Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Penn Kemp on Poets in Collaboration
68 Plays1 year ago
Mark and Joe talk to poet Penn Kemp about fellow poets Harold Rhenish, Sharon Thesen, and others, and how they work in collaboration. They start with Penn’s roots in visual arts – her father was the well-regarded London painter Jim Kemp – and how it became poetry, not painting, that sparked her muse.
Penn, Joe and Mark then get into a fascinating discussion about poetry, song lyrics, Leonard Cohen, Shakespeare and performance.
For more information about Penn Kemp and this episode, please visit the show notes page.
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner.
Contact us at: joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
Recommended
Transcript
Canoe Conversations and Humorous Anecdotes
00:00:09
Speaker
Mark, I'm guessing that you have a question for me. Actually, I don't have a question. I just was thinking, oh my god, Joe's going to ask me what the question is, and I don't have a question. I've had canoes on my mind a lot, though, lately. So how much time have you spent in a canoe? That's kind of a sore point. Thanks for bringing that up, Mark. Oh, sorry. Well, there you go. You never know what happens with these blind questions. Nobody has ever invited me on the canoe trip.
00:00:33
Speaker
And that's painful to me. Oh, I'm sorry. And now I live in New Brunswick where there's all sorts of great rivers for canoeing. Yeah. Yeah. And so now I'm hoping that... Have you ever been in a canoe though? I have. If I took you on a trip down the Miramichi, would you be able to
00:00:50
Speaker
draw at the right moment so we didn't hit a rock or. I believe I would. Okay. All right. All right. Well, then maybe I can go head out to New Brunswick and do a canoe trip. I'm in. Absolutely. What about our guest? Can she come with us? Yeah, absolutely. Penn, have you spent much time in a canoe? I went as a camper to Camp Queen Elizabeth in Beausoleil Island.
00:01:13
Speaker
A neighbor was a camp counselor and a great big brownie football player who taught us canoeing. And you had to flip over the canoe. You had to flip it over and then write yourself. And he passed
00:01:29
Speaker
me even though i didn't do it right so i wouldn't think you would want me well you could take a gentler river so one that we don't have to worry about the rapids and i would never turn anybody away never having been invited and been hurt by that you know i welcome anybody into my canoe and you know what that's the first overnight camp that i ever went to as well
00:01:53
Speaker
Oh, it was wonderful, that pink crystalline granite. These are beautiful. So Pen Kemp, I should say your last name.
Introducing Penn Kemp: Poet and Playwright
00:02:02
Speaker
Normally what we do here is we have the guests introduce themselves so they can frame their own reality. So could you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are? Hopefully some of them already know because you're a fairly famous poet.
00:02:16
Speaker
In London, Ontario. At least in London, Ontario. You are first poet laureate. I mean, come on. The first and you did it for what? Two or three years. I did. It was extremely extended. Yes. I'm a poet and a playwright, a failed novelist, as well as a failed canoer tipper. But I've returned to London, Ontario after 40 years away and I love it here.
00:02:42
Speaker
I couldn't wait to escape 20, 40 years, 60 years ago, but here I am back. That's interesting. What changed? I think age and decay. I think 21, I got married and fled like was going to do the grand tour and all that. This was 1966, which does tend to date me. So we moved back here 20 years ago when my mother had a stroke and happily have lived here.
00:03:12
Speaker
I don't know because my father was an artist, Jim Camp, and so I grew up in a very fabulous poetry and art scene of the 60s here with Jack Chambers and Greg and all the people of that era. So it wasn't that I was, I think London though was such a military town, it was still sort of a garrison town. And when I came back, it was much more
00:03:42
Speaker
Much more interesting, I would say. Hmm. Now, yeah, so I wonder, was it London that changed or you? I think 40 years difference had something to do with it. It's great to have you on the podcast.
The Drive Behind Poetry
00:03:57
Speaker
So, Mark had mentioned you've been a poet laureate and you're highly accomplished with a fair body of work. Yeah, I think you're our first poet laureate on this podcast. I'm not mistaken. Definitely our first poet laureate.
