Poetry of Penn Kemp: participating in "a seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry"

When a poetry reading is accompanied by choric chant, dancing and audience participation, it creates, as owner and director of "Aeolian Hall" Clark Bryan says, a "sacred place". And it did. And when the poet is Penn Kemp, activist, publisher and artist who's known for taking the "textual & aural boundaries" of language into a uniquely Canadian avant-garde, the poetry reading can sing to its own sacred energies. And it did.

This "Summer Soirée Festival Event" at London's "Aeolian Performing Arts Centre"played to a full audience, privileged (as Maria and I were) to view "a seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry", the lyrics of Penn Kemp wonderfully transformed into music and dance accompaniment. The tempo (as how could it not) alternated with great skill and precision between the dithyrambic, lyrical and elegiac: every stage in the cycle drew on the powers of language, movement and sound to tell the tale ('epic' in scope) of seasonal growth, the world's present disaster-course and the hope of regeneration. Both social awareness and healing that lie at the basis of Penn's sound opera and her poetics, both at one incredible reading.

Ruth Douthwright's interpretive dance evoked the very primal motions of living and dying, hands, arms and feet shaped into seasonal winds, rains, while artists Anne Anglin, Brenda McMorrow, and Rob Menegoni created through vocals, music and percussion the "paeans of praise or rant" necessary to give essential voice to what Penn describes as a "MotherWorld's enChantments". From the striking of the Keiso through the rhythmic refrains and to the exotic Djembe and cymbals, Penn's reading was designed to elicit response, at one moment holding an audience in reverential silence and the next releasing it to the poem's wildest impulses.



I celebrate the 'ecco' in her ecco poetry, enjoying the playful senses of language, sound-effect and ecology activism that inform Penn's work, as also the whole Art-and-social change impetus of "The Aeolian Performing Arts Centre": for I believe the two are of a piece. The website announces "Aeolian" not just as a Heritage site but a place where culture lives in partnership with the local community. Since it's run for profit, undistracted by the politics of funding, it meets a real need for the type of Art that matters: one that's self-generated, innovative and sensitive to social change. Marion Drysdale's Black Madonnas and AIDS art hang on the walls as a visual representation of the Art and social activism nexus which"Aeolian" was created by Clark Bryan to promote. I celebrate Clark as true cultural entrepreneur.



And, of course, I celebrate Penn Kemp, artistic spirit of MotherWorld poetics whose work in Sound Opera and videopoetry will form the subjects of a later blog post. Meeting her for the first time only confirmed my impression of her as visionary, artist and one of Canada's greatest literary innovators. As I saw Penn after the performance move gracefully among a crowd of friends and supporters, receiving thanks, embracing everyone she met, I couldn't help thinking that the words of the third Chorus served appropriately as homage to someone who's been for many years an active, engaged and always inspiring presence in Canadian poetry: "There you are in moments, between friends, among many. (There you are, again)."

Erland Lee poetry reading: or return to a Canadian poetics

"Readings are the central social activity of poetry. They rival publishing as the most significant method of distribution for poetic works. They are as important as books and magazines in bringing poets into contact with one another, in forming generational and cross-generational, cultural and cross-cultural, links, affinities, alliances, communities, scenes, networks, exchanges and the like." (Charles Bernstein)

If any poetry venue can claim to inspire participants and, at the same time, give visible proof of the 'urban' and 'rural' mix that is the essence of Canadian poetry, it'd have to be the Erland Lee house in Stoney Creek. I was happy recently to organize a second poetry reading there, in the red adz-barn (as poet Katherine L. Gordon calls it) lying just adjacent to house. A sturdy plank two--tiered structure(technically a 'drive house'), it displays some of the original farm implements of late nineteenth-century Stoney Creek , while outside, on almost every side , stretching to the very horizon, lie the mostly uncultivated fields of an Ontario landscape that has virtually remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Everywhere is the rural poetic landscape of Isabella Valancy Crawford and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts: the same grid work of roads and orchards, same lush verdure of weed, grasses, & the same forest wildlife that had called a distinctively Canadian pioneer poetics into being.

But when you look directly ahead, & see cityscape sweeping below the escarpment to the shores of Lake Ontario and beyond to Toronto ( CN Tower always looking as if it's about to poke through the clouds!) naturally names like Al Purdy, Earle Birney and Milton Acorn come to mind, and all their literary descendants. A year ago a statue of Al Purdy was unveiled at Queen's Park, Toronto as testimony to one Canada's most popular city poets. And what may also come to mind is the terrible 'two solitudes' syndrome to which Canadians have grown accustomed because it now translates into split allegiance to the 'rural' and 'urban' literary consciousness. Behind us an early Canadian pioneering poetics but everywhere else, encroaching on the countryside, a city's own sensibility and distinctively jarring rhythms.

Who (and what) are we as poets: purveyors of a pioneer poetics, nostalgic for the old British 'models', or a contemporary poet attuned to a very different type of human buzz, always ready for novelty, experiment and academic discussion? Are we colonialist or postmodern in temperament? I posed that question at our Erland Lee reading and let each of my poet-friends give their own unique responses in verse.