetry! Rebecca Gee
Dear Penn, Rico, Susan and all who made this special event possible…It was an emotional gathering of coast-to-coast poets and poems and I was honoured to be part of the outpouring of love and grief and hope at this time of peril. Here’s to peace and freedom indeed! Diana Hayes
Dear Penn & Rico, Warm thanks for hosting such a wonderful event! It was fabulous. I know it took a lot of energy to do that. You’re culture heroes! Excellent reading. — It came out great! Good to see and hear so many supportive authors! A strong reading set! — The book extends vital support of Ukraine while condemning war. What a massive job. Your combined energies on the reading, video and book are deeply appreciated. Here’s hoping that the war will come to an end soon. The world stands against the atrocities. It is good that Canadian writers also stand against such martial aggression. Thank you for it all, Sunflowers for Ukraine) 🌼🌼 🌼 Karl Jirgens
And thanks dear heart for all your continuing efforts. I love that the whole project began with the conviction that poetry makes everything happen…in its time. Patricia Keeney
Such an amazing project! I hope the blog post, the project (and the new book!) get lots of well-deserved attention and love! Renée Knapp
Thank you Richard-Yves Sitoski and Penn Kemp for all the work you put into Saturday’s very moving “Poets in Response to Peril” event. It felt like a teaser for the upcoming anthology. Now I can’t wait to read “Poems in Response to Peril”. Mary Little
Wonderful initiative, great event. And thanks to you Penn, to Richard-Yves, to Susan McCaslin who worked so hard to bring it to fruition. Thanks to Tim for the technical support. A great gathering. Splendid poetry. Now people should purchase the Anthology and help support Ukraine. But it was great to feel a part of the poetic community this afternoon. I look forward to reading the anthology. There were many powerful, moving poems this afternoon. Blaine Marchand
Dear Penn & Richard, Thanks to you both for collaborating on this wonderful and meaningful event. I hope more books orders flow in. Thanks for all you are doing to get more poets’ voice out to the public, Penn. And thanks for the links you are providing to preserve people’s responses to Saturday’s amazing event. The event continues opening in ever-widening circles! Susan McCaslin
Yes, thank you Penn, Rico, Tim, Susan, and all of my fellow poets for a most intense and meaningful event. I’ll remember it! Susan McMaster
One of the poets said that she was falling in love with the community of poets on the zoom. Certainly, it was a wonderful group of poets, both in terms of their poetry and also their humanity. In the midst of sorrow about the war, there was also much beauty in the poets’ words…The breadth and depth of the poems shared by the poets was emotionally moving. Thank you again for putting together such a phenomenal project. Ola Nowasad
I would like to order a copy of Poems in Response to Peril. I attended the Zoom event on April 2nd and it was phenomenal. Lisa Reynolds
That was a very rich and varied collection of poems and poets. A delight to be a part of the gathering. Well done, organizers. Thanks! Peggy Roffey
Sorry Penn for not to be able to participate at event with my voice. I was just ear but not voice. Anyway, I already doing my best with colegues writer here in Bosnia to help some of Ukrainian writer to find temporarry home here in Sarajevo and to be evacuate with great help of German Goethe Institute. I hope I am doing right, aven I have Memory of myself rejecting to leave Sarajevo with my two Children on the beginnig of four years long siege of my city starting 1992. All the best to you and friends making that event possible. Goran Simic Because of a poor connection from Bosnia, Goran was able to be with us only “by ear but not voice.” How ironic, because the voices of those who have known war need to be heard! As this conversation points out: Dear Mr Simic, (And Everyone else…) I have not had the pleasure of meeting you, but I do know of your fine work, and have just now read two of your poems, https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/13065/poems-about-migration-love-and-war-by-bosnian-poet-goran-simic. It does not seem right that you could not share your voice at this event, particularly because in addition to your gifts as a poet, you are much closer in many ways to the bloody events unfolding in the Ukraine than many of us here. Robert Girvan Dear Robert, thank you for kind words about my poetry. I will be glad to record one of my poems to participate for video Message as Canadian/ Bosnian contribution of poets who alarm the world about attack on Ukrainian state, culture and history. All of my friends writers who survived siege in Sarajevo still feel alive the same scars watching destruction of city and civilians in Ukraina. But with pride for people not to give up struggle. I will do video asap because I spend most of my day on the hill keeping company to the four street abandoned dogs we adopted five years ago. Goran Simic Dear Goran, Excellent! I look forward to seeing you and hearing your voice and words. The lucky ones who have not (yet) faced war, bow their heads to those who have endured it, and listen. Robert Girvan Goran has sent the video of his poem for https://www.youtube.com/user/veggiemeister/playlists. I hope you do too.His greetings from Sarajevo and the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW1KSzzPQ9c&list=PLDARA01MjoyW7WccH9j6yGtI3XZhcE0BD&index=41.
I am still feeling the pleasure of seeing you in your great blue and yellow costume, and the honour of being involved in the hours of poetic tension that was so invigorating, even in the perilous present. Elizabeth Waterston
All I can say is Thank you and love to you. You are a great inspiration, your spirit, insights and grace encourage me, inspire. Sheri-D Wilson
Please let me add my voice to those who have already thanked the organizers and all who attended yesterday’s reading. It was indeed a marathon and, as one of the final readers, it was gratifying to see how many people hung in through the whole reading in an amazing outpouring of solidarity, support and yes, love. As Richard has noted, if even a fraction of that positive reverse-bomb energy intervenes in places in the world where people’s lives are torn by violence, we will have done our bit for peace and for the sustainable future of humanity. I look forward to receiving my copies of the anthology. Susan Wismer
This month, with comments:) In a time of loss and transition, I’m having trouble organising my mind, so I read instead of writing or editing. A book is so contained with its beginning, middle, and end. Covers we can close with a sense of accomplishment and of completion. I love how books weave around one other, sequentially, thematically, without my conscious intent. So grateful to London Public Library for their engaging and enticing collection! The dregs of winter: a perfect time for tomes and for poems.
Recommended Reads for International Women’s Day and ON….
Angie Abdou, This One Wild Life: A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir. In her dedication, Angie Abdou hopes the reader will receive the book like a long letter from a good friend. And it is: a sweet, endearing, sometimes heart-breakingly honest memoir. But earlier, the price of being so open was a devastating social media attack: Abdou describes the effects in this memoir of healing. We learn what it is what Abdou plans to do with her “one wild and precious life”. During the Pandemic, it’s a lovely treat to hike in the mountains vicariously with her. And oh, I loved her cottonwood!
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half. Many different ways of exploring identity and choice and choice’s consequences.
Natasha Brown, Assembly. Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Bernardine Evaristo walk into a bar… and meet Natasha Brown. Assembly is honed stiletto-sharp, not a hair out of place, however the protagonist feels in classist, racist England. “Unfair”, whine the various white men who confront her in this short, perfect novel.
Sharon Butala, This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life. Always brave, honest and necessary writing.
Clare Chambers, Small pleasures: a novel. So many charming pleasures: beautiful writing, engaging characters and utterly engaging plot. A delicious read and reprieve from current events.
Sadiqa de Meijer, The outer wards Sadiqa de Meijer, Alfabet / alphabet: a memoir of a first language. “Or was there an influence of origins at work, an onomatopoeic element with ecologically ambient sounds and forms giving rise to each language?” “I tried to contain where the words went, but there are submerged forces in writing—in the land-water realms of consonant vowel—that require our surrender.” “a sort of sideways drift has taken place among the words” “The untranslatable is inherent in all intercultural contact, where its particles may accumulate and become tropes of otherness.”
Junie Désil, Eat salt / gaze at the ocean: poems “scudding back and forth through history” “There isn’t a pastness”
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence. Louise Erdrich herself reads the audiobook in a delicious rendition as funny as it is powerfully poignant. And the novel includes a bookseller called Louise! A ghost story that starts on Halloween 2019 and progresses through that annus horribilis till Halloween 2020: one long sentence of the present. Glorious!
Annie Ernaux, Hôtel Casanova: et autres textes brefs. Autofiction écriture at its finest in curious glimpses: “l’écriture, du rapport qu’elle a avec le monde réel.” My school French was good for Ernaux’s lucent prose, until the slang of dialogue…
Lucy Foley, The Guest List. A predictable but fun mystery set on a secluded Island… murder ensues.
Louise Gluck, Faithful and virtuous night Louise Gluck, American Originality: Essays on Poetry. Essential and astonishing reading and re-reading for any poet and reader of poetry. “What remains is tone, the medium of the soul.” “The silenced abandon of the gap or dash, the dramatized insufficiency of self, of language, the premonition of or visitation by immanence: in these homages to the void, the void’s majesty is reflected in the resourcefulness and intensity with which the poet is overwhelmed.” “the use of the term ‘narrative’ means to identify a habit of mind or type of art that seeks to locate in the endless unfolding of time not a still point but an underlying pattern or implication; it finds in moving time what lyric insists on stopped time to manifest.”
Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry. An astonishingly accomplished and moving collection. The Muses, daughters of Memory inspire us. “History and elegy are akin. The word ’history’ comes form an ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to ask.’” Anne Carson “Lumen means both the cavity of an organ, literally an opening, & a unit of luminous flux, Literally, a measurement of how lit The source is. Illuminate us. That is, we too, Are this bodied unit of flare, The gap for lux to breach.”
Joy Harjo, Poet warrior: a memoir In these quotes, you can experience her voice directly as written: “And the voice kept going, and Poet Warrior kept following no matter Her restless life in the chaos of the story field.”“Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff. This is the first world, and the last.” “The imagining needs praise as does any living thing. We are evidence of this praise.” “When you talk with the dead You can only go as far as the edge of the bank.” “Frog in a Dry River”
Vivian Gornick, Taking a long look: essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time
Lauren Groff, Matrix: a novel. “Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.” Loved this celebration of mediaeval visionary Marie of France!
Bell Hooks, All about love: new visions. “Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration… We honor their presence by naming the legacies they leave us.”
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko. Fascination depiction of a war-torn Korean family saga, now filmed. All too relevant still.