00:04:11
Speaker
Welcome. I've read the other people you've had on and there's no poets yet. So I'm not only the first poet laureate, I'm the first poet. And I guess my first thing I want to ask you is just about poetry. What about poetry drives you? Springtime, springtime. I mean flowers coming out of a long hiatus. I've always been
00:04:38
Speaker
a poet, I think, in terms of my disposition of the way I perceive things. Perhaps it's being left handed, but I've always perceived things on the slant differently. And poetry was the way that I could actually articulate the visual movie that was in my head into where it's
00:05:04
Speaker
and give them form, articulate that which hasn't been articulated. That's wonderful. You mentioned your father was a painter. Did that have an influence on? It sure did because I had some talent. I inherited some talent, but I wanted to be drawing beautiful princesses in flowing robes. He gave me a book on structure and the body as architecture. He criticized
00:05:34
Speaker
my attempts. So I just shifted from drawing to poetry. Oh my goodness. So he discouraged you. He critiqued me. Yeah. But he didn't critique by writing. And the other thing that probably helped make me a poet was that in this household growing up, and I live in the house that I grew up in, which is just very, because I'm surrounded by art. But if I were caught reading,
00:06:04
Speaker
I would be allowed to continue the book. I would never be asked to do chores. If I were doing anything else, playing games, arguing with my brother, anything, I'd be curtailed into digit washing. But if I was reading, I was left alone. So I'm a reader. And if you're a reader, then you're a necessity to become a writer.
00:06:31
Speaker
My mother was always trying to shoo me outside into the sunshine. So I loved rainy days because then she wouldn't bug me. I was left alone to read. I want to ask you about poetry. We were blessed at the CBC. We took poetry and still do, I believe, seriously there. And we had a specialist on staff, Barb Carey, who curated. Are you familiar with Barb? Yeah. What do you think the state of poetry is today in this country, in the world? I think that the marginalized
00:07:01
Speaker
poets that have not had their voices are finally being recognized. I think they're on juries now and on publishing boards. And I think that's a really, really fine thing. It's so necessary, essential now. It's as difficult for me to get published as an old white woman, as it was in 72 when Coachell did my first book, Bearing Down. So that's interesting.
00:07:30
Speaker
And it keeps you on your toes. It's astonishing. For Poetry Month, I've tried to read a poetry book a day, which has been a challenge. I think I got up to 28. And all the books came from the library, thanks to the London Library, which has a good selection of new work.
00:07:50
Speaker
And most of it was books that were not my friends. And of course, having been on the scene for so, so long, like almost 60 years, it was mostly books that I wouldn't have picked up by myself because I would be normally reading my friend's work and that would keep me busy enough.
00:08:12
Speaker
But the library was presenting new work by so many young new writers of color, BIPOC, all that, and some very fine writing. It's very interesting to me.
Exploring Artistic Inspirations
00:08:27
Speaker
Well, that kind of leads us sort of a segue into the purpose of the podcast, which is to
00:08:36
Speaker
Have you talk about a piece of art, I'm guessing it's poetry, that has inspired you or that inspires you? Did you do your homework? I did. Okay. I'm going to talk about collaboration because that is what really
00:08:51
Speaker
inspires me, just as conversations. I just heard Eleanor Walktail talking to Carol Shields about, she, Carol, was talking about the importance of talk, of how it stimulates and how it changes you and that has you growing. And I think collaborations, because of course we're so widespread, this beautiful country of ours,
00:09:15
Speaker
And finance is tricky because in poetry months we usually, the poets get sent coast to coast to coast or not coast to coast to coast, just coast to coast usually, but that's whittling the amount of money available. So, I mean, what I used to do is organize poetry series.
00:09:38
Speaker
to see my friends or to when I first started in 1973, this was a coach's base in Toronto, asked me to set up a poetry series. And so I got to thanks to Victor Coleman, I invited all the poets that I loved, that I had read. And they became the women of them, became my good friends, like Daphne Marlett or
00:10:07
Speaker
Robert Creeley became a good friend, Al Ginsberg. So that led me to when I moved, I was a gypsy for those 40 years that I wasn't in London and I lived, I started a poetry series in Victoria for a little while and then back in London in 1980 for just a couple of months, I started a series at Forest City Gallery.
