Some years ago, I was commissioned to write a poem on L. L. Fitzgerald’s painting for the National Gallery of Canada’s magazine. Luminous Entrance: a Sound Opera for Climate Change Action was performed at Aeolian Hall in 2009 with Anne Anglin, Ruth Douthwright, Brenda McMorrow, Robert Menegoni, video by Dennis Siren, sound by John Magyar.
The sky is about four o’clock bay. Icicles have dropped heavy white tulips onto back kitchen rooves. Soft snow is rising onto the air.
Maple buds set in their pale limbs almost as if ready. Our cultivated tree prepares to join the bush outside familiar lines where sharp angles collide.
Time to leave the window to its own reality, condensed flat beyond the pane. Supplies are low. We have been so long in winter, we are running out of sun.
On the shelf inside the storm, an empty pitcher of light awaits sage and summer savory. All puns are planted. We present these things as if saying were enough to
conjure the perfect illusion of presence.
PK
You can see where the poem’s title came from!
L.l..Fitzgerald, The National Gallery, OttawaFrom Luminous Entrance. Photo: Saby Siren Productions
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
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The water dancer
Alexander McCall Smith, To the land of long lost friends
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Téa Obreht, Inland Alix Ohlin, Dual Citizens
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, The water dancer celebrates the power of story and lineage.
What better way to begin Black History Month than with this powerful novel! To be read along with Colson Whitehead’s TheUnderground Railroad. Brilliant, immersive, majestic, magic.
“But knowing now the awesome power of memory, how it can open a blue door from one world to another, how it can move us…can fold the land like cloth… I know now that this story, this Conduction, had to begin there on that fantastic bridge between the land of the living and the land of the lost.”
“I understood Conduction, understood it as a relay of feeling, assembled from moments so striking that they become real as stone and steel”
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Alexander McCall Smith, To the land of long lost friends
Listening to Alexander McCall Smith’s To the land of long lost friends, I’m conflicted. The easy charm, the delicious accents with rolling r’s, the satisfyingly happy endings, the morality: yes. But the characters are tropes out of Little Black Sambo. When I was five, this forbidden book was my favourite; I read it to my dolls off by heart, loving the exoticism, the bright colours, the adventures… and the pancakes! How do we recognize colonialism in ourselves? I know Alexander McCall Smith was born in Africa. Would he recognize his lightly white-washed stories in present-day Botswana?
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Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Téa Obreht, Inland
Inland is the better novel by far, though the characters are stock in both. The landscape moves from “the former Yugoslavia” (which always suggests Serbia) to the American West of the past. Here’s Obreht has capture the feel of the land, and dialogue. Both novels rest in a mythic premise, a fascination with folkloric beasts.
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Alix Ohlin, Dual Citizens
A gentle read twinning two sisters, two countries. So refreshing to read a deeply felt story where the turmoil is internal, not political nor ecological. Though wolves are involved!
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Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel
What’s not to love on a blustery winter day? Astrology! Epithets for each chapter by Blake! The unreliable narrator a madly determined old woman, as ferocious as she is tender. And does she love animals!
This poem will be published in P.S., a collaboration with beloved Sharon Thesen to be published by Kalamalka Press in the spring of 2020.
As the Initiation of Imbolc begins
My birds are ruder than yours, they
squabble a dance of dominance. But
I offer you the scarlet of cardinals in
return for a glimpse of a red-shafted
flicker at your feeder. Let ‘em meet.
We are in the same weather thousands
of miles apart and yet I carry an image
of you shoveling alongside the walk,
heaving snow with a cheeky grin that
by the end of the driveway is grimace.
Though we talk, I can’t quite figure out
what you’re saying. Your mouth moves,
your lips shape words that fly like birds
on the frost breath, cartoon apparitions,
and conversation curls in upon itself.
*
Response quickens into a new poem.
Exhalation is exhilaration in the cold.
Small hairs in my nostrils are spiked:
a word which leads me to mull over
Burgundy and cinnamon spiced hot.
