some author activity: Hawes, Burdick, Paige, Kemp + Crosby,

James Hawes has new work up at carte blanche; Alice Burdick is included in the Canadian Poets Series via peripety and/or tronies; Salem Paige is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Penn Kemp has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; and did you know that Gregory Crosby has a newsletter?

some author activity: Aube, Kemp, Kronovet, Earl, Wells + MacEachern,

Gwen Aube has new work up at Maisonneuve; Penn Kemp has a new poem up at Centred.ca, and there's an article on her work in the London Free Press and new work in The Typescript; Arlington poet laureate Jennifer Kronovet took part in a recent event in the county; Amanda Earl has a long poem up at Canto; Christina Wells offers reading recommendations via The Fiddlehead; and a poem by Jessi MacEachern lands on the Room Magazine 2026 Poetry Contest Longlist.

some author activity: Tardi, Sawyer, Melancon, Gordon, Kemp + Naughton,

Mark Tardi writes on the late Larry Sawyer for the Poetry Foundation website; Jérôme Melancon appears in the Canadian Poets Series via Peripety and/or Tronies; a trio of videos of Nada Gordon reading in Manhattan, along with a short note, sit at the end of this substack post by Vladislav Davidzon; Penn Kemp has a series of poems for the late Barry Dempster now up at Public Reverie; and Katie Naughton has a poem up at Poetry Daily.

some author activity: Niespodziany, Jenks, Flowers, Ross + Kemp,

Benjamin Niespodziany offers "My Favorite Reads of 2025," and includes Tom Jenks' 2025 above/ground press title, Chimneys, which was nice; Neil Flowers has new work up at Public Reverie; Stuart Ross offers his New Year's Poem over at his blog; and Jennifer Wenn writes on a Penn Kemp title, forty years after it first appeared, at The Seaboard Review.

some author activity: fitzpatrick, Kemp, mclennan, Beaulieu, Saklikar, Collis + Manery,

the Calgary Guardian offers "a day in the life" of poet ryan fitzpatrick; Penn Kemp has new work up at Public Reverie; rob mclennan is interviewed at On Creative Writing, and also has some new work up at Public Reverie; Derek Beaulieu once again offers his annual list of Most Engaging Books; and the audio of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Vancouver chapbook launch, hosted by Stephen Collis with readings by Stephen Collis, Annie Lafleur (read by Stephen Collis), Rob Manery, Renee Rodin, Marguerite Pigeon, and Renée Sarojini Saklikar at People’s Co-op Bookstore on Dec. 6, 2025, is now online via Rob Manery.

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell reviews Penn Kemp's Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell provides a review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets. Thanks so much! This is actually the fourth review of Kemp's title, after Jennifer Wenn's review over at The Miramichi Reader, Karl Jirgens at The Typescript and Gordon Phinn at The Seaboard Review. Thanks much! You can see Fretwell's original review here.

In the golden age of Toronto’s explosive poetry scene in the early 70s, Penn Kemp met many vital poets who have since passed away. Her longstanding connections to these revered poets inspired her to write the chapbook Lives of the Dead Poets. As host of A Space Reading Series (this reviewer exhibited on the Members Wall), publishing with venerable Coach House and living on Toronto Island, Penn made soon-to-be-lifelong friends: Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, P.K. Page (P.K. Irwin as artist), Robert Creeley, Allan Ginsberg, and letter-friend Diane di Prima.

Kemp’s elegies respond to the styles of the poets whom she memorializes in verse: “A lament for those who have left/ the present, the planet and possibility/ behind, left us bewildered by/ no more/ words” (“Lives of Dead Poets”). For Gwendolyn MacEwan, Penn praises: “Your fingers/ semaphore a complex code/ we cannot read.// A ring of hands/ ready to catch or pull you up” (“Not Waving But Drowning”). This reviewer also mourned a cancelled reading by MacEwan up north.

In “Gone Fishing”, Kemp elegizes Robert Creeley in the manner of the famous Kempian wordplay: “Reel back the real, back/ to the little wicker// basket carrying trout,/ Creeley.”

For Ontario poet Ellen Jaffe, Penn includes a poignant event: “Ellen   dying in hospice     listens in on/ Zoom     as Voices Israel read    her poems.// How wonderful   to be read to at last.” (“Homage for Ellen S. Jaffe, Poet”).