00:10:30
Speaker
And it was that, at that time, it was a way of inviting my friends to visit and read. But it led me into, I think my first collaboration was with Daphne Marlett, and it came out in a book that Coach has printed. It was called Transform, and it was a collaboration with her. But then we got into, lately I've been collaborating with Harold Renish,
00:10:56
Speaker
And I was writer in residence at a fabulous art community hub called Katani House in Vernon, BC. And in the fall of 2018, where I met Harold and we connected about the land because I'm always keen to know the herbs and the trees of the places where I am. And also Sharon Dyson lives nearby.
00:11:25
Speaker
So for both of those friends, the friendship continued through poetry. And I've been working since the Ukrainian War on a book with Harold called The Black Keys of Kiev, which we've submitted. And then in 2018, when I came home, 2019, Sharon and I had spent a year writing poetry.
00:11:54
Speaker
a poem each month. So it became 24 poems, 24 pages, and it became a chapbook that Gap Riot put out. And that was just an extraordinary joy. Having that constraint on us to produce one poem a month to each other was a lovely kind of push.
00:12:20
Speaker
Now, was that a conversation? So would you read her poem and then reply with your poem and then she'd read yours and that's so interesting. It's like very old fashioned idea of how letters used to be the way that people connected, but with poetry. What is that word? Epistolatory, something like that. From the epistles. According to the epistles. Yeah.
00:12:48
Speaker
So the work that you're bringing forward is a collaboration that you've done with these two other. Well, work that I'm bringing forward as a as an object is called PS because there is always a PS in our letters back and forth. This is all Gmail. So we called it PS. Yeah. And then Québécois.
00:13:09
Speaker
writer Nancy Long, she took it up and published a number of these poems in book for a French English. She translated the poems and they were translated in her first edition of a magazine called Femme de Parole, Woman of Their Word, number two. She had a big zoom in where poems from P.S. were read by Sharon and myself and translated.
00:13:39
Speaker
by the editor Nancy Arnaud. And that also is very exciting. The whole process of translation is fabulous. Do you speak another language
Reflecting on Colonial History with the Thames River
00:13:50
Speaker
or? I vaguely speak French. And I speak some Spanish. But just last night,
00:13:59
Speaker
I was on a Zoom with Professor Miguel Meneve and he had me talk about the Thames River, the Antler River, which is so colonized and just like this palimpsest of the colonial English desire to recreate home on this foreign scary
00:14:20
Speaker
landscape. It's called the Antler River. Mark well knows there's a fork of the pens where the north and south meet like antlers, but he had me in conversation with a professor of ecology who had written a book on the Madeira River, which flows into the Amazon.
00:14:40
Speaker
And before Harper cut the council grants or for travel and for supplying money to, it's called ABACAN, which is the Association of Canadian Studies in Brazil. They had me there and sent me all around Brazil to read. And so I was there 20 years ago.
00:15:05
Speaker
And they took me on a, not into the Rio Madero. And we saw these pink dolphins leaping and... Oh, well. Now, were you in a canoe at the time or...? You had a large canoe with a deck. With a motor? A motor and a... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's no pink dolphins in London. No. So pink dolphins and what were you drinking at the time? Well, it was sort of pink in that, no.
00:15:38
Speaker
I'm going to jump in there because I would totally support us changing the name of the Thames River to the Antlered River, or even the original indigenous word for it. I can't pronounce it, so I'm not going to try it. It's called either the, uh, since, uh, Skinnesipi or the Dishcam.
00:15:54
Speaker
Yeah, I have to profess my ignorance here. So you guys are living in London, Ontario, Canada, and there's a Thames. And we have a Thames. And frankly, Joe, it's it's just embarrassing. I mean, the streets, the main some of the main thoroughfares are Oxford Street and Wellington. It's just it's ridiculous.
00:16:16
Speaker
It's just a palimpsest of the original. They are just trying to recreate this whole... The main park is called Victoria Park. Did you see a palimpsest? I didn't, but that sounds like fun. It's the word palimpsest where you've got a piece of parchment or vellum and you can read it underneath what's there before. So the real Thames, the Iskincippi, is just underneath this layer that's applied of
00:16:47
Speaker
colonial autocrat. Yeah. Thinking. Do you know what the early French settlers in the region called the Thames? That's wrong. The ditch. Because it does kind of look like that part of the year when it gets muddy. It's pretty, it doesn't look like much of a river.