Thought our forecast is bleak mid-winter,
snow squalls are more easily weathered
than political disruption and upheaval.
Trump addresses the state of disunion.
The blood and full blue moon eclipses.
*
A phrase from a poem I read today—
“in the revolving question of a field”—
leads beyond the shoveled path to
the woods we think we know. As if
trees belong or we to one another.
All your particulars of sheen sparkle,
snow in pale sun, the showing forth:
Candlemas, Celtic cross-quarter day.
Baby and his mother presented pure.
Bridget spreads wide her crimson cloak.
Here’s to the Creative Aging Festival! I’m delighted to be opening this showcase tonight with a paean of praise to an elder who most exemplifies creative aging!
Diana Beresford Krueger lives on a farm near Lanark, Ontario, but she grew up in Ireland. Diana is a seventy-two year old Leo, appropriately born in the Year of the Wood Monkey, and a proponent/gardener of native species par excellence. Her film, The Call of the Forest, exudes an astute vitality and a whole-hearted commitment to environmental activism. The glory of the film is its in-depth appreciation of trees: a documentary “driven by beauty”*! It is showing at The Hyland Cinema till June 1, and I truly recommend it.
In this film, The Call of the Forest, and in her books like The Global Forest, Diana interprets the nature of trees from both profoundly scientific and spiritual perspectives. Certainly, she emphasizes the healing benefits of specific trees as well as the forest as a whole. Care to go forest bathing to enhance your immune system? Try wandering among the deodar pines of Elsie Perrin Williams estate. Open your lungs and breathe in the powerful antioxidants that will lift your spirits for days.
How to articulate the invisible, the spirit of tree, for example… why, that’s my aim as a poet. My childhood desire was to understand the language of trees, plants and birds. Diana translates for me, even in this dream poem:
Visit In Tune, In Time
Diana Beresford Kroeger benignly surveys my wild garden.
As I explain that I like to let things grow naturally, to pop up
where they will, she sniffs. “This garden needs more tending,”
she proclaims. Singing along, I set to work weeding. Waving
a hand, she encourages my rhythm to tune in with the plants’
own. So the cardinal colours deepen, burnished lilies bronze
exuberant in sunlight. Impossible Echinacea record no clash
of purple/orange but blare triumph. Songbirds gather, a lilt of
goldfinch, a trill of Carolina wren. Cardinals respond in chords.
Brilliance resounds all around. Redbud, mock-orange boughs
bow in the heightened breeze. Resonance ripples and whirls
to restore, re-story this walled garden, her flowers telling, told.
How do plants communicate to each other… and to us? As botanist and biochemist raised in Ireland’s woodland lore, Diana bridges the false gap between science and the arts, between science and spirituality. Her roots are manifold, both as botanical researcher with a doctorate in medical biochemistry, and as hereditary lineage-holder, steeped in the Celtic tradition that has revered woodlands for centuries. Diana vividly and empathetically expresses the urgency in protecting the forest, especially our northern boreal forest that is so essential for global carbon storage.
She continues to beam a sense of wonder, joy and curiosity grounded in intellectual acuity. And in those traits alone, Diana Beresford Krueger is a triumphantly engaged guide to very creative aging. We can only aspire to learn from such an inspirational mentor. Her message is simple: go plant a native tree every year, and watch it grow! Let’s create our Forest City in reality as well as name!
*A quote in a email from the film’s director, Jeff McKay. Thanks to him for exquisite photography, editing and commentary.
For a rebel like me, what do I know about tradition? In my youth, along with the rest of my 60’s generation, I cast off all tradition as old hat. I scorned as false the sense of security that tradition offers. We vowed to create everything new! But this year especially, after such world-wide disruption, tradition gives comfort and joy, as the carol’s refrain has it. The old hat fits just right. Nostalgia offers a familiar past that is safer than the unpredictable future. Tradition is a way of handing down a swirling legacy to children and grandchildren, establishing the implant of warm memories. Here’s to plum pudding lit with brandy flame for New Year’s dinner! Christmas cake soaked in rum since early November… eggnog and Handel’s Messiah!