Maggie Nelson, On Freedom. I’m listening to Maggie Nelson ON FREEDOM ironically, given Canada’s truck convoy versus convoys to Ukraine. Oh, the loss of innocence in that word’s current associations.
Molly Peacock, Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door. A lovely study of painters and painting. Tonalists “connected light both to emotions—and to the sounds of emotions. Using musical vocabulary, like nocturne or symphony, they suggested that emotions could be heard through paint”. “tap into childhood to find the ‘transitional object;” as D.W. Winnicott calls it: “‘Our first adventures into reality are through the objects” with “vitality or reality of [their] own.”
Angela Szczepaniak, The nerves centre. A ten-act cast of characters: poetry in performance, poet performing! A study of anxiety, her titles from self-help with dramatis personae. My fave: Mime Heckler. Utterly uttered!
Lisa Taddeo, Animal: a novel is a ferocious diatribe against male sexual violence. Since the book is dedicated to her parents and she lives with her husband and daughter, I wondered about the story behind the novel.
Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise. Nicely structured fin de siècle tome, over three centuries, based on Washington Square and similarly named characters not to mention Hawaiian royalty. Deja vu, David Mitchell!
Zoe Whittal, The Spectacular. Three generations of women negotiating current, changing times. It’s complicated, very. Spectacular, if you’re 21. I’d have liked much more from the oldest woman but it’s a long novel as is. Reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue.
Ah, the season of lists… Here’s to curling up with a good book! Happy reading…
In this annus horribilis, I took refuge, as so many did, in books, both audio and print. My pleasure was to take out both versions of a title from the library: if I fell asleep listening, I could catch up by reading the text. Commentary was mostly quotes I loved from the books, so I have included only a few; scroll down.
Poetry highly recommended: Some of my favourite prose this year: all by Canadian women!:
An eclectic collection! I’m surprised at the gender balance in books I’ve read over the last two years: I would have thought I’d read more women. You can tell I go on author-binges… Most books came from London Library, with my thanks
Comments below.
May 2022 be shimmering!
Books Read
Garous Abdolmalekian; translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey. Lean against this late hour
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Untie the strong woman: Blessed Mother’s immaculate love for the wild soul Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype
Sebastian Faulks, Snow Country
Elana Ferrante, Incidental inventions; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Richard Flanagan, The living sea of waking dreams
Carolyn Forché, In the lateness of the world
Aminatta Forna, The Window Seat: Notes From a Life in Motion
Tana French, The Searcher The Trespasser Dublin Murder Squad Series, Book 6
Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
Benjamin Garcia, Thrown in the throat: poems
Gary Geddes, Out of the ordinary: politics, poetry and narrative
Doireann Ni Ghriofa, A Ghost in the Throat
Camilla Gibb, The Relatives
Chantal Gibson, How She Read
Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
Louise Glück, American originality: essays on poetry Louise Gluck, Faithful and virtuous night
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mind
Seth Godin, The practice: shipping creative work Seth Godin, Linchpin
Carol Rose GoldenEagle, The Narrows of Fear
Ariel Gordon, Treed: walking in Canada’s urban forests
Mary Gordon, Payback
Amanda Gorman, The hill we climb: an inaugural poem for the country; foreword by Oprah Winfrey
Vivian Gornick, Taking a long look: essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time
Catherine Graham, Æther: an out-of-body lyric
Adam Grant, Think Again
Richard Greene, The unquiet Englishman: a life of Graham Greene
Lauren Groff, Matrix (William Heinemann)
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl
Robert Hass, Summer snow: new poems
Cate Haste, Passionate spirit: the life of Alma Mahler
Natalie Haynes, The ancient guide to modern life Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships
Richard Heath, Sacred geometry: language of the angels
Steven Heighton, Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos
Amy Hempel, Sing to it: new stories
Gay Hendricks, The big leap: conquer your hidden fear and take life to the next level. Gay Hendricks.
Tara Henley, Lean out: a meditation on the madness of modern life
Richard-Yves Sitoski, No Sleep ‘til Eden Richard-Yves Sitoski, Brownfields: poems Richard-Yves Sitoski, NoDownmarket Oldies FM Station Blues
Jake Skeets, Eyes bottle dark with a mouthful of flowers / poems by Jake Skeets
Johanna Skibsrud, Island
Danez Smith, Homie
Ali Smith, Summer
Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses
Dani Spiotta, Wayward
Mirabai Starr, Wild mercy: living the fierce and tender wisdom of the women mystics
Edward St. Aubyn, Double blind
John Elizabeth Stintzi, Junebat John Elizabeth Stintzi, Vanishing Monuments
David Stones, sfumato: new and selected poems
Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Graham Swift, Here We Are
Arthur Sze, Sight Lines
Lisa Taddeo, Animal: a novel
Katie Tallo, Dark August
Jordan Tannahill, Liminal
Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Jeff Vandermeer, Hummingbird salamander
Katherena Vermette, The Strangers
Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides: A Novel
Sara Wainscott, Insecurity system: poems
Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep
Natalie Zina Walschots, Hench: a novel
Jo Walton, Or what you will
Phoebe Wang, Admission Requirements
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Awakening the Sacred Body
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key
Marina Warner, Inventory of a life mislaid: an unreliable memoir
Bryan Washington, Memorial
Elizabeth Waterston, Railway Ties 1888-1920 Elizabeth Waterston, Plaid
Phyllis Webb, Selected poems: the vision tree
Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words: A Novel
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs: Maisie Dobbs Series, Book 1
Kathleen Winter, Undersong
Peter Wohlleben, The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature
Elana Wolff, Swoon
Yi Lei, My name will grow wide like a tree: selected poems /; translated from the Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi Yi, Lei, author.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist
Julia Zarankin, Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder: A Memoir
Lindsay Zier-Vogel, Letters to Amelia: a novel
Kathryn Aalto, Writing wild: women poets, ramblers, and mavericks who shape how we see the natural world
Caroline Adderson, editor. The Journey prize stories: the best of Canada’s new writers
A very few comments
The foodie mystery series I love are by Louise Penny (of course!), in Québec Donna Leon in Venice and Martin Walker in Provence.
I love how books, movies and dreams find one another in corresponding themes.
Peter Kingsley, Reality: Profound and beautifully written. This book will shift your perception of the whole of Western culture from Plato on!
Portrait of a Lady on Fire: After reading Undersong, I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire: so interesting on the female gaze sans men, the artist’s gaze. Marianne, a painter, and Héloïse, and the countess’s maid Sophie: Orpheus and Eurydice live! Director: Céline Sciamma
The Spanish Princess: Watched while reading Hilary Mantel’s Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books. Her one word for Philippa Gregory: minced!
Feeling isolated? Then read Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, and you’ll feel much better. Or worse. How fiction plays out: in the Netflix movie, Denzel Washington will play his namesake, George Herbert Washington. Amanda even comments that they look alike: “Has anyone ever told you that?” Well, yes.😜
Reading Tanis MacDonald’s Mobile directly after Madhur Anand, This red line goes straight to your heart: a memoir in halves is a scrumptious act of apophenia: “gratuitous pattern-finding in random data”. How I loved the play of form in free fall, O bricoleuses! After Gavin’s death in September, I’ve been mired in bureaucracy and practicality, removed from poetry, even from reading. Then MOBILE! Mad MacDonald hurtled me back to poetry. “From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.” W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”. How I loved the Jane poems: Jacobs would have too! Tanis spun so many words in the air, O Juggler, that I caught the drift and wrote all that I could not say about this huge transition (well, a start…) So, gratitude for your verve, and hugs in the swerve~
I didn’t think much of Natalie Haynes’s-A Thousand Ships but enjoyed Pat Barker, The Women of Troy (Women of Troy #2): a feminist take indeed! Briseis: “elation is one of the many faces of grief…Like savages, we ingest our dead.”
Gary Barwin, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy: Begin at high noon, as Motl might suggest, and you will be still reading long into the night, impelled by plot and even more by language to conclude. A picaresque, quixotic triumph. Here’s celebrating all the balloons Gary keeps suspended in the air… and makes manifest! I must have known (but didn’t!) that it was your birthday, having started your novel on June 22, and then read that was the day the Nazis invaded Lithuania! It’s a master work, hovering between tragedy and the humour you bring to all your work… very like Indigenous writing in that good regard! The novel reads like Salmon Rushdie on a very good day in its exuberant inclusivity… but the writing is so much tauter than Rushdie’s rush, and it never totters. Nor does it falter in its picaresque but sure dash toward safety, somewhere, surely! “those three dots in a row…Ellipses. They mean something’s missing. If you erase them, you have to put them back in to show you’ve erased them. We’re like that. We’re the absence of absence. We didn’t have a future, but we’re going there anyway.”
SJ Bennett, The Windsor Knot: Yep, watched The Crown. Speaking of the monarchy, I loved The Windsor Knot: the Queen at 90 as detective at Windsor Castle, portrayed as a Superior Being. The audio captures her clipped voice to perfection. Really fun and fascinating. A new series!
A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree witches: a novel: I think you’d enjoy Alice Hoffman’s The Book ofMagic: herbal fun and sweet plot. I followed it with A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree witches: a novel. This book gives context and historical accuracy and is much better written and also heavier!
Nic Brewer, Suture: You think as an artist you sweat blood? SUTURE literalizes the metaphors! Should be on every creative writing course as a warning 😊
Completely wrapped up in Carol Bruneau’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis. Thanks for shining this light in dusty & dark corners. Such a tender, illuminating book! In this #pandemic, #publishing is tough & #selling #books even tougher. So when we #read something grand, it’s glorious to #SpreadTheWord! @ValueCdnStories
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Cathy Marie Buchanan, Daughter of Black Lake: It’s a marvellous re-creation of such little-known history! By chance (which means when the book is due back at the library!), after finishing Signe Pike’s The forgotten kingdom, I open the evocative, moving Daughter of Black Lake and couldn’t put it down. Women healers who foresee Roman invaders, a few centuries apart!