00:17:05
Speaker
We have a river like that here in Riverview. No, I just wanted to say that we've had some high caliber guests on this podcast, but you're the first one that has impressed me with their vocabulary, and I would expect no less from a poet laureate. It's after all the pink lemonade, right? How much of that stuff do you consume? You don't have to answer that.
00:17:28
Speaker
I want to hear more about this collaboration and about the nature of the poems. We'll get you to read one a sample later, but first, just tell us what kind of poetry it is. Sharon's and my styles are very different. She's much...
00:17:46
Speaker
So for me to put words on the page, they have to, and because being a daughter of a painter, I think visually as well as orally, so they tend to go across the page as in field poetics. And Sharon has just had a new book, a collection out from Talon books. Our thinking is very different. She was based on Blue Mountain poetics,
00:18:14
Speaker
Black Mountain Poetics, it might probably be based more on Blue Mountain, whatever that is, I've just made it up, but it's a different kind of poetics. But we love each other as friends and we share, I think poets share a sensibility of wonder.
00:18:33
Speaker
So you're a sound poet and how does she differ from that? So I want to get into the nitty gritty of poetry here. I want to understand. Well, yeah, I don't know what a Black Mountain poet it would be, what that would mean. Charles Olson and Robert Creeley had this school of poetics in Northern California, and it was field poetry where you did use the whole page to, and you worked with the breath.
00:19:01
Speaker
to end the lines and so on. So it was breaking out of modernists like Eliot or Pound. And it was very influential in BC, which is where Sharon was raised in. And my background actually is more traditional. I went through Western through Honours English and got a Master's at OVC and so on. So it was very, and she has an academic background as well. She taught for many years at UBCO, you know, the Okanagan.
00:19:28
Speaker
Mark, I feel like there's a whole depth and world of poetry here that we can dig into. I can't speak for you, but I'm largely ignorant of it.
00:19:38
Speaker
What I should do is read you the poem so I could demonstrate the difference because... Yeah, read one of each and then that'll give the listeners a sense because they won't be able to see the words though, which I think is an important component. Well, but she's a sound poet. But know that we only have 40 minutes left.
00:20:02
Speaker
I promise not to move over. But it's interesting that the
Comparing Poetic Styles: Penn vs. Sharon
00:20:07
Speaker
poem for April is about Diana Prima, and she is one of the beat poets that I invited to read at Ace Face, and we became friends, and she just recently died in 2019, I think, not sure. So I will read my poem, which I guess I would call
00:20:28
Speaker
My poetry, when it's on the page, is more like mythopoeic. So it's being very much based on Northrop Fry's sense of the imagination. And Sharon's is, in interesting ways, more given to the events of her daily life, colloquial conversation. But let me read. These two poems happen to be
00:20:52
Speaker
the ones for April. I could read the ones for me, of course, but I think I will read the ones for April just because we were talking about dying in the present. This will give you, Jo, a sense of her as well because she was a darling little alchemical
00:21:10
Speaker
Be fierce revolutionary beat Nick she wrote pieces like that no by the wolf for revolutionary letters she was really a tough sense of the beat poetry and that would be like Ellen Ginsburg would it yeah and Ellen was a friend as well he came up through a space and care what but that's it later and right okay.
00:21:33
Speaker
She, Diana Prima, tinier than in her prime at A-space, reading wrapped in a dun protective cloak of her own devising. Forty-five years ago, but still inviting us to run with her noble lord, inviting us to her den, and then always in stride La Loba and the many cubs she fostered. Proportion varies inversely seen
00:22:03
Speaker
through the other end of telescope. Time withers, whether or not we must be caught by its tether or run free through obscure alchemical forests, red and black. High winds knock down the back fence of our walled garden, opening out to sun, to highway din,
00:22:31
Speaker
Ontario, the beautiful, flattened to remnants of magnificence. Across jet stream back to you in BC, in Kelowna, the hill house where I imagine you riding impervious to flood, but to summer firestorms more susceptible. May our places be safe and the people in them.