Kemp honours bp nichol, one of the Four Horsemen, with a high compliment: “our// Rumi, born in all/ their holy,/ poetic fecundity” (“For bp nichol”), the words lovingly dancing across the page. Phyllis Webb, champion of the anti-ghazal, leaves us in a sense of Kempian whimsy: “How can we forget you?   You left/ a whiff of unicorn   in your wake.” (“The Poet in Charge”). Also magical, John Ashbery, the Rowan Bard, is commemorated thus: “‘Rowan is the tree of power, causing/ life and magic to flower. (“Alphabet for Ashbery”).

A lively anecdote revivifies P.K. Page: “P.K. Page was dressed   to the nines … // At the stove’s first growl,   she leapt up and alighted/ for the evening … closest to the door.// An oil stove had exploded on her ….// But she made that perch [couch arm] hers, crossing elegant legs,/ gallantly …” (“The Girl from Sao Paulo”).

For an elegiac taste of the other poets that Penn wistfully sets in stone, read this marvellous paean to influential Canadian [except Creeley and Ashbery] poets, with a nod to William Wordsworth’s “Ode to Intimations of Immortality”: “Only their poetry can still convey/ intimations of immortality ….// Only their poems can transcribe/ mysterium tremendum …// For me.   For you.” (“One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones”).

For Kemp’s essay sourcing her inspiration, see 
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/03/penn-kemp-one-by-one-they-depart-great.html.

Gordon Phinn reviews Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (2025) and Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Seaboard Reader

Gordon Phinn provides a first review of Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (2025) and a new review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Seaboard Review. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of Kemp's title, after Jennifer Wenn's review over at The Miramichi Reader and Karl Jirgens reviewed such over at The Typescript. You can see Phinn's original review here.

Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (Above/Ground Press, 1879/2015)

Chapbooks: As outlined in Eli MacLaren’s Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks (McGill-Queens 2021), these diminutive pamphlets have been a low profile but integral element of CanLit for decades. Between 1925 and 1962 Ryerson Press produced over 200. Since the 70/80’s the genre has, with the advent of copy machines, blossomed. Heck, I’ve done about a dozen myself. In its now expansive corral, new work is led out of the barn by poets and prose stylists trying out experiments in form and expression that might not otherwise see the light of day. Once not always so easy to acquire, the digital age, with all its websites, podcasts, and Substacks, has simplified the task. One can observe a wide selection as they canter around the exercise yard, finding their new legs and admirers. One seemingly inexhaustible source is Rob Mclennan’s Above/Ground press, and if I’m not mistaken, his stable has at least 600 residents. Mind you, I’m a past master at being mistaken.

Allow me to remedy whatever lack you may feel by introducing a couple of new contenders, each with a unique and valuable contribution to make. Jamie Sharpe, a Comox BC writer with five books to his credit, has uncovered a long neglected 19th century Quebecois poet, Eudore Evanturel, whose only book, Premieres Poesies from 1879, was not well received by the critics of the day and the disappointment led him to retire and relocate to Lowell, Massachusetts.

In his preface Sharpe reveals that on encountering Evanturel’s work he felt confronted with “a misplaced heirloom, a finely etched reliquary of longing, wit and restraint” and that his approach was “not archival but sympathetic”, and his use of “succinct English cadence” was to “allow the poems to exist without the velvet rope and museum glass.” In this he has succeeded admirably, allowing the shelved sentiments to breathe freely. Many of the verses are tantalizingly brief, some approaching the remote elevation of the haiku:

Village at Noon

Whitewashed walls lean
Under noon’s sunlight.  A lone bicycle
Collapsed by the door.  Somewhere:
Laughter, a  saucepan clatter.
The village slow and bright.
A midday lull in a world
Kept small.
To My Reader

Hold these words close, like a flower
Pressed, preserved, between pages.
Let it oblige your fingers to turn into
Glints of quiet contemplations waiting
For your own heart to finish them.
One hopes for more translations and research on this buried treasure.

Lives Of Dead Poets by Penn Kemp (Above/Ground Press 2025)

Penn Kemp has been regarded as something of an iconoclast and trailblazer for fifty odd years, the composer of thirty plus books of poetry and prose, seven plays and several daring, and dare I say seductive, experiments in sound poetry. If you suspect that there are boundaries that yet require breaking then Penn has already been there, joyously deconstructing. In this chapbook, she fondly recalls the lives and work of contemporaries who have shifted their focus to that universe next door. Let me say: she knocks and gains entry.