Catherine Bush, Blaze Island @goose_lane: On the BEST BOOK List! Oh & a mysterious birder searching for irruptions at the start of the marvellous Blaze Island novel :et in Newfoundland but with The Tempest ever present, including a young Miranda on a remote island. Thanks for this glorious, essential work that makes a riveting novel out of necessary science. Redolent, relevant, and haunting, it’s still gleaming in my mind. Have been recommending it to everyone. We live in such synchronicity. The night before I began your novel, I dreamt: A sparkling blue lake and sunshine. I run along over the hills, looking for the Island out in the water, looking for the ferry. But have I overshot the city? There are no signs of anything urban, though I have trekked miles, back and forth over the terrain of woods and fields. Have I travelled back into a pre-colonial paradise? There’s no Indigenous presence either. Nothing human here disturbs the natural cycle. How shall I return to my friends? I’m happy here in this other dimension, but will I be able ever to step back?
One of the advantages of the Pandemic is how many of us are outside, even in the cold. And there are bald eagles in London ON, swooping down the river!
By chance, right after Blaze Island, I read Montreal fantasy writer Jo Walton’s Or what you will. Also playing with The Tempest and another Miranda:), it really bridges that mean-spirited gulf between genre and literary fiction (even if it needs a bit more tweaking). I think of Jung’s precognitive (what an interesting word, pre cognition!) apocalyptic dreams of a flood of blood, pre-WW1. We surely are herd animals, and thoughts of dread and fear sweep through into stampede. My work these days is to stay alert to what is mine and what is communal… to expand to a plane beyond fear into spaciousness.
Victoria Chang, Obit: I write down her name as Change. “Who would want to speak prose over such poems,” cries Jorie Graham. Jorie Graham hosts today’s powerful readings live now and up later on https://www.youtube.com/c/TheBrooklynRail/videos “The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.”
Speaking of cattails, I loved Rachel Cusk’s new Second Place, , set in marchland: by far her most interesting and based on Mabel Dodge, D.H. Lawrence:)! And by far her most interesting and based on Mabel Dodge, D.H. Lawrence:)!
Lauren B. Davis, Even So A paean to the Sisters of St. Joseph and the work they do!
Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean
“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience,” Joan Didion
“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions – with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating –there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space” Joan Didion, Why I Write
afterthought, the saddest story.’ Well, he would not have to fail at writing them, either.’”
the shimmer of her writing! I think Rachel Cusk has learned from Joan Didion’s concision in remarking on the peripheral that has not yet been articulated!
Delighted in this collection of essays, tracing “Why I Write”. You can breathe easily and trust Didion’s perspicacity, her wry wit and oblique perceptions that so clarify a worldview that is unflinching. To quote her on Hemmingway: “the very grammar of a Hemmingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching” “ ‘Now he would never write the things he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well,’ the writer in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ thought as he lay dying of gangrene in Africa.
Reading the riveting and essential Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface. The whole issue of moral compliance, complicity and compartmentalization, with Masha the expert in same. How to use one’s talents throughout life? “we weren’t trying to use technology to open up a space to change the system… to organize political change.” Afterword by Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab at U. of T.
Don Domanski, Bite down little whisper
As I write about Don Domanski’s Bite down little whisper I dream Don as tufted lynx! What a loss to the poetry community. But we have his words: “Quietude is called returning to life Lao Tze says …chocolate irises gleaming outward from their arterial darkness with the unborn standing high up in the trees like cemetery angels one finger pointing to heaven the other to earth”
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Kim Echlin, SPEAK, SILENCE
What a powerful, lucent book to read as Canada mourns our own shame. Mothers and daughters, intergenerational trauma. Kim, your words are inscribed in me.
Kim Echlin’s SPEAK, SILENCE is essential reading. Long ago, I coined a neologism, SIOLENCE to express exactly what this book delivers, in its title and its text. SPEAK, SILENCE should be hollered to the mountain tops. Written in Kim Echlin’s lucent prose, SPEAK, SILENCE rings as clear as a bell, tolling for thee. Mothers and daughters, intergenerational trauma expressed with eloquent clarity and compassion. Listen to these women and you too will be inscribed by their stories.
Quotes that inspired me
“I am interested in metaphor, that is where I get my fix of transcendence,” Anne Enright, The New York Review of Books, February 20, 2021
“What if the fantasies of our childhoods, mixed in with childhood’s grief, are the obscuring coil around our adult lives?” Madeleine Thien
“Mêtis was the Greek term for cunning, skillfulness, practical intelligence; and especially for trickery. It was what could make humans, at the most basic and down-to-earth level, equal to the gods. Mêtis might sound like just another concept. But really it was the opposite of everything we understand by concepts. It meant a particular quality of intense awareness that always manages to stay focused on the whole: on the lookout for hints, however subtle, for guidance in whatever form it happens to take, for signs of the route to follow however quickly they might appear or disappear.” Peter Kingsley, Reality
“To be a poet is to have a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
“In one direction, we’d reached the border at which clairvoyants stand gazing into the future, and in the other we’d gone backward to the zone where the present turns ghostly with memory and yet resists quite becoming the past.” Stuart Dybek, “Paper Lantern” #sundaysentence
“I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!… I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of the cloud across the sun’s disk!” Alexander Graham Bell #sundaysentence
“A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.” Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle #sundaysentence
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci #sundaysentence
“Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?” Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) #sundaysentence
“All of a sudden he has that sensation he kept getting…an intense awareness of the spread of the dark countryside all around his house; a sense of being surrounded by a vast invisible web, where one wrong touch could shake things so far distant he hasn’t even spotted them.” Tana French, The Searcher #sundaysentence
“Leaves learn to fly at the end of their life.” Rilke
“I have a close relationship with silence, with things withheld, things known and not said.” Colm Toibin
For years on International Human Rights Day, December 10th, we celebrated peace with my little “poem for peace in many voices” in 136 translations, which Gavin produced as a book/cd combo for Pendas. The cd is still available from me.
Photo: Angelo Bucciarelli
“Penn Kemp’s richly evocative poem has been translated into 126 languages and dialects so far. I have participated in the readings in Italian, Latin and Pig Latin and have noticed how Penn involves new arrivals and immigrants and how they love to participate and feel part of something so multicultural and thus, essentially Canadian. Kemp’s goal is to spread the message for peace worldwide and to involve as many languages and dialects in her promotion of peace as she can. Poem for Peace is truly a global effort and an appealing and significant act of diplomacy in the best sense of the word.” Katerina Fretwell
You can see Rachel Thompson’s glorious video for the poem, with a reading by many translators at Elsie Perrin William estate in London ON: https://vimeo.com/148164038
Vera reading her translation of the poem into Elvish!
Join us as we welcome two prominent voices of poetry in London — Cornelia Hoogland, founder of Poetry London (now Antler River Poetry), and Penn Kemp, inaugural Poet Laureate of London — as they read from their new books of poetry.
Cosmic Bowling is a collaborative work of Ted Goodden’s ceramic sculptures and Cornelia Hoogland’s poems. Specifically, they are responding through image and text to the 64 hexagrams contained in the ancient book of wisdom, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Cosmic Bowling’s calm weather lands in the midst of twitter storms in which everybody wants to start a conversation. Here’s a conversation — facilitated through visual art and poetry — that’s been going on for three millennia, one that asks the perennial question: How should we live now?
Penn Kemp’s A New Memoir: New Poems explores the earliest stirrings of the creative imagination in childhood and the joys of associative thinking. With narrative skill and vivid sensual detail, it discovers and uncovers the effect of adult perspectives on a young mind, the puzzling life lessons of parents and teachers, the wisdom and heartbreak of nature. Ironic and lyrical, accurate and ambiguous, playful and profound, these finely tuned poems–whether enlightened moments or deep dives into an evolving self–flow with the ease and excitement that only a seasoned artist can bring. A book full of surprises and affirmation.
Biographies:
Cornelia Hoogland’s Cosmic Bowling (Guernica, 2020) is a collaboration with the visual artist Ted Goodden. Trailer Park Elegy and Woods Wolf Girl were finalists for national awards. Two recent short-list nods from the CBC Literary Prizes include Sea Level (nonfiction), published with Baseline Press in 2013 as poetry. Hoogland was the 2019 writer-in-residence for the Al Purdy A-Frame and the Whistler Festival. With Ted Goodden she produces the podcast series Not Bowling Alone: Making Art on Hornby Island. She lives and writes on unceded Puntledge and K’omox territories on Hornby Island in the Salish Sea.
Penn Kemp has participated in Canadian cultural life for 50 years, writing, editing, and publishing poetry and plays. Her first book of poetry, “Bearing Down”, was published by Coach House, 1972. She has published more than 30 books of poetry, prose and drama, 7 plays and 10 CDs. The League of Canadian Poets acclaimed Penn as 2015 Spoken Word Artist. She is the League’s 40th Life Member. From 2010-2013, this prolific writer was London Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate. At Western University, Penn was writer-in-residence, 2009-2010. In 2020, she was presented with the inaugural Joe Rosenblatt (Muttsy) Award for Innovative Creators. Penn will be reading from A NEAR MEMOIR: NEW POEMS (Beliveau Books). The chapbook is available from beliveaubooks@gmail.com or, signed, from me, pennkemp@gmail.com. www.pennkemp.weebly.com
This event is brought to you by Words and Antler River Poetry (formerly Poetry London).
Our beloved Gavin died on Thursday, September 16, peacefully at home, as he wished. Gavin was cremated on September 22. The process was complete at 3:21 pm EDT, the exact moment of the Fall Equinox. This time of Balance is propitious. Because of COVID restrictions, a gathering on October 17 to celebrate him is limited to 25 people, family only. We will celebrate him full-on with friends in the Spring.
Gavin’s huge spirit touched the lives of so many. We will be holding a celebration of his life at the home which we shared for the last twenty years around the time of his birthday in late April.
SO grateful for all your support, however it manifests, through these changes.
Love abounding,
Penn
Tributes to Gavin abound on his Facebook page and mine. So many kind comments and consoling blessings. Thank you! Here are some:
My son, Jake Chalmers writes: “Gavin Stairs, my mother’s gentlest protector, husband and spiritual companion moved on peacefully. Penn and Gavins love for each other for the last quarter century has been thorough and constant. They cherish each other, and we are so thankful for him and his dedications.”