00:23:02
Speaker
Our dear Diane may well shrivel to grasshopper dimension and be blown off by the next gust. Her words stay with us. As if that ever is enough to replace person, as if place could be counted on to stay put. As if we didn't know, we too will be what remains.
00:23:34
Speaker
an open ending to the end. Wow. Am I allowed to applaud? Yeah. Great performance, thank you. Yes, that is so well read. Yeah. You know, a great poem, well read. Thank you. Yeah. So I will read Sharon's reply. April, out West.
00:23:59
Speaker
The poetry deal Diane de Prima said was the real deal. Out west, San Francisco, where she moved from New York and stayed, came up to Vancouver to read a couple of times, angelic on the stage, her gentle voice and long black hair, her many gifts and intelligence to live the way she did, always with love or in love.
00:24:28
Speaker
with things she cast as beautiful a light as herself in circumstances and writing now diminished and elderly declining to be on the film due to ravages of Parkinson's I'm thinking of her so much today and the poetry deal and Penn's visit to the west coast
00:24:56
Speaker
amid really tall and big trees creaking with crows and ravens, fish bones, and pieces of glitter, the palm in its moments. I got chills with that one too. Nice. That's great. My Corvids are a real theme in this podcast, A. Joe.
00:25:22
Speaker
Yes. Ravens and crows. Creaking with crows and ravens. The poetry deal. I have to ask, so you described yourself as a sound poet. When you read, there was a musical quality to your read. Do you ever feel the urge to set your poetry to music?
00:25:44
Speaker
Yes, but I myself was one of those ones at Reasonville Public School who were, by
Songwriting: Leonard Cohen vs. Bob Dylan
00:25:52
Speaker
Mr. Golding, asked to stay in the choir because I was so tall and knew all the words, knew all the songs, and was told to mute. Never sing. Oh, no. You had two. You had two critics. I had two critics. That's crazy. So you were told to be mute.
00:26:14
Speaker
I just took it for granted because I couldn't carry a tune. And so when I work with jazz, I've worked with many, many jazz and other musicians. I've done a whole bunch of sound operas at the Aeolian and different places. And it's always me conducting because I can't follow anybody else. They have put your words to music.
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah, they usually like I'm doing a performance set in July with Bill Gilliam at the Transac and we've worked together a lot. So we've done something called Night Orchestra. So he's taken my words and there would be a lot of sound and improvised my sound and he would take them and sample them or play piano alongside.
00:27:08
Speaker
to balance or to reflect or to respond. So it's called response in some ways. Yeah, that must be very rewarding. So much fun. It's so exhilarating. And the lovely thing of sound poetry, of course, is that nobody knows what you're doing. And
00:27:28
Speaker
I can't correct you. Except that's not true. I once with that book called Transform that I told you about, I was in U of A in Edmonton. This would be 76. And all these students, 35 of them had a copy of my book, which had this semi nude woman on the cover in bright yellow. And I did the performance, which was very, very vocal.
00:27:53
Speaker
And they turned the pages correctly and at the end said that I was doing it wrong, that I wasn't following my own text. That's just style. Mark said that he met you when you were what? No, I'm guessing. So you said you were back in London in 1980. Were you reading in schools then?
00:28:20
Speaker
I was just there for a couple of months. Okay. So I came back with my husband in 2001 when my mother had a stroke and to take care of her and we moved into her house. Yeah. Did you ever do readings in London apart from the time since you've been living here? Because I have a vivid memory of your, of your reading some of your poetry. Uh, I think from my grade nine class. Oh, that's so fun.
00:28:49
Speaker
I, it was Lucas. Yes, I was, I performed. And I, we loved it. We had no idea what just happened. You read, you read, I think two or three poems and you could have heard a pin drop. We were all just like, what is, what is happening? It was wonderful. Why is this happening? But I loved it. I thought it was amazing.
00:29:14
Speaker
Well, usually they're participatory, so I get the kids, the students or the kids. I did a performance a couple of days ago for a poetry month and I have people do a sound poem with me. I think you're asking me to do some sort of sound piece. No, no, not really. I just was just, I just say, you know, I do, I do think you're really good at making the music of your poetry come out. Thanks.
