Happy New Year! Celebrate on!
Here’s my dad, painter James Kemp, as Father Time and museum curator Clare Bice as the New Year Baby in ‘staid’ London 50 odd years ago:)
Un prospero y feliz año 2015! Thanks for your presence ongoing in my life, Lovely Ones!
Penn
Jim Kemp at ease(l)
A moth I brought home for him to paint, 1967.
In tribute to December 26, 2004. “Facing the Epicentre”, http://www.ourlondon.ca/2011/03/penn-kemp-offers-a-poem-in-aftermath-of-disaster-in-japan/, a poem from the dvd, Luminous Entrance: a sound opera.
Text by Penn. Reading with Anne Anglin at Aeolian Hall, London ON.
Videography: Dennis Siren
“Facing the Epicentre” and commentary is up on http://didiodatoc.blogspot.com/2011/03/poets-and-bloggers-whove-written-to.html.
On the Moon after Solstice
you dream of hiking contours
to cathedral carol service.
Singing in the cavern of nave,
omphalos to the world, you curve
on rounded meridian of joy to outer
space, linking with others of like mind.
You race to catch the authors
to know the next act. Old tales
are told and tell themselves new.
You connect fragments, dropping
your lines, dropping me a line
in the cheer of retrieval.
Rings of companions collaborate,
not wanting to recapitulate
events of the day merely or
invent night’s happenstance.
Something’s given, something
larger than the single self.
Presently you’ll know the story
as it is happening to you.
Singly or together our dreams
direct us, as if night-given leads
to true script. What is real
agitates dream into action.
Penn Kemp is London, Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate.
In 2012, Penn Kemp and I published the chapbook Dream Sequins with Lyricalmyrical Press in Toronto. The title refers to Penn’s poetry manuscript. My contribution consisted of 18 ink drawings. I sent Penn a number of scans which I thought related or tangentially connected to her words and she made the final selection. Drawing can be an automatic process, as spontaneous as dreaming, with line unfolding connections not crafted by the conscious mind. My body of drawings 2009 – 2011 expressed a number of intertwined themes & at a certain point Penn and I connected. We were independently working in close enough proximity to our ‘source’ materials that text & image, both floating on a warm parchment paper, felt synonymous. This post was inspired by the idea of using Penn’s words as a design element in constructing digital images while referencing one poem & drawing from the chapbook.
http://poemimage.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/the-pageant-by-penn-kemp/ and images by Steven McCabe!!!
Poem copyright Penn Kemp. Images copyright Steven McCabe. Your visit is appreciated.
The Pageant by Penn Kemp. A poem for Solstice.
Steven McCabe and I published From Dream Sequins with Lyricalmyrical Press in Toronto.
Steven writes: “The title refers to Penn’s poetry manuscript. My contribution consisted of 18 ink drawings. I sent Penn a number of scans which I thought related or tangentially connected to her words and she made the final selection. Drawing can be an automatic process, as spontaneous as dreaming, with line unfolding connections not crafted by the conscious mind. My body of drawings 2009 – 2011 expressed a number of intertwined themes & at a certain point Penn and I connected. We were independently working in close enough proximity to our ‘source’ materials that text & image, both floating on a warm parchment paper, felt synonymous. This post was inspired by the idea of using Penn’s words as a design element in constructing digital images while referencing one poem & drawing from the chapbook.”
Tuning in to change | The London Free Press.
By James Reaney, The London Free Press
Twenty-five years after the murders in Montreal, some of the strongest voices of remembrance and calls for action are in London.
Across Canada, Saturday marks the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women and the 25th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.
Music and words — all day long — at Western’s 94.9 CHRW stand here for events around the London region. The campus radio station’s Saturday statement All Women’s Voices runs for 24 hours. All day. As it must.
“Our amazing female DJs will be informing and empowering all while playing some of the best female artists out there,” the station says in an admirable call to hearts and minds.
By Saturday morning, hours of programming will have visited music by women, gender culture, high school students and teachers share perspectives.
Still to come Saturday for your empowerment and solidarity are contributions by such Londoners as DJ MediaFrenzy, Words literary festival and Poetry Slam star Emma Blue, the city’s former poet laureate Penn Kemp, The Alcohollys and Tina Powell, who discusses missing and murdered women in the aboriginal community.
“The volunteers came to me with what they wanted to do — and I put a call out to the community for anybody else who wanted be involved,” says CHRW’s program director Allison Brown.
The noon-hour ceremony and Ritual of Re-Membering is at the Mother St. James Auditorium, Brescia University College is to be broadcast live. It honours the loss of the 14 women murdered 25 years ago at Ecole Polytechnique, and to all women who have lost their lives to gender-based violence. That’s when Kemp’s poem The Invocation will be heard…
Come and say hello, women. The veils are still
thin and we welcome your presence, fourteen
plus all the disappeared whom you stand for.
As if you were in the prime of life now. As if
your daughters bloomed full-grown around you.
As if your mothers were crying delighted tears.
And if you were here to see what has changed
and what has not, would you hide your eyes in
shame for what has been done, what has not?
Come into the light and tell us how you are. As
if you have life beyond what we recall, remember
before this dark December claims its own again.
Penn Kemp
This poem was published on Saturday, December 6, 2014 and online:
Poem for Peace in Many Voices, Volume 2, Pendas Productions, with Bernice Vincent’s image, “Fourteen Women” (Montreal, December 6, 1989).