Gwen MacEwen, Robert Creeley, Robert Hogg, bp nicol, Jack Spicer, Phyllis Webb, John Ashbery, James Reaney, Colleen Thibaudeau, P.K. Page, Robert Kroetsch, Teva Harrison, Joe Blades & Ellen S. Jaffe: all are evoked, praised, loved and grieved. Her heart is in the right place and her aim is true.

One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones

The sound of voices
I wish I could hear, voices
now dissolved to ether, to

the vagaries of memory, lost in
translation.  What’s that?

How could such
presence disintegrate?

How could so much 
wisdom evaporate with
the body’s decay?

A chasm awaits 
Across the great 
division.

As the poets fall into their tradition,
our beloved dead are more intimate
now than they ever could be in the flesh.

Only their poetry can still convey
intimations of immortality, subtle slips
we grasp as truth, not knowing for sure

what is real, what is fantasy and false,
what lies somewhere in between as true.

Only their poems can transcribe
mysterium tremendum – where they’ve gone.
Their words embodied on the page,

For me.                                               For you.

some author activity: Vitkauskas, van Vliet, Betts, Beaulieu, Kemp, Smith, Barwin + Jarvis,

did you know that Lina Ramona Vitkauskas has a substack? ; Robert van Vliet answers the "12 or 20 questions"; Gregory Betts is a guest on Richard Capener's Morgiana Podcast/substack, where I had clearly missed that Derek Beaulieu had also been a guest, as had Penn Kemp; some new Steven Ross Smith collaborations are now up at bandcamp; Gary Barwin has a new visual poem up at Asemana Magazine; and Jenna Jarvis has new work up at Discordia Review.

some author activity: Robinson, Kemp, Jenks, Inniss, Davies + Browne,

Elizabeth Robinson has new work in Under a Warm Green Linden; Penn Kemp has a poem and an article up at SAGE-ING; SJ Fowler interviews Tom Jenks for 3AM magazine; Scott Inniss interviews Kevin Davies over at Jacket2; and the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review offers five new poems by forthcoming author Laynie Browne.

some author activity: Browne, Maloukis, Saklikar, Manery, Robinson, Boughn + Kemp,

a video conversation of Kate Colby and Al Filreas discussing a poem by Laynie Browne at Kelly Writers House is now online; Rose Maloukis had a poem longlisted for The 2025 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse contest, via The New Quarterly; Renée Sarojini Saklikar etc read in Vancouver on June 28th as part of Rob Manery's Some Reading; Ben Robinson has some new poems and book recommendations over at Etcetera, as does Michael Boughn; and Penn Kemp has four new poems up at The Typescript.

Celebrating Penn Kemp's Life Time Achievement Award At Blackfriars Bistro, June 8 : London ON

Please join us at Blackfriars Bistro 

 

Cocktail / Hors-d’oeuvre Reception & Poetry Reading

 

 Celebrating

Poet, Performer and Playwright

 

Penn Kemp’s

 

 League of Canadian Poets 

 

Lifetime Achievement Award

 

Sunday June 8th from

 

 2 PM to 4 PM.

 

Please R.S.V.P at 519-667-4930.

Address: 46 Blackfriars St, London, ON. N6H 1K7

ethicalgourmet@yahoo.com  

Jennifer Wenn reviews Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Miramichi Reader

London, Ontario poet and reviewer Jennifer Wenn was good enough to provide a review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) over at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this particular title, after Karl Jirgens reviewed such over at The Typescript. You can read Wenn's original post here. As they write:

From Penn Kemp, one of our true elder trailblazers, is a new chapbook, Lives of Dead Poets (Above/Ground Press) A lament for those who have left/the present, the planet and possibility/behind, left us bewildered by/no more/words.

This is a poignant, affectionate collection leveraging a variety of forms and voices, for the most part a tribute to a remarkable era in Canadian literature centring on the early 70’s, one I very much wish I had known personally. At the time Kemp found herself in the middle of Toronto’s flourishing poetry scene, publishing her first book Bearing Down in 1972, editing the first anthology of women’s writing in Canada next, and then hosting a new reading series at A Space Gallery. Due to the Canada Council’s generosity at the time, it was possible to bring in poets from across Canada and even the United States. All this placed Kemp in a remarkable circle, as reflected by those she elegizes. She also reminisces in an separately published essay:  https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/03/penn-kemp-one-by-one-they-depart-great.html

After two introductory pieces (“Lives of Dead Poets”; and the punningly entitled “Die Verse”) the first memory is of Gwendolyn MacEwen (“Not Waving But Drowning”). This is a simply brilliant piece, for me the strongest in the collection, very heartfelt and sad.  It tells of a time when MacEwen (who was to pass on in 1987 at age 46 from complications of alcoholism) showed up for a reading a day late (The night after what would have been/triumph if you had appeared/you appear, bleary, beckoning to me/against the wall) and proceeds to reflect on her tragic decline.