00:29:42
Speaker
Now, can I ask a silly question? So if your poetry is put to music and then essentially becomes a lyric, and lyrics are kind of poems in a way, what is the difference between poetry and lyrics? Or is there one? Certainly a lot, a whole school, a whole form of poetry is the lyric. It's called lyric poetry. So it's poetry that sings.
00:30:10
Speaker
and certainly has structure, the same as a song. But not set to music. Well, I'm thinking of, I did teach for three years and in the late 60s and of course at that point I was free to teach Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen and this was at Royal Hague in Toronto or up north in Timmins. And those songs were poems, of course.
00:30:40
Speaker
In fact, it was Leonard Cohen I was thinking of. He's a very fun poet. He spent hours and days and years crafting, I don't know how many renditions of Hallelujah, for example. Oh yeah, that's a great story.
00:30:55
Speaker
Oh, was there many different... Oh my God, yeah. One of my favorite stories about pop music ever is he meets Dylan somewhere at a concert and Dylan says, hey, I really love that song you got there. Hallelujah. And Cohen, who was a pretty shy man, I think, said, well, thank you very much. I really like Highway 61. How long did that take you to write?
00:31:17
Speaker
And Bob Dylan's like, I don't know, it's half an hour or something like that. How long did it take to write Hallelujah? And Cohen said, I think, four years. And he's lying. He still was writing verses for it. He probably wrote more that day. Aren't you a great Bob Dylan?
00:31:35
Speaker
I guess I need to work on Leonard Cohen too. I spent the last year actually memorizing Allie Leah. It's got like five or six verses to it. There's at least 30 verses, Joe. Wow. I did not know that. Are you going to give us a little song? No, I'm not. I read some rendition.
00:31:59
Speaker
in a recent book where it truly was biblically based, like I saw her bathing on the roof. That was David watching Bathsheba. Yes. A little secret about me. I entertain myself when I'm walking my dog by memorizing and singing songs. Now you're going to shift to poems and memorize and sing poems. Well, champ, recite.
00:32:29
Speaker
I will consider that. Consider is a very interesting word. It begins con with the dairy with the stars. So by considering, you are eliciting the whole magic of the cosmos to be with you. I meant to do that. I thought so. You've got to be aligned.
00:32:56
Speaker
Wow. But yes, I should memorize your poetry. Now, did you know Phyllis Gottlieb? No. I knew Phyllis Webb. She was the woman I was trying to think of when I was thinking of people that I got to know and love from having them come. I visited her in 2018 when I was last in BC. She did marvelous things on CBC. She loved my sound operas and kept trying to get me to send them to Bill.
00:33:25
Speaker
Bill Lane? Yeah, yeah. Oh, interesting. I'm actually quite shy and don't send stuff much, so I never got to, but yeah. Her work was amazing. She'd be good to memorize. Now you said you had met Eleanor Wachtel. Did she interview you for her show or? No, I was up in the Yukon. I was doing a performance there and she didn't much like it, so we've never corresponded at all again.
00:33:52
Speaker
Wait a minute, what? Yeah. Eleanor didn't like your performance? No, she didn't. We're hearing some painful memories from you today, it seems like. Oh, the life of a suffering poet. It's all grist for the mill. That's right. No, it's just, I mean, some poetry isn't for everybody. You have to be open to weirdness.
00:34:18
Speaker
But it's subjective, isn't it? Nobody has the right to criticize poetry. You put the poetry out there and you don't have to like it. She didn't criticize it, she just walked out. I think that was a very active form of saying, I think I prefer poems. Maybe she had to use the washing. Yes, a long time though, she didn't come back.
00:34:40
Speaker
I mean, this is not therapy. I did not mind. I just was okay. I think it's fair to say that you're a performer as well as a poet. You have to recognize as a performer, Joe, that sometimes you're not someone's cup of tea. That just happens. I wasn't even somebody's cup of pink lemonade. Yes, exactly.
00:35:02
Speaker
I think all of us can relate to rejection, whether writing fiction or poetry or it just comes with the territory. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you have to. I don't really care because I'm writing for people who can take it into their hearts and if they don't, that's
00:35:25
Speaker
It doesn't bother me at all because I recognize that my way of thinking or perceiving is different. It's neurodivergent. And so why would somebody who is text-based like something that is so in your face or in your ears? Well, and they may not like it at one point in their life and then come to like it later because I have to admit that I did not appreciate Leonard Cohen really in my life.