Photo of mother and daughter Amanda Chalmers by Gavin Stairs
Twenty-five years since the Montreal Massacre, and we still desperately need action on Violence Against Women. I hope you can join us during the National Day of Remembrance and Action On Violence Against Women,Saturday, December 6, on the Full Moon.
What can we do? I beleive art can inspire us to action. To counteract the silence that all too often surrounds violence, I’ve coined the neologism Siolence. See https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/siolence/ and my book, Binding Twine, up on mytown.ca/bindingtwine,
London artist Bernice Vincent’s work graces the cover of the second volume of my Poem for Peace in Many Voices and the frieze continues throughout the volume: see www,mytown.ca/poemforpeace.
In conjunction with Bernice Vincent’s mural Exhibition, “Fourteen
Women” (Montreal, December 6, 1989). Bernice wrote:
“A frieze-like composition (4’x28’) with silhouettes of fourteen young women engaged in conversation, exchanging ideas and carrying symbolic objects that relate to engineering. They move against a background textured with fragments of dried plants signifying the seasonal changes in the land which supports and enriches our lives. In the border of the work are fourteen circles which represent the iron rings that engineering students receive upon graduation. The circles are incomplete to signify the sudden loss of the young women’s lives and aspirations for the future.”
**************
If you are in London, come to the Ritual of Re-Membering
Saturday 6th December 2014, Noon, Mother St. James Auditorium, Brescia University College
Brescia University College, 1285 Western Road, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 1H2. Free Parking
“On December 6th, 1989 a young man, enraged by hatred and a misguided idea of a women’s place in the world, entered L’Ecole Polytechnique and massacred fourteen women students. It was an event that awoke many Canadians to the ongoing reality of violence against women in our society. The Ritual of Re-Membering seeks to honour the loss of their young lives, as well as all women who have lost their lives to or suffered from gender-based violence.
The Ritual of Re-Membering has been held each year since the first anniversary of this tragic event and sadly, we must continue to commemorate the ongoing acts of violence that are a daily reality for women in this city, province and country. The ritual moves us into grief and sadness and then lifts us out into hope and power for transformation and change.
We hope you will stand in solidarity with us against gender-based violence.”
Hosted by The Circle Women’s Centre for Spirituality, Activism & the Earth. For more information: circle@uwo.ca or 519-432-8353 ext. 28288
AND Vigil – National Day of Remembrance and Action On Violence Against Women
Women’s Monument – Victoria Park (opposite Williams Cafe), London.
5:30 pm Candlelight Vigil
6:00 pm Reception at CUPW
Hosted by Women’s Event Committee.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1531269750446541/?pnref=story
“Deshkan Ziibi Native Women’s Association, a local of Ontario Women’s Native Association (ONWA), will be speaking and drumming at the Vigil.
It is estimated that nearly 1,200 Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing in Canada in the last 30 years. Indigenous women are far more likely than non-Indigenous women to experience violence and the violence experienced is more severe: 2014 statistics show that Indigenous women are four times more likely to be murdered than non-Indigenous women.”
NO MORE SIOLENCE!
Here’s my poem:
We have landed they tell us
in the centre for all Morocco
of magic & the old ways
high in the Atlas mountains….
We have heard this.
What we have not heard or seen
happens for the first time
today via the one TV in the one cafe:
Apollo astronauts land on the moon
& high-step in slow motion, gawky
in grey scale.
“Ha!” says Omar. “What a stunt.
Those Americans are so clever.
But we know. Moroccans
are not easily tricked. This
is a fiction to entertain the people.
Quelle blague.” He pretends to toss
a rock off the dusty floor at the screen.
The crowd in the cafe laugh
at the outlandish gear, the preposterous
instrument & helmet gimmicks
clumsier than any cartoon.
Still scoffing, the moon men jostle outside
& hidden in hooded dun djellabas
melt into the lunar dusk of their grey plateau.
Penn Kemp
1 December 2014
From a sequence of 48 new poems selected by Zenobia Frost and Kent MacCarter
Cordite 48.1: CANADA is now live! Featuring work from Lisa Robertson, Tim Bowling, Sina Queras, Derek Beaulieu, Jeramy Dodds, Aisha Sasha John, Nora Gould, Sonnet L’Abbé, Christian Bök, Penn Kemp, Paul Vermeersch, Nick Thran, Sandy Pool, Jordan Abel, Larissa Lai, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Katherina Vermette, Shane Rhodes, Helen Guri, Garry Thomas Morse, Priscila Uppal, Stuart Ross, Jenny Sampirisi, Sue Sinclair, Colin Fulton, Jacqueline Turner, Jason Christie, Stephen Collis, Susan Iaonnou, Rachel Zolf, Stephanie Bolster, Sachiko Murakami, Susan Glickman, Clea Roberts, Ken Babstock, Lydia Kwa, Tanya Evanson, Jenny Haysom, Jordan Scott, Kate Fagan, John Barton, Adeena Karasick, Ray Hsu, Karen Solie, C R Avery, Garry Gottfriedson, Margaret Christakos, David Seymour, Sharon Thesen, Anita Lahey, Kevin Matthews, Lucy Van, Kelly Richardson, Kim Adams, Ian Friend, Matthew Hall, John Charles Ryan, Ann Vickery and Bonny Cassidy.
Penn Kemp 