Two other poets who died young are included: bp nichol (For bp nichol: A loss as alive now as/then) and Teva Harrison (Not One of These Poems Is About You, said Teva), perhaps best known for documenting her journey with metastatic breast cancer.

One of the minority of American poets found in these pages (the others are Canadian), Robert Creeley, is gifted two poems (“Gone Fishing“; and “Wednesday’s Man”), quite appropriate given that for Kemp of the old poets, the one/I most/miss is Creeley.

“Reading: Bob in the Light of” provides a sketch constructed of anecdotes for Bob Hogg, and some wisdom on a poet’s body of work: …The night//before you died, you/replied— /it goes on even when we no longer do!” Along the same lines is “The Girl from Sao Paolo”, a humorous narrative of a visit by P.K. Page to Kemp’s Toronto Island home: At the stove’s first growl, she leapt up and alighted/for the evening on the couch arm.

Special mention must be made of James Reaney and Colleen Thibaudeau, husband and wife icons of Souwesto (a term for Southwestern Ontario popularized by Reaney). A pair of beautiful tributes are happily included here, in the form of updated versions of two pieces that originally appeared in Kemp’s collection Local Heroes: the lightly revised “Drawing in Miniatures” for Reaney; and the significantly reworked “Social Justice Recounted”, ReStoried (formerly titled Recounted, ReStored, ReStoried) for Thibaudeau.

Two American poets (that, as Kemp has written in the aforementioned essay, she did not meet but whose poetry she admired) are also represented: Jack Spicer (“For Jack Spicer”) and John Ashbery (“Alphabet for Ashbery”). The latter is a very nice piece whose enjoyment would be enhanced by possessing a good appreciation of the subject; and my enjoyment of the former, I have to admit, suffered on account of my unfamiliarity with Spicer.

Lovely homages feature Phyllis Webb (“The Poet in Charge”: You are the glimmer     between sea/and sky/your poems still arrest us) and Robert Kroetsch (“A great illumination”: Of prescient kindness one/of a kind).

The last two elegies are both unusual. “Joe for Joe, Encore” is an affectionate dual tribute entwining Joe Blades and Joe Rosenblatt (Yet what I recall/most tenderly is your kind selves). In “Homage for Ellen S. Jaffe, Poet”, we meet Jaffe on her death bed, but still engaged: Ellen,     grey,     lying on//pillows,     blows us kisses   from her bed.

Closing the circle, we have the concluding piece “One by One They Depart, the Great Ones”, a touching reflection on times gone by and poets and friends passed on.  For one who wasn’t there, this chapbook is a precious glimpse into an extraordinary time and a special group of writers. Happily for all of us, we have their works, and, as Kemp says, “As the poets fall into their tradition/our beloved dead are more intimate/now than ever they could be in flesh.”

The League of Canadian Poets : Lifetime Achievement, Penn Kemp : Life Member, Gary Barwin

Congratulations to above/ground press author Penn Kemp (author of the recent Lives of Dead Poets), for receiving this year's Lifetime Achievement Award through The League of Canadian Poets! And to Gary Barwin (author of eight titles through above/ground press, most recently MY STRUGGLE WITH NOUNS), for receiving this year's Life Membership! Hooray! As the website for The League of Canadian Poets offers:

Poet, performer and playwright Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication of poetry by Coach House (1972), a “poetic El Niño”, and a “one-woman literary industry”. The League of Canadian Poets has honored her with the Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award  (2025),  as Spoken Word Artist of the year (2015), as a foremother of Canadian Poetry, and Life Member. Penn has long been a keen participant/activist in Canada’s cultural life, with more than thirty books of poetry, prose and drama; seven plays and ten CDs produced as well as award-winning videopoems. She was London's inaugural Poet Laureate (2010-13) and Western University’s Writer-in-Residence (2009-10). Her project was the DVD, Luminous Entrance: A Sound Opera for Climate Change Action, performed at Aeolian Hall, London. Her other Sound Operas have been performed there and at venues across Canada. She has been writer-in-residence at universities throughout India and Brazil with her work widely translated. Her “poem for peace in many voices”, for instance, is out in 136 languages. Her many collaborations with artists are up on Youtube and River Revery. Out now is POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, an anthology for Ukraine. Penn’s sound poetry, INCREMENTALLY, is up as e-book and album. New collections in 2025 are available through Silver Bow Publishing and above/ground press. Penn is active across the web on her website; on Facebook, X, and Instagram; on her blog; on Substack; and on Soundcloud.