00:35:54
Speaker
And now I find myself quite amused as I'm walking the pooch, singing Leonard Cohen lyrics. I thought you didn't like Leonard Cohen. No, I guess I do. It's so personal and it does shift with time and with custom. And we are social beings, so it's
00:36:16
Speaker
It's all tied up as well with group sync. Leonard Cohen is now popular, so you get to listen to him a little more carefully than he would if he were just out on the margins. I guess it was probably made palatable to me or more attractive to me by hearing Katie Lang sing Leonard Cohen. That's amazing rendition of that song. I was not like you, Joe. I was on the Leonard Cohen
00:36:46
Speaker
Last much earlier in my life when you're much more sophisticated i don't know what that but at the same time to be fair i also study shakespeare so i think you have to have some kind of love for poetry you never gonna get through shakespeare yeah if you can't absorb the rhythms of it's really impossible to enjoy it.
00:37:06
Speaker
Yeah, and I've been blessed and fortunate to have seen Shakespeare performed by the best at Stratford. Just down the road from London, sorry. So it's good to think that this is the London tourist bureau is supporting this podcast or something.
00:37:23
Speaker
But yeah, it is still, you can appreciate it. I saw King Lear with King Fiore, and yeah, it's good, but it's challenging. Oh, for sure, yeah. If you don't really know what's going on, some of them can be very challenging, especially the history plays. I think the evening of people gathered together, and I had, because poems for joy,
00:37:49
Speaker
was the theme of National Poetry Month. And so I had them do, actually, three people clamored, including myself, to do Chaucer. So Chaucer, if you read it, you really, what I asked them to do is put themselves in the frame of as if your understanding
00:38:11
Speaker
as if you're listening to Welsh and you understand it, as if you're listening to German and French from the Normans. So if you put yourself into that space of acceptance, as a child learns, then you aren't fighting the understanding.
00:38:31
Speaker
Right. Yeah, you're welcoming it. And I have to say that the couple of performances of Shakespeare that I saw, it's amazing how an excellent performer can
The Art of Performing Poetry
00:38:43
Speaker
give meaning to the words. Because they're not just reciting lines, they're making those lines mean what they're supposed to mean, even if they're using different language than we're accustomed to. They are enacting the words, they're putting the act, their word into form, into physical form. Yeah, as someone who had to do Shakespeare, an acting class and actually did some Shakespeare. Yeah, you have to as an actor, you have to understand what it is you're saying.
00:39:12
Speaker
A, and then B, you have to then do all the other things that actors do when they're doing a scene, which is you've got to have something that you're trying to accomplish in the scene. You have to have an emotion that you're trying to touch, that you want the audience to feel. So all of those things go into it. But yeah, you have to start, but that's what's hard about it. Because sometimes, you know, as actors, we're not that bright. And, and it's and we haven't don't have that kind of training, literary training. So you have to really work hard. And that's where the director is so important, or the dramaturge.
00:39:42
Speaker
is if you've got someone who kind of has done that hard work of understanding what this could mean so that you can explain that to the people who are going to do the scene, that really makes a big difference. So it's not just the performer, it's also a lot of work going on behind the scene. I'm always afraid the directors don't get their due because a really good director can just make an okay performance sparkle and come alive because they can get the actor up the wrong to the next level.
00:40:11
Speaker
But even as a performer of poetry, what I'm attempting to do when I'm performing is to physicalize the words.
00:40:22
Speaker
So, they come through my body. I'm so aware of what my mouth is doing, what my lips are doing, what my arms or hands are doing. Well, yes, because we noticed that in your performance and I'll call it a performance because it was a performance. You know what you did with us today? You really lifted off the page. That's exactly that the attempt is to
00:40:44
Speaker
embody the words so that they can be received from my heart to your heart, right? Would you be willing to do one more before we end up today? Yes, ask me for a month and I will do whatever you need. Well, I was going to actually suggest Surprised by Joy. I think you sent that to us. Oh, Surprised by Joy. I think I actually have it right here. And I'm sure that I want to hear what Joe has to say about some of the vocabulary. There's a couple words there that I know what they are, but I don't know how they sound.
