Night Orchestra, a poem written & performed by me with #music & #Sound design by marvellous composer Bill Gilliam & visual editing by Gera Dillon. Opening title painting: Jim Kemp
Night Orchestra
Deep in summer stillness, an electric hum of air conditioner in B flat flat monotone entrains my body monotonous.
Heat produced to cool my neighbours thrums the outside air, heats up our collective night.
Mechanical multitudes self-replicate in chorus, relentless fridge and clock.
The only spell breaker is a tape of Tibetan chant. Deep harmonic overtones conjure a resonance, disturb the sine waves.
Sleepless in the Beaches, I resist the single sound as Blake deplores single vision and Newton’s sleep.
The sound of the perpetual twentieth century colonizied our future with a dominant beat, sales pitched for comfort, con- venience, reliance on appliance.
The pity is not that the century wound to a close but that it’s whining on and on
Somewhere beyond the pervasive rattle, waves break on the shore. Species diversify.
From: On Our Own Spoke. CD-ROM. Toronto: Pendas Productions, 2000. Text updated: 2021
Penn Kemp has participated in Canadian cultural life for 50 years, writing, editing, and publishing poetry and plays: 30 books and 10 CDs. Penn is theLeague’s Spoken Word Artist (2015) and inaugural recipient of the “Muttsy” award! Hercollection,A Near Memoir: new poems(Beliveau Books), recently launched.
Of the old poets, the one I most often call on is Creeley.
That singular eye. That dear clear voice.
That. Oh, and this. Odin, move
over.
*
Catch as catch can. Stand your staff by. Wander, Wotan,
over new terrain where words no longer count.
Where you wonder why. Or rather why not, when over form.
Understanding.
When the deep-sighted eye opens worlds, no need of catchphrase to recant.
Why funnel many dimensions down to one small realm of print?
*
Bob, have I lost you in clouds of northern gods?
Not foreign to you but absent. Irrelevant, off- beat.
The Solstice edition of SAGEING is out, with fine articles by Susan McCaslin and John Lent. AND a review of A NEAR MEMOIR by Richard-Yves Sitoski !
“SUSTAINING CONNECTION”
Penn Kemp with Richard-Yves Sitoski
Even as we are isolating in place during this long pandemic year, we need to conjure a sense of community… now more than ever, perhaps. These days, my community lives on-line and in memory through many decades. Because I think in poetry more than prose, my musings turned into a collection, A Near Memoir: New Poems, and I welcome the new connections my memoir is bringing to me.
MEMORIA TENERE: PENN KEMP’S A NEAR MEMOIR: NEW POEMS Richard-Yves Sitoski
I write this at 4:36 a.m. on a mid-May morning, 56 weeks into a pandemic that has left me simultaneously enervated yet full of a need to move, to do. I have become my cat, essentially, alternating between endless hours of otium and brief instants of frenetic activity. Because my priorities need realignment and my insecurities ministrations, I have, like many, turned to poetry, greedily hoovering up biographical and autobiographical works in an attempt to feel rooted. Penn Kemp’s new chap, A Near Memoir, therefore arrived at an opportune time. Kemp looks at the body of her cat in “For a Small, Beloved Descendent of Bast.” There’s a wonderful juxtaposition here of the promised mythologizing indicated by the title with the very matter-of-fact description of the cat’s lifeless state, leading to a payoff at the end that takes us into Christopher Smart territory. As the title indicates, her book is not a memoir – it can’t be, with only 23 poems – but rather a brief compte rendu of a life of dynamism and poetic invention. In its scope and concerns, however, it accomplishes one of the roles of a memoir, which is (to reverse engineer the paraphrase of Heidegger that serves as the book’s epigraph) to “empresent” the past and bring it near in a process that slows the future’s approach. Context is key. Kemp situates the personal in the familial and the familial in the public, sometimes through slapstick satori slaps that take us out of our own egos – symbolic and physical falls to the “sous-face” of the Earth – and remind us that we are part of something bigger than we can possibly understand. In “Shooting the Duck,” a young Penn becomes resigned to figure skating, fails in the process of “enduring” her mother’s encouragement, and we find in her mother’s motives shades of vicarious living.