My daughter, Amanda Chalmers, writes: “With a heavy heart, I am sharing the news of my mom’s life partner, Gavin Stairs, passing. He died on Thursday, September 16, peacefully at home. For those who knew Gavin, you will remember him as a gentle giant with a twinkle in his eye. Gavin was an extraordinarily wise, deeply spiritual, and thoughtful person whose calm, kind spirit created a ripple effect around him. He was devoted to my mom and her work and had a loving, playful side he shared with me and my kids. Gavin was cherished by Penn and our family and his presence will be deeply missed. We all wished we had more time with him.“
Robert McMaster: “I am so sorry to hear of Gavin’s passing, not so much for him, I think his spirit was ready for the journey, but for you and all those that knew him. He was like the brother I never had, and one of the closest friends I’ve ever had. I felt honoured to be there with him…”. ❤️LOVE🙏BLESSINGS☮️TRANQUILITY and ☯️Balance in Life.”
Brenda McMorrow: “Gavin’s spirit lives on in my heart and mind. I have such deep and beautiful memories of times spent with him. I felt so connected with him and he will be surely missed in his physical form.”
Glen Pearson: “I recall the wonderful talks the three of us had together at your lovely home. He was a person of keen insight and possessed a compassionate outlook. The thoughts of so many of us are with you.”
Lisa Maldonado: “Dearest Penn, my sincere condolences at this irreparable loss. I wish we had been able to spend more time with you both. Sending you much love.”
Jennifer Chesnut: “Gavin was a wonderful warlock from the world of light. He was wise, honest, gentle, witty… I’m so sorry for your loss.”
My fave photo of Gavin, meditating:
August 2021, several days before Gavin’s collapse
Baby, young man and elder: Gavin embraced Love embracing Love.
Gavin Stairs (1946-2021) was the publisher of Pendas Productions, a series of poetry chapbooks combined with CDs, based in London ON, from 2000-2014. Poets include Henry Beissel, Katerina Fretwell, Patricia Keeney, Penn Kemp, Daniel Kolos, Susan McMaster, Charles Mountford, and Gloria Alvernaz Mulcahy. He collected and fastidiously published Poem for Peace in Many Voices, chapbooks and CDs, in 136 translations and two volumes. Collaborative works included Sound Operas with musicians like Bill Gilliam and Brenda McMorrow. Gavin designed and produced these gorgeous books, CDs and DVDs from his den in our basement. How his generous, expansive presence will be missed.
It really does take a community! Thank you so much for all your kindness on many levels. Change is on the wing for us pilgrims on Canterbury Road. Mutability is afoot.
So many have donated their time, their moral, emotional, financial and spiritual support to help us in the transition. Not to mention food!
“Our beloved friends Penn and Gavin need our help. As many of you know there have been significant changes in Gavin’s health status. He has had several strokes recently and has been hospitalized after a serious fall.
We are raising funds for home renovations to meet their current mobility and health needs and provide an environment that is safe and workable into the future. This will include a major bedroom and bathroom renovation that will increase accessibility for Gavin.”
If you are able to contribute please consider donating to this GoFundMe campaign.
Gavin is not doing well; so far he is only able to consume a couple of hundred calories per day and a little water. But the threat of hospitalization has encouraged him to eat a little more: my chicken broth! We are hoping he can access the rehabilitation help he needs at Parkwood: he’s on the priority list.
We’re in this pickle for the long haul.
LOVE and so much gratitude from us, Gavin and Penn
If you’d like a numbered copy signed to you, let me know, pennkemp@gmail.com. If you’d like a numbered copy, unsigned, please contact beliveaubooks@gmail.com.
With special thanks to Dennis Siren, visionary videographer, for his videopoem of a poem in the book, “Translation”, dedicated to my father, painter Jim Kemp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqzgfLJtws&t=22s.
“There you are”, from A Near Memoir, is at 8:14 in my Luminous Entrance: a Sound Opera for Climate Change Action, up on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9mS75i.
Endorsements for A Near Memoir: new poems
The poems in this unusually substantial chapbook reflect with charming insight on key moments and memorable forks in the road in the poet’s early life, then move to more sombre reckonings with mortality, the traumas of war, and the trees and environs of her Souwesto region, and conclude with inspirational “challenges” to us all in facing our uncertain future. Stylistic aplomb is underpinned, throughout, by mindful perception, impassioned concern, and a visionary verve. — Allan Briesmaster, author of The Long Bond (Guernica Editions)
d the deep without. It draws from the innermost regions of subjective consciousness while opening to social engagement and planetary awareness. The title suggests a genre both personal and universal, exploring the double lineages of family and the larger polis, our civic communities. Here we meet various members of her family, including her father, the visual artist. Penn has transformed his legacy into spoken word and a poetics where sounds and silences converge: “I still wait with paper’s white space till / words arise, images in words, watching them come into form…” As we participate, we are whirled into places where perception sharpens, and we too are transformed.
Penn Kemp’s A Near Memoir carries the reader simultaneously to the deep within and the deep without. It draws from the innermost regions of subjective consciousness while opening to social engagement and planetary awareness. The title suggests a genre both personal and universal, exploring the double lineages of family and the larger polis, our civic communities. Here we meet various members of her family, including her father, the visual artist. Penn has transformed his legacy into spoken word and a poetics where sounds and silences converge: “I still wait with paper’s white space till / words arise, images in words, watching them come into form…” As we participate, we are whirled into places where perception sharpens, and we too are transformed. —Susan McCaslin, author of Heart Work (Ekstasis Editions)
A Near Memoir collects a confluence of poems around Penn Kemp’s beloved subjects: art, nature, community, the divine feminine, and flowingness of life. —Sharon Thesen, author of The Wig-Maker (New Star Books)
Penn Kemp’s A Near Memoir: new poems explores the earliest stirrings of the creative imagination in childhood and the joys of associative thinking. With narrative skill and vivid sensual detail, it discovers and uncovers the effect of adult perspectives on a young mind, the puzzling life lessons of parents and teachers, the wisdom and heartbreak of nature. Ironic and lyrical, accurate and ambiguous, playful and profound, these finely tuned poems—whether enlightened moments or deep dives into an evolving self—flow with the ease and excitement that only a seasoned artist can bring. A book full of surprises and affirmation. —Patricia Keeney, author of Orpheus in Our World (NeoPoiesis Press)
“Diving into a new book of poems by @pennkemp is like setting out on an adventure. You never know what you’ll come across and @JoeBatLFPress says her newest offering, A Near Memoir: New Poems, is no different.”
Hey, Red! Great poems!!!! So sensuous and lyrical and sly. —Catherine Sheldrick Ross, author of The Pleasures of Reading (Libraries Unlimited)
Penn Kemp ‘s book is wonderful in her mastery of language and attention to detail. A gorgeous read. A really great gift!” —Jude Neale
Nice day in the Grove for a new read from a dear friend and mentor, the magical Penn Kemp — Nick Beauchesne
A near Memoir has arrived and it is a treasure. So beautifully produced. With your life writings personal and planetary. And with such touching story-telling visuals. —Patricia Keeney
A Near Memoir: new poems (Beliveau Books) is launching on Earth Day, April 22! Want a taste of my new work? Four poems from A Near Memoir (“Drawing Conclusions”, “A Convoluted Etymology of the Course Not Taken”, “Celebrating Souwesto Trees” & “You There”) appear in Beliveau Review, Vol. 2 No. 2 Issue 5, out now on https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/home/magazines.
National Poetry Month Readings
Sunday, April 18, 4pm EDT. Our group reading from the anthology, Voicing Suicide, is hosted by Josie di Sciascio-Andrews with Daniel G Scott, Editor. Spread the word and join us if you can. Here is the link: meet.google.com/pwz-yqew-fiu Contact: <voicingsuicide@gmail.com>.
Sunday, April 25, 2021, 1 PM EDT. National Poetry Month zoom and launch of Femmes de Parole/Women of their Word, edited by Nancy R Lange. The readers for Femmes de parole / Women of their word on the 25th will be Mireille Cliche (QC), Catherine Fortin (QC), Louise Bernice Halfe, Penn Kemp, Nancy R Lange(QC), Genevieve Letarte, (QC), Sharon Thesen and Sheri-D Wilson! Contact: rappelparolecreation@hotmail.com.
Happy National Poetry Month, NPM2021! These readings are sponsored by the League @CanadianPoets!
“Drawing Conclusions”, “A Convoluted Etymology of the Course Not Taken”, “Celebrating Souwesto Trees” and “You There”. Beliveau Review, Vol. 2 No. 2 Issue 5, Spring 2021. https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/home/magazines.
“To Carry the Heart of Community Wherever You Find Yourself”. Sage-ing With Creative Spirit, Grace and Gratitude, http://www.sageing.ca/sageing36.html, P. 12. Number 36, Spring 2021.
“What Matters”, “Studies in Anticipation”, “Hope the Thing”, Possible Utopias: the Wordsfest Eco Zine, Issue 6. http://www.wordsfest.ca/zine, March 2021.
February, 2021. “We are gonna begin writing sometime when…” from “Re:Solution”. Performed with Anne Anglin. Sound Poetry DJ mix on https://www.mixcloud.com/spoken_matter/sound-poetry-mix-tape/. Editors, Andreas Bülhoff & Marc Matter, <andreasbuelhoff@googlemail.com
April 18. NPM. Readings from “Voicing Suicide”, an anthology edited by Daniel G. Scott. Contact: <voicingsuicide@gmail.com>, organizer Josie Di Sciascio Andrews <j_andrews@sympatico.ca>
April, 2021. NPM Zoom and launch of Femmes de Parole/Women of their Word, edited by Nancy R Lange. Readings: Penn Kemp and Sharon Thesen. Contact: rappelparolecreation@hotmail.com.
“To Carry the Heart of Community Wherever You Find Yourself”. Sage-ing With Creative Spirit, Grace and Gratitude, http://www.sageing.ca/sageing36.html, P. 12. Number 36, Spring 2021.
“What Matters”, “Studies in Anticipation”, “Hope the Thing”, Possible Utopias: the Wordsfest Eco Zine, Issue 6. http://www.wordsfest.ca/zine, March 2021.
“Drawing Conclusions”, “A Convoluted Etymology of the Course Not Taken”, “Celebrating Souwesto Trees” and “You There”. Beliveau Review, Vol. 2 No. 2 Issue 5, May, 2021. https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/home/magazines.
