Windsor, Ontario writer, editor and publisher Karl Jirgens was good enough to provide the first review of
Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) over at
The Typescript. Thanks so much!
You can read Jirgen's original post here. As he writes:
Penn Kemp’s latest poetry collection, Lives of Dead Poets, is published by Above/Ground Press, 2025. The cover features images by Penn Kemp’s father. This publication features rob mclennan’s utilitarian design with colour cover and black and white guts. This book offers a series of homages to influential writers who have died. As great literary figures depart, there are resonances. In this brief chapbook, echoes go back 50 years to the 1970s, including the City of Toronto, Coach House Press, Victor Coleman, A Space, the Canada Council, Bronwen Wallace, Fred Wah, George Bowering, audio recordings, Kemp’s archives at McGill University, and P.K. Page’s visit to the Kemp’s residence on Toronto Island. Resonances include Toronto’s Harbourfront, Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, Robert Creeley, John Ashberry, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Gwendolyn McEwen, the City of Cairo, Sound Operas, the City of Vancouver, Robert Hogg, bp Nichol, GrOnk, Underwhich Editions, the Music Gallery, the Glenn Gould Studio, Sound Poetry, and London’s WordFest. All these people, places, and events resonate along with Penn Kemp’s sense that she was lucky to come of age within such a grand poetic milieu.
This collection features homages to diverse dead poets while offering an elegiac tribute to past authors who left meaningful impressions on our literary worlds. Penn Kemp’s open stylistics inform these tributes while posing many questions. Are we waving while we are drowning? Why is meaning blurred? Why are possibilities opened? Why is meaning un-fixed? Kemp plays with the building blocks of language. Meanings shift, and become multi-valent, malleable, polysonic, polymorphous, polysemous. Words build and lead to other words, meanings mutate, gears shift, while the line with the lion lying with the lamb goes on the lam. Kemp develops her own signs, her own language. Lexical uncertainties become her style. Doorways open into strange new worlds, open ended, multifarious, rife with free morphemes, rich with latent meaning, and lush with occasional licentious lexicons. Kemp’s style provides an abundance of multiple meanings, language runs freely dialogical. We are granted simultaneous senses of complexities, depths, and layers. With reference to Jack Spicer, Kemp speaks of Rimbaud and says;
read Rimbaud instead and lie
with the lion on the lam to lie on it,
no lie!— loose
occupational hazard—
pelt, spelt
and all played out.
*
Is Kemp echoing Roland Barthes’ (1967) essay, “The Death of the Author,” where he says that the meaning of a poem is not fixed, because it is interpreted by each reader? Or, does Penn Kemp find a greater influence in Derrida, not Barthes? Does each reader hear and see a plethora of wonders? Are these mythologies or writings degree zero (which consider the arbitrariness of linguistic communication)? Does Penn Kemp introduce us to multi-dimensional linguistic spaces? Are we met with subtle or overlooked characteristics which can lead to new insights? Without a doubt. In any case, Kemp hands us a lion in lieu of a line. Are we met with convolutions of the personal and the universal? Are we confronted by undying texts versus human impermanence? I say, yes. See here. Hear for yourself. This is a brief excerpt from Kemp’s poem “Die Verse”;
As if. What matters. As if. What’s left.
As if. We have only our elegies. As if.
Even the need for elegy. As if remembering
and inventing—invenio —as if.
As I come upon. As I discover.
As if in passing through this vale.
As if memory’s world is
as if trudging up sludge,
As if the word that springs to
mind is devotion, as if, despite
the mess, life’s unholy
business forever left
unfinished.
Penn Kemp weaves us spells of language. Makes magic. Bewitches. Casts spells. Which wood have we entered? Witchwood? She leaves linguistic traces. A trail of bread crumbs. Alert readers will find pathways leading to pleasurable open spaces, or strong silences. This writing features multiple layers, meanings and perspectives. In “Alphabet for Ashbery” Kemp says;
Words in proximity to one another
take on another meaning…What you
hear at a given moment is a refraction
of what’s gone before or after.
Glorious clumps of crimson berries, brilliant in long
September light. Sorbus domestica, a glow
from that prolific rose family. Mountain ash.
“Rowan is the tree of power, causing
life and magic to flower. Not to be
forgotten, set aside, or ignored”—
Pssst! except by the emerald ash borer
that does not attack our rowan,
itself the too-bright green pest—
*
This collection acknowledges various significant periodicals and small presses, including, The Typescript, The Malahat Review, Boneshaker Anthology, Texteditions, Brick, Insomniac Press, Moonstone Press, Above/Ground, plus Penn Kemp’s essay “An Ecology of Intimacy” (https://poets.ca/npm22-blog-penn-kemp/ ). The acknowledgements recognize significant poets including Robert Creeley, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Jack Spicer, Phyllis Webb, Robert Hogg, John Ashbery, James Reaney, Wayson Choy, Les Murray, Colleen Thibaudeau, P.K. Page, bp Nichol, Teva Harrison, Joe Blades, Joe Rosenblatt, Robert Kroetsch, and Ellen S. Jaffe, among others. All of these authors were engaged in the fine art of being. These acknowledgements cover a period from the 1970’s to the present and address years of creative energy. So many heroes are gone now. Friends. One by one, they depart. Leaving voices, memories, wisdoms, and chasms. Penn Kemp’s collection provides a tribute to these and other creators.
You should know about Penn Kemp’s poetry and activism. She has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication (Coach House, 1972). Penn Kemp has long participated in Canada’s cultural life. She’s had roughly three dozen books of poetry and prose published, as well as seven plays and multimedia works, plus collaborations (for example see; www.riverrevery.ca). Penn Kemp served as London Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate, and The League of Canadian Poets’ “Spoken Word Artist” (2015). In addition she is acclaimed as “a foremother of Canadian poetry”. In case you haven’t noticed, Penn Kemp is one of Canada’s national literary treasures. Her recent poetry collaborations include “Intent on Flowering,” https://rosegardenpress.ca/intent-on-flowering/ and her anthology for Ukraine titled Poems in Response to Peril, co-edited with Richard-Yves Sitoski, https://www.rsitoski.com/poems-in-response-to-peril. Penn Kemp’s latest collection of sound poetry, Incrementally, text and album, can be found at https://www.hempressbooks.com/authors/penn-kemp, and www.pennkemp.weebly.com, plus, www.pennkemp.wordpress.com. Kemp has spoken these words for you and for me. Read these readings and writings. Read these pleasures of the text!
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