Shooting the Duck
During the snowy winter of 1952, when I was eight mom drove me each week to the Arena for a figure skating class. She outfitted me just right, in a navy blue velvet skirt that just covered my bum, a white rabbit muff that kept me warm, a pompom wool cap. En route mom told me romances of skating to Silver.
But those nasty nicks on the skate blades would trip me up just as I pushed forward. Even when I learned not to topple over, I could not figure out how to shoot the duck. The ideal was to hunker down till you were nearly sitting on your skates, then to dart one leg out like the barrel of a gun as you coasted along the ice.
Not me. Invariably I’d end up on my bottom, gangly colt legs galumphing out in front of me. An older girl skated graceful rings around the fallen and the splayed in a swirl of perfection as glumly shivering we tried to imitate her glide. Like an unwelcome, embarrassed dog, our wet legging stench slunk into the arena’s crisp air.
But I’d been given a dime and a nickel. My reward after class was a soggy and savoured cone of chips, best chips ever, the paper cone soaked in salted vinegar, well worth taking mittens off for and enduring mom’s encouragement on the wet-bottomed ride home. She’d been an avid skater on outdoor ponds and still had unwarranted hopes for me.
Her dream of Winter Olympic Championship held no sway.
Getting back to the importance of context, one of the most affecting pieces in A Near Memoir is “Circling the Gulf,” which to me articulates something that may seem heretical in the discourse surrounding mental illness: that what we call illness might very well be a rational, if not reasonable, response to trauma. How should we on the outside react to war? Is it not possible that the trauma of war can be visited upon some people not directly involved in conflict, simply by virtue of their extreme sensitivity to our shared humanity? Kemp leaves it to you to decide; what she does tell you, however, is that the situation played out in her family in a very specific way which ought to be considered by all of us, as we are currently living through a nightmare scenario that will have emotional ramifications the likes of which we can’t honestly predict. which to me articulates something that may seem heretical in the discourse surrounding mental illness: that what we call illness might very well be a rational, if not reasonable, response to trauma.
A Near Memoir, then, is a stop along the way in a career that has given us much poetry and given much to poetry. It does what poetry is meant to do, celebrating the universal by highlighting the particular, and whets our appetites for what will come next.
Richard-Yves Sitoski
Circling The Gulf: A Gain A Loss, Ingrained
Signs proliferate as we pass by. Plastered on the auto dealership plate glass: SAVE THOU SANDS SAVE THOU SANDS. Save thou souls, save thy soul, grain of sand, rain of rant, cycles of want and plenty.
We are so defined by the stories we tell and those we as children hear. For years, as I was growing up, ‘war stories’ were served with dessert at the table. Over & over, I listened to my grandfather’s tales of leading a regiment of Iroquois troops in battle on the killing grounds of France.
This warrior tradition emerged in my son in a fantastical, twisted way. During an acute psychotic episode, he was hospitalized. His terrible adventure, coinciding with the Gulf War, took on metaphoric overtone. Even the word “gulf” looms between realities. Mind the gap, mine hole.
As a child, he listened to my father’s stories about his work as a bomb disposal expert in Scotland during the Second World War. That stress internalized by my son with dreadful accuracy. I believe a literalization of memory occurs down generations all the time. Our work is to stop the war in art and life so that the children don’t continue to enact conflict.
At the height of concern about the possibilities of chemical, biological or nuclear warfare, he became convinced he himself was radio-active, a bomb about to explode. Who is to say what his response to threats of nuclear annihilation should have been? His was a tortured way of
reinventing personal history, of linking himself up with our tradition of war service, of families disrupted by early deaths from wounds borne on the field of battle. With the end of the Gulf War, my son recovered and continues to celebrate family histories to this day as our memory keepers.
Penn Kemp
On Sunday, September 5, 2021, 7:30 – 9:35 pm, Kemp will be reading from A Near Memoir: New Poems as featured poet in the Red Lion Reading Series: https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/redlionreadingseries/shows. Kemp is thankful for a CAIP grant from the London Arts Council, allowing time to write these poems. A numbered copy of A Near Memoir, signed to you, is available by writing to pennkemp@gmail.com.