Icelanders have a tradition of giving each other books and then quietly reading at home all through Christmas Eve. I’d be too antsy to read on a night so redolent with anticipation. But I’m ready to establish a new tradition of peacefully reading through New Year’s Day. Reading quietly, very quietly, after the excess of New Year’s Eve. Sinking into the contained comfort of the latest Louise Penny novel. And poetry, luxuriating in the slow process of reading poetry, where not even eyes move fast. My only Resolutions on New Year’s are to eat less, exercise more: sound familiar? By the last Saturday in January, I’m ready for another feast….The clan collects annually for Robbie Burns and a reading of the “Address to the Haggis” before we feast on haggis and tatties. I still resolve to exercise more… later. My feeble rendition of the “Address to the Haggis” is up on https://www.facebook.com/christine.romard/videos/919139858104867/?theater
1952, reading Tom Sawyer (I think…)
A typical New Year’s Eve pic in the Kemp household: New Year’s Baby Clare Bice and Father Time Jim Kemp en route to the Beaux Arts Ball!
Coda: If you’ve been raised on English Literature, you can’t escape the T.S. Eliot essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. How we fit into the wide embrace of all that has been already written.
Intimations of becoming all that already has been, is, and will be.
Janus: the two-headed month, looking back and looking forward. May your memories be dear, your present fulfilled and your future shining!
First day of the Goddess month of Bridhe, sacred to the Celtic and Britannic Goddess variously called Brigit, Bridhe, Brigantia and later, St. Bridget. As shown here, she is also called the Triple Brighids, and is one of the most widely-revered manifestations of the Triple Goddess. She is the protector of the eternal creative flame that maintains the vitality of the natural world, and is the patron of warriors and of all practitioners of feminine arts and crafts, most notably the occult disciplines of divination, witchcraft, herb and star lore, and prophecy. She is also represented by the spirals that appear constantly in Celtic art. Her totemic animals are the ram and the ox, her sacred plant the blackberry.
London writer, poet, playwright, performance artist and author Penn Kemp. (Free Press file photo)
London poet Penn Kemp wants us all to be more like goats. That’s the message behind a poem she’s penned to commemorate the Chinese New Year.
“I’m making a very political point,” she said of the 12-line work that she put together Thursday morning. “We want to butt our heads against the powers-that-be.”
Although she typically works from sounds, this particular poem came to her through the imagery of the Chinese zodiac.
There has been some discrepancy over whether this is the year of the goat or the sheep, but Kemp thinks we should emulate the former — known as a stubborn, ornery animal that can stomach almost anything.
Kemp — London’s poet laureate from 2010 to 2012 — grants that sheep are cuddly and cute, making for a more pleasant image. However, she thinks “the goat is a really more intelligent, aware animal than the sheep.”
She intends to collect the poem into a forthcoming manuscript of political poetry. “I try to be clear and that’s tricky,” she said of her process. “Metaphors can often be read and interpreted on many levels and in many ways.”
Christians may separate sheep from goats but
Chinese does not distinguish between Caprinae.
Yang, ‘a hoofed animal that eats grass and bleats’.
Any ruminating mammal. That Hong Kong leader
claims it’s the Year of the Sheep so unruly subjects
will fall meekly into line. His nickname: the Wolf.
Specific qualifiers Green and Wood lead me to Goat,
not so cuddly or kind, but knowing his own mind—
wild dancing Pan clacking his hooves in a clearing.
Sound the horns! Let Pan pipes start trilling reels!
May the play commence and whirl wind up again.
Light slanting in long through green scent of cedar.
PK
Barbara Taylor, London Free Press Entertainment & Life editor, tweets: #ldnont favpoet @pennkemp marks #Chinese New Year w praising goat prose Words & why http://bit.ly/1zS1pa0 RuttanPic
Penn Kemp 