“What we did not know in 1972. What we know now.” Resistance Anthology. Sue Goyette, editor. University of Regina Press, Spring 2021.
“Re:Solution”, performed with Anne Anglin. Sound Poetry DJ mix. Limited edition audio cassette. Editors, Andreas Bülhoff & Marc Matter, <andreasbuelhoff@googlemail.com
“Weather Vane, Whether Vain, Whither and Thither” and “Black, White and Red All Over Town”, An Avian Alphabet. Edited by Susan McCaslin, with woodcut prints by Edith Krause.
March 8, 2021. 7 – 8:30 p.m. “CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE: Finding Common Ground Through Dialogue”, Featuring keynote address by Waneek Horn-Miller. Celebrating International Women’s Day at the 2021 Hanycz Lecture/International Women’s Day event. 8:15 p.m. Penn’s reading, commissioned by Brescia University College, London, is sponsored by Playwrights Guild of Canada. Register here for the whole event (https://hopin.com/events/choose-to-challenge-finding-common-ground-through-dialogue?bblinkid=248579307&bbemailid=28900794&bbejrid=1864748878. Contact: Linda, lpalme9@uwo.ca.
“Re:Solution”, performed with Anne Anglin. Sound Poetry DJ mix for https://www.mixcloud.com/. Limited edition audio cassette. Editors, Andreas Bülhoff & Marc Matter, <andreasbuelhoff@googlemail.com
Painting by Jim Kemp in Museum London collection, for 80mL
February 27, 2021.11:00am EST. “Craft Bites!” Live Zoom reading and discussion with Sarah Adams. Penn reads from The Triumph of Teresa Harris. Sponsored by Playwrights Guild of Canada. Moderator, Mindy Doherty Griffiths, mindy@playwrightsguild.ca
February, 2021. “Re:Solution”, performed with Anne Anglin. Sound Poetry DJ mix for https://www.mixcloud.com/. Limited edition audio cassette. Editors, Andreas Bülhoff & Marc Matter, <andreasbuelhoff@googlemail.com
February 27, 2021.11:00am EST. “Craft Bites!” Live Zoom reading and discussion with Sarah Adams. Penn reads from The Triumph of Teresa Harris. Sponsored by Playwrights Guild of Canada. Moderator, Mindy Doherty Griffiths, mindy@playwrightsguild.ca
March 8, 2021. 7 – 8:30 p.m. “CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE: Finding Common Ground Through Dialogue”, Featuring keynote address by Waneek Horn-Miller. Celebrating International Women’s Day at the 2021 Hanycz Lecture/International Women’s Day event. 8:15 p.m. Penn’s reading, commissioned by Brescia University College, London, is sponsored by Playwrights Guild of Canada. Register here for the whole event (https://hopin.com/events/choose-to-challenge-finding-common-ground-through-dialogue?bblinkid=248579307&bbemailid=28900794&bbejrid=1864748878. Contact: Linda, lpalme9@uwo.ca.
April, 2021. NPM Zoom and launch of Femmes de Parole/Women of their Word, edited by Nancy R Lange. Contact: rappelparolecreation@hotmail.com.
“Becoming”: a poem of 80 words matched with Jim Kemp’s painting for 80mL Exhibition to celebrate Museum London’s 80th Birthday. http://museumlondon.ca/. Contact: 80museumlondon@gmail.com
Forthcoming Publications
“To Carry the Heart of Community Wherever You Find Yourself”. “To Carry the Heart of Community Wherever You Find Yourself”. Sage-ing With Creative Spirit, Grace and Gratitude, http://www.sageing.ca. Number 38, Spring 2021.
“What we did not know in 1972. What we know now.” Resistance Anthology. Sue Goyette, editor. University of Regina Press, Spring 2021.
“Re:Solution”, performed with Anne Anglin. Sound Poetry DJ mix. Limited edition audio cassette. Editors, Andreas Bülhoff & Marc Matter, <andreasbuelhoff@googlemail.com
“Weather Vane, Whether Vain, Whither and Thither” and “Black, White and Red All Over Town”, An Avian Alphabet. Edited by Susan McCaslin, with woodcut prints by Edith Krause.
Painting by Jim Kemp in Museum London collection, for 80mL
Jim Kemp at work
Forthcoming Publications
Spring 2021. “What we did not know in 1972. What we know now.” Resistance Anthology. Sue Goyette, editor. University of Regina Press, spring 2021.
Superb Canadian writing highly recommended, grouped idiosyncratically
First, by women
Pairing books by Indigenous Writers: Michelle Good, FiveLittle Indians; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, This Accident of Being Lost, Islands of Decolonial Love and Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies.
Pairing pandemic novels: Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars; Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu.
Pairing BC novelists: Shaena Lambert’s Petra Maria Reva; Good Citizens Need Not Fear; Caroline Adderson’s A Russian Sister and Anakana Schofield’s Bina.
Pairing books on relationship: Christy Ann Conlon’s Watermark; Annabel Lyon, Consent; Lynn Coady, Watching You Without Me; Shani Mootoo, Polar Vortex; Vivek Shraya, The Subtweet; Frances Itani, The Company We Keep.
Pairing Westerns:Gil Adamson’s Ridgerunner; Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel; Helen Humphreys’s Rabbit Foot Bill and Kate Pullinger’s Forest Green.
Pairing fiction set abroad: Aislinn Hunter’s The Certainties. Janie Chang’s The Library of Legends; Sarah Leipciger’s Coming Up For Air; Marianne Micros’s Eye; Louise Penny’s All the Devils Are Here; Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractals. Anne Simpson’s Speechless AND Farzana Doctor’s magnificent Seven.
Non-Fiction Carol Bishop-Gwyn, Art and Rivalry: The Marriage of Mary and Christopher Pratt Lorna Crozier, Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats) Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal Theresa Kishkan, Euclid’s Orchard & Other Essays Amanda Leduc, Disfigured Susan McCaslin & J.S. Porter, Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie, and Paulette M. Rothbauer, Reading still matters: what the research reveals about reading, libraries, and community Susan Vande Griek and Mark Hoffmann, Hawks Kettle, Puffins Wheel Elizabeth Waterston, Railway Ties 1888-1920 Jody Wilson-Raybould, From where I stand: rebuilding Indigenous Nations for a stronger Canada
Awards The Writers’ Trust Award goes to Gil Adamson for Ridgerunner! The Giller goes to Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife The Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize goes to Armand Garnet Ruffo
Reading Canadian men Billy-Ray Belcourt, A history of my brief body Dennis Bock, The Good German Michael Christie, Greenwood: A Novel of a Family Tree in a Dying Forest Desmond Cole, The Skin We’re In David Frum, Trumpocalypse William Gibson, Agency Rawi Hage, Beirut Hellfire Society Thomas King, Indians on Vacation Thomas King, Obsidian: A DreadfulWater Mystery Kurt Palka, The hour of the fox: a novel Andrew Pyper, The residence Iain Reid, I’m Thinking of Ending Things Robin Robertson, The long take: a Noir Narrative Jesse Thistle, From the Ashes Clive Thompson, Coders Richard Wagamese, Keeper’n Me
Back to Poetry, Canadian and Beyond Madhur Anand, A new index for predicting catastrophes: poems Margaret Atwood, Dearly Adèle Barclay, Renaissance normcore Gary Barwin, For it is a PLEASURE and a SURPRISE to Breathe: new & selected Poems Heather Birrell, Float and scurry Jericho Brown, The Tradition Lucas Crawford, The high line scavenger hunt Amber Dawn, My Art is Killing Me Dom Domanski, Bite down little whisper Klara du Plessis, Ekke Nathan Dueck, A very special episode / brought to you by Nathan Dueck Chantal Gibson, How She Read Julie Hartley, Deboning a dragon Karen Houle, The Grand River Watershed: a folk ecology Patricia Keeney, Orpheus in Our World Kaie Kellough, Magnetic equator Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraph*st Daphne Marlatt, Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968 – 2008 Jane Munro, Glass Float Harold Rhenisch, The Spoken World Robin Richardson, Knife throwing through self-hypnosis: poems Anne Simpson, Strange attractor: poems John Elizabeth Stintzi, Junebat Moez Surani, Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real?
Anthologies Best Canadian poetry 2019 Measures of astonishment: poets on poetry / presented by the League of Canadian Poets Caroline Adderson, editor. The Journey prize stories: the best of Canada’s new writers Nyla Matuk, editor. Resisting Canada: an anthology of poetry Adam Sol, How a poem moves: a field guide for readers of poetry
Beloved Books on Spiritual Ecology Tim Dee, Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass Diana Beresford-Kroeger, To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest Robert Macfarlane, Underland Richard Powers, The Overstory Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
Deepest, Longest and most Transformative Read of 2020 Peter Kingsley, Reality, Catafalque Press, 2020 (and Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom)
International Reads John Banville, Snow Neil Gaiman, American Gods: The moment of the storm. 3 Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings Lily King, Writers and Lovers Natsuo Kirino, The goddess chronicle E. J Koh, The magical language of others: A memoir Raven Leilani, Luster Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights William Maxwell, So long, see you tomorrow Ian McEwan, Machines like me: and people like you Ian McEwan, Cockroach Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: the revolution David Mitchell, Utopia Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere Naomi Shihab Nye, Cast away: poems for our time Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet and Judith Tommy Pico, Feed Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist Omid Safi, Radical love: teachings from the Islamic mystical tradition Jake Skeets, Eyes bottle dark with a mouthful of flowers / poems by Jake Skeets Mirabai Starr, Wild mercy: living the fierce and tender wisdom of the women mystics Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key Jennifer Weiner, Big Summer Niall Williams, This is Happiness Bob Woodward, Rage
About to read (sometime, soon-ish) Madhur Anand, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart Marianne Apostolides, I can’t get you out of my mind: a novel Nina Berkhout, Why Birds Sing Carol Bruneau, Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis Cathy Marie Buchanan, Daughter of Black Lake Catherine Bush, Blaze Island Louise Carson, The Cat Possessed Dede Crane, Madder Woman Lorna Crozier, The House the Spirit Builds Francesca Ekwuyasi, Butter Honey Pig Bread Heather Haley, Skookum Raven Catherine Hernandez, Crosshairs Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society Shari Lapena, The End of Her Jessica J. Lee, Two trees make a forest: travels among Taiwan’s mountains & coasts in search of my family’s past Tanis MacDonald, Mobile Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic Noor Naga, Washes, Prays C.L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain Damian Rogers, An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments Johanna Skibsrud, Island Susan Swan, The Dead Celebrities Club Emily Urquhart, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father, and Me Natalie Zina Walschots, Hench: a novel
AND… Jordan Abel, Nishga André Alexis, The Night Piece: Collected Short Fiction Bill Arnott, Gone Viking John Barton, Lost Family David Bergen, Here the Dark Wade Davis, Magdalena: river of dreams Cory Doctorow, Radicalized Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface Gary Geddes, Out of the ordinary: politics, poetry and narrative Steven Heighton, Reaching Mithymna: among the volunteers and refugees on Lesvos Kaie Kellough, Dominoes at the Crossroads David A. Robertson, Black Water Mark Sampson, All the Animals on Earth J.R. (Tim) Struthers (Editor), Alice Munro Everlasting: Essays on Her Works II Mark Truscott, Branches Ian Williams, Reproduction
Most of these books have come to me through London Public Library, now celebrating 125 years! Thank you! Others came from Indie bookstores and friends. None from Amazon.