00:41:15
Speaker
Right. There's one word, hexicity. Hexicity, okay. I had to, it means the presence of this. And I just, the meaning was so important to me. I had no idea. I'd read it in John Banville, right? Yeah. A very Irish writer. So I look it up on Google and I go to pronounce, Google pronounce.
00:41:38
Speaker
and found out how to pronounce it. So I practiced that word. So anything else here is not, but that word caught me. And then it was chosen as the Poem for Joy featured in National Poetry Month by the human poets.
00:41:57
Speaker
And they could only show too many or so many verses. So they this blessed be hexicity starts the fourth verse. And the poem that they showed started with the first blessed be hexicity. Well, everybody's going to say, yeah, you just so blessed that. But, you know, you had to open it up. You'd see the whole point.
00:42:25
Speaker
But I didn't get any comments on that, I thought it would. But yeah, Mark, that's the one you picked up, right? Yeah, I really quite enjoyed it. And I think there's something about it that, well, it's very spring-like. It's got a spring kind of feeling to it. Spring-like. All right. Well, I look forward to hearing this. Is that okay, Joe? Absolutely. Can I suggest to that? If you don't mind, Penn. Yeah. I never mind performing.
00:42:54
Speaker
adapted from Surprised by Joy, which is in River Reverie. And a number of poems, Mary McDonald put them into video. So here's again where the painter in me gets realized because as an artist, she put them into poetry films, video poems on riverreverie.ca. So one more drink and I'm up. Boy, that lemonade goes down smoothly. I wish we all in the same room so we could
00:43:23
Speaker
Yes, I know I share. I share gladly. Surprised by joy. Blessed be here. Blessed be clever cardinals who bury their song into language only other cardinals interpret. Blessed be red squirrels who scold all intruders into silence beneath.
00:43:48
Speaker
Blessed be hostas and fern the mix of wild with cultivated. Blessed be the cultivated soil that allows for splendid fluorescence. Blessed be the breakers upon the shoal. Blessed be hushed wing of crow and after landing on spruce branch, a rock at sky.
00:44:16
Speaker
Blessed be the interchange of story, space to be alone together. Blessed be the quiet. Blessed be hecticity, an expanse of time. Blessed be completion. Blessed be night that covers the cottage in a moiré spread and seeps into warm dreams of possibility.
00:44:48
Speaker
Blessed be old, bare, black cherry, dead in winter's past blast, but ready to turn now into fire as best wood, slow-burning, hot. Blessed be the poets whose refrains run through their still-too-busy brains. Still listening till dawn chorus bursts into joy.
00:45:19
Speaker
And celebration of the daily begins again in jubilation, in improbable hope, arising. The wonderful thing about that poem was that it was translated by Miguel Meneve and read in Portuguese last night to lots of people throughout Brazil.
Global Reception of Poetry
00:45:49
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for doing that. You're welcome. My pleasure. Absolutely. I got the crow in, right? That took me places too. Another, yeah, there's another crow in there. Plus it, that was in my garden for a moment there with the Cardinals and the Hostas and the Ferns. And then you took me somewhere else. London is the Cardinal center of the universe. Yeah. I just originally learned that. Oh, this is weird. So yeah, thank you for that. They should pay us.
00:46:17
Speaker
They should be. They should be giving us some kind of stipend. Pen Kemp, thank you very much for being on our podcast, Recreative. Fun to be with you and fun to chatter away. Wonderful thing you're doing.
00:46:47
Speaker
So Mark, you and I have discussed how people can support this podcast. And one of the ways I would like to get them to support us is by, and I think you're going to like this, by purchasing one of your books. Ooh, I like that. How about your books? We're going to start with your books. We'll start with my books. Okay. And today I would like to point people in particular to Alpha Max, which is a novel about the metaverse, which is kind of in vogue these days.
00:47:09
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, it doesn't take a lot of the standard approaches that the metaverse stories do. I think it's a bit more grounded. It's funny and it's a, and it's witty and it's smart and it's entertaining. Go to recreative.ca slash support and you can find your books there. Alpha Max by Mark A. Rayner.