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:
Also, on the League blog, “An Ecology of Intimacy: Through the Lens of Poetry by Penn Kemp” up on https://poets.ca/npm22-blog-penn-kemp/.
“Scaling the Colour Bar: Ecophonics” is up on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wv-sAp-g1A.
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…
See https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/michael-morris-of-words-wiliness-and-wisdom.
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!
#BestCanadianSeries #BestCanadian2023 #BestCanadianPoetry23 #BCP23
Penn Kemp 