“For Penn Kemp, poetry is magic made manifest. While her subjects are varied, and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy informed by Alchemy, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects, while the voices in the air produce others altogether.”
New #SpokenWebPod episode coming next Monday, Dec 7. Come to our Listening Party to experience “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp.”
Monday, December 7, 2020 at 5 PM EST – 7 PM EST Hosted by SpokenWeb
Join us to listen and discuss #SpokenWebPod episode Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp
We will gather virtually to listen together at 5pm ET and share our reactions in a Twitter conversation. This will be followed by a 6pm ET Q&A with Episode Producer Nick Beauchesne and featured guest Penn Kemp. You are invited to join for the entire event or at 6pm ET for just the Q&A.
Listening Party Zoom Link: https://sfu.zoom.us/j/83778515727…Meeting ID: 837 7851 5727 Password: resonate One tap mobile +16473744685,,83778515727#,,,,0#,,71824394# Canada
Join the Twitter Conversation: You are invited to follow @SpokenWebCanada and #SpokenWebPod on Twitter and join the conversation during the event as we listen together. Tweet at us with #SpokenWebPod and share your listening experience: what moments jump out to you? what sounds resonate with your experience?
And the Giller goes to Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife! Congratulations! And Congratulations as well to the other finalists!
Superb writing that I highly recommend, grouped here idiosyncratically.
Pairing Westerns: Gil Adamson’s Ridgerunner; Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel; Helen Humphreys’s Rabbit Foot Bill and Kate Pullinger’s Forest Green.
Pairing work set abroad:Shaena Lambert’s Petra; Janie Chang’s The Library of Legends; Louise Penny’s All the Devils Are Here. Lisa Robertson, Baudelaire Fractals. Pairing Caroline Adderson’s A Russian Sister and Sarah Leipciger, Coming Up For Air. AND Farzana Doctor’s Seven.
Pairing pandemic novels: Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars; Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu.
Pairing books on relationship by Annabel Lyon, Consent; Lynn Coady, Watching You Without Me; Shani Mootoo, Polar Vortex; Frances Itani, The Company We Keep.
Pairing books by Indigenous Writers: Michelle Good, FiveLittle Indians; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, This Accident of Being Lost
Memoir: Lorna Crozier, Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)
Sans pareil: Naomi Klein, On Fire. Not a novel: I wish it were!
About to read (sometime, soon-ish):
Marianne Apostolides, I can’t get you out of my mind: a novel Carol Bruneau, Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Day the Falls Stood Still Cathy Marie Buchanan, Daughter of Black Lake Catherine Bush, Blaze Island Catherine Hernandez, Crosshairs Maria Reva, Good Citizens Need Not Fear Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies Elizabeth Waterston, Railway Ties 1888-1920
Hoping to read: (Attention, London Library! Every other book listed here is in your collection. Please take the hint…) Dede Crane, Madder Woman Lorna Crozier, The House the Spirit Builds
Celebrating Wordsfest, tuning in to MORE Literary Arts!
Then back to new poetry. And back to writing…
Feature image: Daniela Sneppova Photo of me age 7: Jim Kemp
A challenge indeed, to read a poetry book a day throughout August!
It’s only now in preparing this list that I’ll see if I reached 31 books. Included here are several anthologies of poetry and the very poetic novel, Baudelaire’s Fractal. I’ve also read books that I had started earlier, a couple that I reread, and several that I have not yet finished! Some I’d been meaning to read forever. There’s always #SealeySeptember!
How to group the list? Some are from my own collection; some, gifts from friends. Many others arrived from the Library. The books came in clusters: Canadian; writers of colour, feminist, contemporary. I decided to go alphabetically. I didn’t have time to include comments or quotes, though a running commentary is ongoing in my head. Pals, if I haven’t included you here, are you in my blog for National Poetry Month? Check out https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/reading-and-recommending-poems-for-national-poetry-month-2020/.
Here’s thelist:
bill bissett, Air 10-11-12
Billy-Ray Belcourt: NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field
Di Brandt, Glitter & Fall
Ariane Blackman, The River Doesn’t Stop
Allan Briesmaster, River Neither
Jillian Christmas, the gospel of breaking
Margaret Christakos, charger
Tom Cull, Bad Animals
Ellen Jaffe, Skinny-Dipping with the Muse
Patricia Keeney, First Woman
John B. Lee, The Half-Way Tree
D.A. Lockhart, Devil in the Woods
Alice Major, Welcome to the Anthropocene
Daphne Marlatt, Seven Glass Bowls
Susan McCaslin, Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne
Susan McMaster, Haunt
Bruce Meyer, McLuhan’s Canary
Stephen Morrissey, A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet
Colin Morton, Coastlines of the Archipelago
Miguel Neneve, En los Caminos de la Miradas
Catherine Owen, Riven
Harold Rhenisch, Winging Home: a palette of birds
Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraph*st
Jay MillAr, The Ghosts of Jay MillAr
Joni Mitchell, Morning Glory On the Vine
Lisa Robertson, Baudelaire Fractals
Sharon Thesen, The Receiver
Phyllis Webb, Peacock Blue
Anthologies 29. Kim Maltman, editor. The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology 2018 30. Nyla Matuk, Resisting Canada: an anthology of poetry with an Introduction by Nyla Matuk 31. Adam Sol, How a poem moves: a field guide for readers of poetry
Thanks for such an inspiring initiative, Nicole Sealey! @Nic_Sealey
I’m so grateful to Joe Belanger and the Free Press for supporting the arts and local artists.
Poetry really can console and articulate our emotions in the pandemonium of pandemic. But imagine, a local newspaper publishing new poems! and these three of mine are so beautifully laid out with room for the poems to breathe! But, hey, embrace me from 6 feet away, okay? 🙂
BELANGER: It’s time to embrace London’s poet laureate, Penn Kemp, and all artists
It’s funny the things you think of when the going gets tough.
London poet Penn Kemp explores the pandemic in her writing as the country has a muted celebration of Poetry Month. JOE BELANGER
It’s funny the things you think of when the going gets tough.
Like everyone else in recent weeks, I could feel the sun’s warmth, see the green tips coming through the garden soil and welcome the crocuses.
It’s spring arriving, yet there wasn’t a big smile on my face; no, just the tension of uncertainty and foreboding that goes hand-in-hand with the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then I heard Penn Kemp’s voice on the telephone and a smile arrived.
I can’t help it. London’s first poet laureate and one of this country’s great writing talents always offers up some delightful word treats that usually provoke a smile, sometimes laughter and even tears that eventually give way to serious pondering of the words, ideas and observations she so expertly writes on paper.
I should have anticipated the phone call because April is poetry month and, more often than not, a chance for me to reconnect with Kemp, who has written more than 30 books of poetry and drama and is renowned as a spoken word performer.
Penn Kemp is a perpetual reminder to me of why we need our artists and I couldn’t wait to find out how she’s been keeping, but even more excited to find out what she’s doing.
“Life as usual for a writer, I’m at home,” said Kemp, for whom a degree of isolation is a natural consequence of her art.
“But we feel it all so deeply. The irony and the consolation or disparity in it all is spring’s arrival – the return of warmth against the depths of sadness and sorrow of so many people passing. There’s so much information coming at us, we’re inundated with so much grief. For me, poetry can console.”
And then I read her new words, in her new poem titled, What We Remember, words this horror has provoked that grabbed my heart and told me I am not alone. The opening stanza drawing tears . . .
So many are leaving the planet and yet
are with us, still and still.
How they hover,
the lost, the bewildered, the wild ones!
Clearly life during a pandemic hasn’t escaped Kemp’s gaze or understanding; it has provoked her muse to sing.
There are two more poems, each with compelling observations, perhaps even provocations. It is what Kemp must do, even though she won’t get paid this month when she is often on tour to celebrate her art. It is why I feel so compelled to write about our artists.
“I so believe in the power of community yet everything we relied upon has shifted — to ‘host’ has become a negative and even ‘positive’ (test) has become a negative,” said Kemp.
“What the arts really does is offer a vehicle for the expression of emotion, whether we’re creating or we’re a recipient, you can share in the collective expression of sorrow and suffering and sense that we are together, that humanity is facing this together.”
And I smile again because I don’t feel so alone.
I’m feeling hopeful again because the power of the arts continues to churn, inspiring and, yes, comforting.
In times of crises we count on the arts for respite,
relief, relaxation and articulation of our response
and reaction to a compounded new normal. As if
unknowns have not always been nearby, hovering
at edge of sight, beyond reach but closing in now,
still unknown. All our questions rise without reply.
How long.
The difference is now we know for once what we
did not know, can’t know, don’t want to face, hid
under cover. But special masks hand-sewn as if to
protect let us feel we are doing our bit, let us act in
dispelling disconnect, overwhelm of circumstance.