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. The League of Canadian Poets acclaimed Penn as their 2015 Spoken Word Artist and she is the League’s 40th Life Member. In 2020, she was presented with the inaugural Joe Rosenblatt (Muttsy) Award for Innovative Creators. In 2021, she was nominated for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pavlick Poetry Prize.
Richard-Yves Sitoski is a poet, spoken word performer, visual artist, songwriter and poverty activist from Owen Sound. His works have appeared in periodicals in Canada, the United States and Great Britain.
University of Regina Press. Sue Goyette, editor. https://uofrpress.ca/Books/R/Resistance. Thanks to U. of Regina Press and editor Sue Goyette and all the courageous contributors to this important anthology. May our voices help those who need to hear our words.
It’s too late. He has jumped me, fallen on me, almost as in love, catching his weight in his hands as they smack against the grungy linoleum tiles I’ve wanted to replace.
The kitchen wall is rippling. The chalky ceiling bulges as if it needs new plastering; as if something is trying to pound through, something that can’t be contained.
A flash flood, a fire? My spine slams against the door. My skull is permeable. I know what’s going to happen.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. Time expands to include all the random possibilities of thought, of world.
Tectonic plates collide. I know that he erupts explosively, a system under great pressure from without, from below.
His face balloons massively through the mist. I know him. I know that drawn-down mouth, mask of Greek tragedy.
How often I have traced the dimple in his chin, a line from nose to mouth where God pressed His finger: the philtrum.
His fingers close, blunt tips touching, the heels of palms meeting as if in prayer. Relentless hands ring my throat.
Gold wedding ring presses deep into my gullet. Even in absolute panic, my body responds to his closeness, dearly
familiar and almost kind. My breath stops, is stopped. My breath holds itself, forgets itself under his thumbs, then
gasps. And is forced quiescent.
I have already disappeared up the smoky trail, out the top of head into wide blue sky. A buzz as of bees in the cool
expanse of air. Strange croaks seem to start in my gullet and travel up with me into the vast and empty. I am flying.
Mewling, I hover, open my new eyes to glimpse our roof, so puny from this height. Beyond him, beyond myself, above.
*
Violent shaking startles me out of freedom: a sudden updraft. I’m being pulled down the vortex of consciousness back into
a body I thought I’d surrendered. The sound in my ear, carol, carol, and no song but choking, roaring. Nothing but his voice, loud as Poseidon in a seashell in my ear. He’s really done it now.
I swim in an ocean of blood. Swirling red currents fill each cranny of consciousness and this time I go under, diving, divining down.
When I emerge, he is gone but the room is swirling around me in colours of other travels. Turkish scarlet cushions. Moroccan
striped curtains dance a jig of molecules that confuse my senses. I am lying on the couch. I shut my eyes again, not to see. Not
to hear. His footsteps, running closer. Water, soaking my head. I look at him. A yellow cast of fear lies over last red flares of rage
on his face. But the hands that hold the basin barely tremble. “If you’ve quite recovered,” he announces, his voice oddly strangled.
“I’m off to town. Just take it easy. You’ll be all right!” He commands. Irony of statement, concern of question or relief: it doesn’t matter.
Pain neatly divides head from shoulders. Voice creaks like something inanimate outside its box. Words, the ability to make words— gone.
Phrases flutter and dissolve. “I’ll be all right.” Something automatic, something ancient in me, is attempting re-entry. “All right. Just go.”
He is already gone, a flash of yellow bike. Silence except for that buzz of wasps in my head. Wasp-words ring in my ears.
*
Can either of us remember what it had been about this time? His jealousy of my phantom lover, the one that got away…
Who knew for sure what happened. What is this complicity between us? Already it’s as if nothing at all had happened.
We can talk to no one, certainly not each other, about the sudden black holes, the mine-fields in ordinary conversation that suddenly erupt. Because most often,
they are not there. The house is simply a house, the scene domestic with cat and kids, and cauliflower on the stove.
I can talk to no one. I cannot talk. When I tried—family or friends—all told me that it was none of their business. Not to interfere. Not to know. I made my bed. Now lie in it. Lie.
When I did call the police, they listened intently to my story. “Is the perpetrator your husband, ma’am?” “Yes.” “I’m sorry.