The award selection committee writes:

Penn’s contributions to community are wildly impressive and undeniable. The tendrils of her devotion to poetry and literature not only span decades, but extend across mediums, forms, and the country. Directly or indirectly, so many of us have benefited from Penn’s contributions to our literary landscape.

Over a career spanning six decades, London ON poet Penn Kemp has done it all: poetry in both voice and print, editing anthologies, publishing, mentoring countless young writers, writing for theatre and sound operas, extensive collaborative and community engagements, and promoting poetry in all its forms. As important as her poetry, and integral to it, is her activism and commitment to social justice. Translated into multiple languages and performed around the world, Penn’s poetry addresses peace and justice, environmental activism, domestic violence and a range of other social and political concerns.  With books and multi-media projects published as early as 1972 and as recent as, well, yesterday, Penn is more than deserving of this celebration of a lifetime very full of achievement.

On winning the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, Penn writes:

To be the inaugural winner of the League's new Lifetime Achievement Award is a profound honour, given the wealth of senior poets across Canada. Throughout sixty years of writing and publishing, poetry has been my lifeline.  But there is so much more to explore! At eighty, I feel at the beginning of all that poetry can offer... I still stare daily at the blank page until words unfurl. In accepting this award, I'd also like to pay tribute to our elder poets, for whom this ongoing award is so pertinent. A deep bow to the League for supporting poetry in Canada over the decades, and on.

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 34 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 and, with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Muttertongue: what is a work in utter space. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His last novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was the Hamilton Reads choice for 2023-2024. His last poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures also won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead will be published in 2026. His art and media works have been exhibited internationally.

His poetry installation, The Ambitious Sky was projected on a five-storey wall in Hamilton in February 2025, an interactive multimedia poetry exhibition (created with Elee Kraljii Gardiner) was exhibited at Massy Arts (Vancouver) in Fall 2024, and Bird Fiction, and an interactive multimedia work (with Sarah Imrisek) was featured in Hamilton Arts Week in June 2025.

Known for his dynamic and engaging performances, Barwin has given hundreds of readings and multimedia poetry presentations (with live music, interactive computer systems, and/or projections) in Canada and internationally. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

Karl Jirgens reviews Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Typescript

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!

some author activity: fitzpatrick, Pakdel, Armantrout, Kemp + Boyle,

ryan fitzpatrick is the first in the Canadian Poets series over at Peripety and/or Tronies; Saba Pakdel has a poem up in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; Rae Armantrout has three new poems up at N+1, and two new poems up at The Fortnightly Review; Penn Kemp has two poems and two paintings over at The Typescript; and Frances Boyle has new work at Full House Literary and a further at Major 7th Magazine.

new from above/ground press: Lives of Dead Poets, by Penn Kemp

Lives of Dead Poets
Penn Kemp
$5

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. Dead
poets, by your name

we shall know you,
by your work.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image: James Kemp

Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication (Coach House, 1972). Kemp has long participated in Canada’s cultural life, with 30+ books of poetry and prose; seven plays and multimedia galore in collaborations like www.riverrevery.ca. She was London, Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate, The League of Canadian Poets’ Spoken Word Artist (2015) and Life Member, acclaimed “a foremother of Canadian poetry”. Recent poetry collaborations include Intent on Flowering (https://rosegardenpress.ca); P.S., https://www.gapriotpress.com/shop/p/penn-kemp-sharon-thesen-p-s and her co-edited anthology for Ukraine, https://www.rsitoski.com/poems-in-response-to-peril. Penn’s latest collection of sound poetry, Incrementally, text and album, is on https://www.hempressbooks.com/authors/penn-kemp. Join her on https://www.instagram.com/pennkemp, https://pennkemp.substack.com, https://x.com/pennkemp and www.facebook.com/pennkemppoet. See also www.pennkemp.weebly.com and www.pennkemp.wordpress.com.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Reid, Mohammadi, Weaver + Kemp,

Monty Reid has new work up at The Pi Review; Khashayar Mohammadi is interviewed over at The Mahalat Review; Andy Weaver has a small essay up at The Woodlot; and Harold Rhenisch and forthcoming author Penn Kemp have a collaborative poem and new interviews online at Canadian Literature.