Art helps us stitch together disparity or discontent.
This poem will not reveal statistics, won’t describe
missing medical gear, what remains undelivered,
how many gravesites prepared, how much suffering—
how many gone. We have aps for that, as numbers
grow beyond belief but not beyond hope nor help.
Frontline workers, be praised. May all you need be
yours now. May salaries be raised. May you rest
till the rest is easy. May your harvest be in health
not death, not calculated statistics of raised risk.
Do care for yourselves just as you care for others.
We wait, sequestered, connected, isolated, missing
touch, missing what we used to call normal, what
we used to do long ago just last month. We wait for
the weight to lift, to remember we are safe at home,
not stuck. We also serve who stay indoors and wait.
May home be our haven. May we shelter in place,
in peace of mind. Confinement’s just fine for now,
home stead, home stayed and schooled in the new.
Mind the gap, the gulf between then and now as
broadcasts sweep over: they are not forever. Turn
off the hourly news. Tune in to spring joys instead.
We can gather in the power of dandelion greens.
Warmer weather is not another postponed elective.
Even though last night, lightning and hail the size
of loonies lit up the sky at the pink full moon, no
frogs are raining and forsythia has not forsaken us.
Toads are peeping, myrtle is purpling and the sun,
sweet sun, is warming our faces as forget-me-nots
pop their determined way up through damp earth.
What is essential, what urgent when baselines shift?
Spontaneous dance parties and web performance
lighten fatigue, the philosopher’s moral dilemma.
The consolation of poetry is the resilience of words
given to comfort or challenge, compare and contrast.
What is grief but love unexpressed? What is love but
expression? Giving, not in, not out, but forth, giving
over to you. The game’s a match. Love won. Love all.
Penn Kemp
April 8, 2020
What We’ll Remember
How first scylla sky shimmers
against the tundra swan’s flight
west and north, north north west.
How many are leaving the planet and yet
are with us, still and still forever.
How they linger,
the lost, the bewildered, the wild ones!
Though tears come easily these days,
we too hover over the greening land
as spring springs brighter than ever
since stacks are stilled and the pipe
lines piping down.
When the peace pipe is lit
and sweetgrass replaces
smog— when the fog of pollution
lifts and channels clear—
Earth take a long breath
and stretches over aeons to come
and aeons past.
Penn Kemp
No Reruns, No Returns
for les revenants
Those who died once from influenza
a century ago, who now are pulled to
a hell realm of eternal return—are you
repeating, reliving the hex of time as if
doomed to replicate the old story you
already lived through? Once is enough.
No need to hover. You have suffered
plenty. You’ve loved and lost all there
is to lose. You have won. You’re one
with all that is. Retreat now to your own
abode. Return home, spirits. You’re no
longer needed here. You are no longer.
Although we honour you and thank
you and remember you each and all,
all those who’ve been called back, called
up from dimensions we can only guess at—
caught in the Great War and carried away
or carried off in the aftermath of influenza—
by this spell, we tell you to go back to
your own time, out of time. Just in time.
May you depart. We don’t know, how can
we tell? where your home is. It’s not here.
Know this virus is not yours. Know this
war is not yours. You are here in our era
by error, by slippage, a rip. You’ve mis-
taken the signage, the spelling in wrong
turns. Now return, by this charm, retreat.
You are dispelled, dismissed, dismantled,
released to soar free from the trance of time.
May you travel well. May you fly free.
Books are the best gift for a time of self-isolation! A shout-out to Canadian small press publishers and indie bookshops. Long may you thrive! Your health all round!
Here are my recent offerings for your wish list, to share with poetry- and play-loving pals.
If you order the books from me, I’ll sign them for you!
Penn Kemp
525 Canterbury Road
London Ontario N6G 2N5
pennkemp@gmail.com
“London poet Penn Kemp helps explore identity at Wordsfest”
The Thames River moves swiftly through London’s Kilally Meadows, a turn in the river at the end of Windermere Road that is eating away at the bank, carving a new history in its journey.
It’s here on the Thames, two kilometres from her childhood home that poet, spoken word performer and playwright Penn Kemp has found inspiration that culminated in River Revery, her 31st book of poetry and drama.
It will be launched Saturday at the sixth annual Words, London’s literary and creative arts festival, also known as Wordsfest, being held at Museum London Friday through Sunday.
Wordsfest will feature 40 Canadian authors, poets, writers, songwriters and other literary stars. It’s a “celebration of creative ideas, artistic expression and cultural diversity,” where the concept of identity will be the theme.
“The Thames River is the very centre of London – look at the forks downtown – the very heart of the city, the flow, the current and the influence,” said Kemp, sitting under a sunny sky days ago a few metres from the river.
In Kemp’s new book is the poem Riparian, inspired by the place where we had just been walking and this excerpt reflects our view:
Woodcocks drum in May at Kilally Meadows as
mallard mothers introduce their pride to water.
Cattails sieve sediment in the marsh. Let alone.
Carrying on. There a dead ash stands undercut by
spring current sweeping without resistance among
dangled roots. On topmost branch, the local osprey,
intent on a shoal of suckers suspended in shadow,
catches sunlight, breast gleaming, before plummeting
with curved claws to pluck family breakfast.”
On Saturday at 1 p.m., Kemp will be in conversation with Diana Beresford-Kroeger, an author, medical biochemist and botanist who wrote the forward for River Revery.
Beresford-Kroeger is the author of several books, including To Speak for the Trees, released in September. She was named a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 2011 and named by the society as one of 25 women explorers of Canada.
The Thames, its tributaries and the land it flows through is the land of Kemp’s childhood, where she wondered and dreamed and played and ran and walked and rode a bike.
The river meanders through her work, including her plays about Teresa Harris, The Dream Life of Teresa Harris (2013) and The Triumph of Teresa Harris (2017).
Harris was born in 1839, youngest of the 12 children of Royal Navy Capt. John Harris, one of the city’s earliest settlers and builder of Eldon House. The house was owned by the family until 1960 when it was donated to the city as a museum, while much of its property along the Thames became Harris Park.
Teresa, an independent minded adventurer, inspires not only Kemp’s work but also her heart.
River Revery, dedicated to Kemp’s grandchildren, is not just a book of poems; it’s a collaboration with London artist Mary McDonald, who provided photos and animations to support Kemp’s words. The website riverrevery.ca includes the full breadth of the work, which was first revealed at last year’s Wordsfest.
Kemp is also a wealth of knowledge about the Thames. She tells me the Thames is called Deshkan Ziibi (Antler River) in the Ojibwe language, but it was named by Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe after its British namesake – a name itself rooted in the ancient Celtic language and meaning the Dark One.
“I really think we need to return to listening to what the river and the land are telling us,” said Kemp, a lifelong environmentalist and activist.
“Ever since I was a tiny child, I’ve tried to articulate the mystery not expressed in words – the river, trees, the birds – . . . and I’m still trying to translate the mystery. I believe if I’m listening I can hear one maple.”
Kemp gets irritated with anthropomorphism of nature by people making it appear and behave as a human being even though the rivers, trees, animals and land are distinct entities.
“The land is not limited to our sensibilities or understanding and comprehension,” said Kemp.
“That’s where the listening comes in . . . We’ve been trained to project, transfer our humanness values to nature and the truth is nature is so much longer lived. It has its own life. It breathes so much longer than we do. We have to get back to honouring the land as the Indigenous People did before colonialism.”
Kemp said the Thames is more than a “metaphor” of the identity of London. “It’s the reality of our identity, staring us in the face, asking for recognition, to be honoured and valued, not just to be used,” she said.
Wordsfest artistic director Joshua Lambier said the festival’s theme of identity is about “re-imagining Souwesto” referring to name coined by the late London artist Greg Curnoe for Southwestern Ontario.
Lambier said identity will be explored from a variety of angles, including the “notion of the Forest City,” which Kemp and Beresford-Kroeger will explore, and the relationship between “creativity and identity,” which a panel hosted by award-winning author Nino Ricci, the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity at Western University, will discuss Saturday at 4 p.m.
“The great thing about Wordsfest is the diversity of the content, so there should be something for everyone,” said Lambier.
“We try to bring the Western University campus downtown to the people of London who want to meet and see national authors, but also our local writers who will all be discussing new ideas, new books, new artistic approaches.”
Joe Belanger, The London Free Press, October 31, 2019
GOING WITH THE FLOW: Kemp a natural at Wordsfest C1
✨Virtual Book Launch: Saturday, February 10,12:30pm EST. Pour a cup of tea and get cozy for this virtual book launch and poetry reading from Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent on Flowering, with three poets: Penn Kemp, Katie Jeresky and Jessica Lee McMillan. Please register here: @wordsfestival. On the Lunar New Year! Free. Chapbooks are available for purchase @rosegarden_press.
✨In-person Poetry Readings:Chapbooks will be available for purchase.
Sunday, February 25, 12:30-1:30pm EST. Join Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian in Heeman’s lush tropical greenhouse for a special in-person poetry reading of Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent of Flowering. Heeman’s Greenhouse, 20422 Nissouri Road, Thorndale, ON N0M 2P0. Grab a tea, coffee, shake or sundae when you arrive at the in-house Cafe Beanery and join us in the houseplants section! RSVP by sending an email to katiejeresky@gmail.com. Free.
✨ Sunday, April 28, 2-4pm. Poetry Reading among the Alpacas by Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian. 2211 Egremont Drive, RR5 Strathroy ON, N7G 3H6. Contact: Thandi, info@timbuktufarms.com. Celebrating National Poetry Month on the theme of Weather. By donation.
✨ Wednesday, June 5, 6:30-8pm. Black Mallard Reading Series features Penn Kemp and D.A. Lockhart, Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N., London ON. It’s World Environment Day! https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home. Free.
✨ Saturday, June 15, 10:30-11:30am. Sounds of the Forest: Music and Poetry Reading at Meadowlily Nature Reserve on the south side of the Thames River between Highbury Avenue and Meadowlily Road, London, ON N6G 2N5. Passport to Nature in support of Thames Talbot Land Trust, https://www.thamestalbotlandtrust.ca/passport_to_nature. Free.