We do not interfere in cases of domestic assault. Thank you for calling the Precinct.” The dial tone still rings in my ears.
And where could I go anyway, on my own with two kids and no money and a body that will not move. Shame— I
wrap it around me to keep warm as if it were my own, protecting me from the eyes of neighbours, hiding black
and yellowing bruises under sleeves and stockings. What have I done? Dishes, drying in the sink. What has he done?
The fingers I’ve studied so closely, bald sentinels drumming action. Beating to their own rhythm, the jazz that syncopates
sudden movement. My glasses hang by a wire arm, frame twisted. Retribution, then contrition. Pain is finite after all. He comes back
begging. I pride myself on the ability to forgive that’s been bred into me. A flip of power and I get whatever I want; he does what- ever I want. Until resentment steams over again. Next time. No.
*
There will be no next time. There’s never going to be a next time. This I believe on faith. This he believes on faith. When he returns
after the kids are asleep, he knows he has changed, knows his ire has disappeared forever, as if it never was. I know there is no more
fear. I pray there is no more fear. We hold onto each other all night. without a word. Stealthily, while his breathing deepens, I practice
opening and closing my throat for when the words come. If I could speak. For when I will speak. My jaw creaks on its wrenched hinge.
*
His thumbs are imprinted on either side of my windpipe like black sentinels. For days, I wear a long turquoise scarf and go around
pretending I am Isadora Duncan. Pretending I could fly. Secretly, unwinding my scarf, I inspect the delicate progression of bruises.
A circle of yellow surrounds the thumbprint. I think I can make out the actual whorls that are the perimeter. Black fades to purple, then
softens to a yellowish centre. In the mirror, that face that is not mine looks out at me from the telescoped distance of time, wrinkled thin
with the patience of years. Her eyes clear and almost wise, assuring— she is somebody I will become, the face I will grow into someday.
Penn Kemp
“It’s so important that the stories of the survivors be told and honoured. We are all one. Consciousness and the best forms of art go hand in hand and this is something your work demonstrates. The moment in “What we did not know…” that shone for me was the last one where you looked into the mirror and beheld your own face, knowing it as “The face I will grow someday.” And surely you have grown it and it has grown you. I’m glad poems about violence against men were included and hope that men and women will join together to address the systemic evils that allow such horrors to happen and be tolerated. Your tone was just right, not over-dramatized but authentic, each line finding the precise tenor and music to best accompany it as it moved from horror, to lament, through to healing.” Susan McCaslin, author of Heart Work (Ekstasis)
“This is the strongest, most potent poem I’ve ever read about violation! Closely observed, the disassociation of flying over the rape, the denial, hope, lack of support of friends and authorities! the grounding in myth and history! The image of his wedding ring imprinted on her gullet is haunting and such a stark clear image of his physical violence! Brava and huge courage! Love in overcoming,” Katerina Vaughan Fretwell, author of Class Acts (Inanna)
Books I read are in the process of shaping, shifting each time I open them. Not just pages but the content won’t let me step into the same novel twice. Characters talk back and letters dance jigs that won’t stand still.
Nor do I step into the same house twice. When I come home, the front hall shifts to accommodate the change I bring in my wake from outside realms. And the place itself has contentedly settled within my absence.
I don’t step into the same dream twice. Oh, I try to return to change the story, to divert the flow from disaster. But the dream flips a new twist into its narrative, leaving me to contend with eddies and currents I never suspected.
I don’t step into the same grief twice. Each has its own taste, bitter, sweet or bittersweet, its intense specificity. marked distinct and marking me. Every sorrow forms a trail you know me by, sure signature of some loss.
I don’t step into the same life twice. Whether I step into the same death is anyone’s guess: so many small ones you’d think would prepare me, but who knows what awaits us over on the other side, en la otra orilla.
I don’t leave my shoes on the bank and wade in. I don’t recover what is swept away in the current. Every poem hovers on the bridge over metaphor. I don’t step into the river at all.
Penn Kemp
“Heraclitus, Ongoing,” P. 28-29. Paintings by Jim Kemp, P. 49-50. A Near Memoir: New Poems cover, P. 67.
Penn Kemp 