“Celebrating the Forest of Forest City” , online exhibit launch, Embassy Cultural House, London ON. www.embassyculturalhouse.ca Curators Emmy Meredith, Ron Benner, Jamelie Hassan and Olivia Mossuto: embassyculturalhouse@gmail.com
For my granddaughter. One day we’ll read Poems to Ula by water. Meanwhile cellist Lucas Tenzen and I perform my poem “In Light” for her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=groiPy9t81M.
Thoughts & prayers do console, as does poetry.
A Wake
for Ula Marguerite Podesta Chalmers
Feel the net, the nest, the next step holding beloved Ula, her family and friends as we move beyond closing in to opening up, opening out to all that
cannot be known while we remain in body. We can wholly feel Ula in all her gentle, generous intensity, her fierce love, her expanding field. As she enters
the Unknown, leaving in the wake of her laugh, her sky-lit smile’s radiance, our hearts. Ready to receive everything she is and would have been. Ready to carry on what she
completed before her time, what we in our small view considered her time. May such Intelligent Beauty and Joy ever trump grief as her smile expands to every possible horizon.
May pain be left behind while we are carried forward in her Wake and held in the larger bowl of Being. With her. Without her. And truly with her. Beauty, inner and outer. Beauty.
BELIEVE…
In the space of a year she has learned to sit, to stand, to walk, to totter forward in a run.
She has seen one full round of the seasons. She wraps her family round her little finger.
Now just before dusk we stroll hand in hand to witness the pelicans’ evening beach patrol.
Gliding over the sea in formation, skimming just overhead, flapping slow time, in synch.
Ula studies the procedure, dropping my hand to edge forward, neck outstretched, arms aero-
dynamically angled. She flaps and flaps along the sand, following the pelican flight, ready
for that sudden lift. Again, again, till the last pelican has flown. Dragging her heels home,
Ula braces her body against the rising breeze, bewildered that she too can’t take off to sky
but game to try again tomorrow…
Her Orbit of Ellipsis
My granddaughter is going as Wonder Woman for Halloween. She’s practised swinging her Lariat of Truth so I’m reading up on Artemis,
protectress of young girls and the archetype for our current Wonder Woman. Arrow to hand, she alights on the mark, drawing her bow on intruders.
Artemis herds young artoi, girls of eight or so away from polis, the city, into wide, wilder woods where she reigns Queen and they her willing apprentices stay
snared till puberty. Artoi, little Bears, they follow their Great Bear into the chase and Orion hides, the hunter hunted and flung out to constellation.
My granddaughter will go trick or treating and return with a gleeful sack full of eternal returns.
Such small cosy comforts subside as the year slips at an entrance to enchantment, the larger dark that awaits us all. And the Greater Bear grins.
What holds Sorrow and Joy in its lap? ‘Setsunai’ implies what has faded from brightness, what can’t quite be recalled, beyond knowing that everything passes. Snow dropping on snow-spangled trees.
We share this deep new reality for which no words suffice…maybe one in Japanese, expressing the loss of ten thousand things. Something quiet in the snow, snow, the silencing snow.
Sometimes I hear you speaking. More often you nod approval or shake your head to comment in replay, in dream, in small glimpses.
You hover about at back of mind, at nape of neck, those startled rising hairs.
The Winter Widow (ii)
The trick is knowing not to choose but to listen. The choice is made, already. You are wafting between up and down, between dimensions I don’t as yet know. The indeterminate unknown prompts me to poetry, to remember you there.
Wednesday, November 1, 2023. “3 favorite reads in 2023”, https://shepherd.com/. My choices: Emma Donoghue, Susan McCaslin and Harold Rhenisch. My 4th: Alicia Elliot’s new AND THEN SHE FELL.
Saturday, November 4, 2023, 1pm. Reading for Climate Change, Victoria Park, London ON through our local Power Up event, https://globalpowerup.org/ ~ through 350.org.
Tuesday, November 14, 2023, 7pm ET. “Heart to Art”, video for Quai Nocent Docent (What Hurts Teaches): A Collection of Poems and Musings. The Friendly Spike Theatre. Contact: sarah.wells@live.ca
Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Launch of the anthology, Stones Beneath the Surface. Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N., London ON https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home/books
April 29, 2024, 7pm. Art Bar, Free Times Café, 320 College Street. Toronto, ON M5T 1S3. On College w. of Markham· (416) 967-1078. Feature, artbarpoetry@gmail.com
Now up! Doesn’t this great review make you want to read/hear Incrementally?https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2023/10/laura-kerr-incrementally-by-penn-kemp.html The text, Incrementally (88 pages and free!) is now up on https://www.hempressbooks.com/shop/p/incrementally-by-penn-kemp ! Album is on https://angrystarlings.bandcamp.com/ https://www.hempressbooks.com/angrystarlings https://www.hempressbooks.com/authors/penn-kemp 3 poems “from Night Orchestra”, “Declination”, “Bees Needs” are up in Interpoem: A Visual Anthology. Editor, Laura Kerr, https://sedserio.com/about
by Penn Kemp Contemporary Verse 2, Summer 2023, Vol. 46 No.1. P. 66-68, contemporaryverse2.ca The Ridge by Robert Bringhurst Harbour Publishing, 2023 168 pp.; $22.95
This new poetry collection by Robert Bringhurst is well worth the wait: an occasion to celebrate. Harbour Publishing has produced a beautiful book. The cover image is of a powerfully evocative wood engraving, black on vibrant red, by Richard Wagen- er. The first two pages present long lists of Bringhurst’s publications, impressive both in breadth and depth: Poetry, Translation, Prose and Edited Works, in an order of priority that is significant. Also significant is the poet’s dedication to beautiful letter- press limited editions, like “Ten Poems with One Title” by Barbarian Press, included in this present volume. The eight parts of this collection vary from one poem to ten. The care in every detail, from typography to layout, displays a lifetime of attention: a spaciousness on the page reflects the spaciousness of the poet’s perception. The Ridge is chiseled, as if flint were shaped by a skilled carver into instruments of use to the community, if we open our ears and listen.
The Ridge stands handsomely on its own, but to read it in the context of Bringhurst’s entire oeuvre is a marvel. He wears his learning lightly and explains what is needed. Still, best keep a dictionary or Dr. Google handy because his many cultural references, from the Upanishads through Herakleitos to earth sciences, only enrich your reading.
The book is the summation of a life embodied in the senses. Bringhurst is as gener- ous in his output as in his acknowledgements. Elegies pay homage to a community of writers: Stan Dragland, Victor Golla, Barry Lopez, and P.K. Page. A musical col- laboration with Jan Zwicky set to Hayden includes the score (p. 59). The staves of music provided are simple enough that an amateur can pick the notes out on a keyboard. They add an immersive solemnity to a tradition, Christianity, that is then set in the wider context of the earth itself with the interplay of words into music. Bringhurst is constantly questioning our assumptions, with an acuity of mind trained in the sciences and rooted in the sensorium. Take the poem “Stopping By” (p. 85): the title alone conjures Robert Frost’s beloved poem, which begins “Whose woods these are I think I know.” Robert Bringhurst’s first line in response is more ambiguous, debating the very idea of ownership: “Whose woods they are I do not know” (p. 85). He stands the original on its head: “How can trees be owned?”
When a poem bursts through a hallowed older poem like this, it carries the tradition into the present, with a difference. Bringhurst challenges the notion of ownership: “I only have to be here long enough to take a breath, And then it’s clear he did not own them, nor do I. What is it possible to own?” (p.87) Bringhurst answers on the same page with the notion of “belonging, not owning.” “it’s taken us our lives to get this clear. You know it’s what our lives are for.”
What triumph to achieve a clarity that costs nothing less than everything. The Ridge is the culmination of long, close observation. Humanity is not primary in these poems; earth is. If we knew we belonged to the earth, how could we destroy so much? These words take new life as Bringhurst reads the collection’s centrepiece, “The Ridge,” on line, in place, on the ridge he calls home. From the perspective of age, he stands “in this / vicinity of space,” not looking down at his readers, but around. We are transported to the specifics of Quadra Island’s ecological past, pres- ent and future on the West Coast of Canada. The poem goes deep into old time— before the ravens, before the trees, back, back, but also up, to the cosmos. Reaching from particular details out to the abstract, these poems are portals that open and open, and on. Such far-sightedness entices his readers to take the long view as well. Further, he seems to say. This way, one more step. Look. Listen. The respect for the natural world in Bringhurst’s poetry is contagious. As field guide, Bringhurst listens to the land, and we can too, if we heed.
Riffing off Gary Snyder, Bringhurst asks: “And is that what the land understands that we don’t? No self in self… Suppose the land just understands that it belongs. That’s all… Could we belong to it?” (p. 88).
Bringhurst continues: “The way we are, we don’t belong. We’re passing by or passing through.” These poems offer a very Buddhist sense of a world that is constantly appearing and disappearing: “whatever is real is always barely coming into view or going away” (p. 87)
A reader’s small concerns drop off in the face of immensity that Bringhurst pres- ents, with the courage it takes to cross so many borders and return with a traveler’s tale to tell. To enter “The Ridge” is to step into a wider space, an old growth forest, a ribbed cathedral, a larger presence. He is in place and he takes solace in the par- ticulars of beauty around him. The land he dwells on becomes the concerns that he dwells on in contemplation. He engages all the senses, mind very much included in the insights with which he articulates his world. Bringhurst speaks for the land, and surely that is what poets are required to do at this imperiled juncture for the world. Participants in his inquiry, readers are encouraged to drop into stillness and attend. Attention must be paid. If not now, when?
What’s the role of poetry? Who will listen to our prophets, our poets? Bringhurst doesn’t stop at easy conclusions. But there is hope in language: “a poem is discov- ered, not made, a poem is a well” (p. 82). “[A]s Wittgenstein put it: Astonishment / is thinking,” Bringhurst writes (p. 139), and these poems are thinking astonish- ment. There is comfort in such articulation, whittled into stark and authoritative simplicity.
May this book reach those who so desperately need this consolation and solace, and its imperative. Courage, mes braves. It is in our hands to embrace the world and to express its needs. Earth of course carries on very well by herself, left to her own devices, but we, humanity, are reminded: do no harm.
“
Penn Kemp 