Penn Kemp : For You, Dear Friend and Fellow Poet

for Barry Dempster (January 17, 1952-November 27, 2025)

 

 

Thank you for your being, Barry, for
your care and kindest attention to all
whom you encountered, with grace.

I applaud your life’s work and a life so
elegantly experienced in its entirety.
Thank you for your acute perceptions,

especially for such exquisite poems:
they will continue to resonate forever
through our eardrums and our souls.

I applaud the choice to join your Love
in your own time, in your own way.
Thank you for your time here, with

the knowledge you will live on in us,
this community you’ve created of all
those who dearly love and admire you.

Thank you for how you so thought-
fully considered life: considere, to
be with the stars that now await you.

*

What courage it takes to cross
the boundary, the borne no-one
evades. We celebrate Barry, this
fiercely gentle man in his choice
to leave, lion-hearted to the end.

From Plymouth Brethren to brother
and mentor to so many, beloved
Barry leaves us in floods of love
and light for the final freedom of
surrender. In his passing, he’s still
the consummate teacher and poet
surrounded by all those he loves
and who love him, near and far.

 

Love and Blessings on your way,
Penn

 

 

photo from Words Aloud, Owen Sound Ontario, October 2023. Barry is to the right of the sign. The other poets are from the left Richard Sitoski, Stuart Ross, Penn Kemp, Barry Dempster, Daniel Lockhart and Kim Fahner.

 

 

 

 

Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication of poetry (Bearing Down, Coach House, 1972). The League of Canadian Poets honored her with their Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award (2025), as Spoken Word Artist of the year (2015), and as a foremother of Canadian Poetry. Recent collections include: Ordinary / Moving (Silver Bow Publishing, 2025); Lives of Dead Poets (above/ground press, 2025); INCREMENTALLY (Hem Press, 2024); POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, an anthology for Ukraine (co-editor, Pendas Productions, 2023); P.S. (with Sharon Thesen, Gap Riot Press, 2022). Penn is active across the web with multimedia collaborations: see pennkemp.substack.com and pennkemp.weebly.com.

Foster Gareau : Two poems

 

 

Dental Care 

Across the bottom of the front top teeth, feel
for uneven levels and chipped corners from opening beer
bottles. Run a pinkie over the sharpest edge,
daring the enamel to foul fingerprints. Bleach 
them later back to fish-belly white. Spend a stack
of hours in the library, slipping past shelves with books
numerous and similar as grains of rice. One title rings a bell,
another rings a symphony. See tomes, ripped from the
archives and dusted with dust. Faces, spines,
bones of the spine. Always needing more
and more. Outside, consider the lungs of trees
while pausing on an exhale. Not yet having caught 
sufficient breath makes speech impossible. Words are only wing-ed
when they issue from the speaker. Buy a new heart
out of a vending machine as a low-bawling locomotive
whistle pierces a hole in the day. Mistake the train exhaust for mother’s
grey Sunday housecoat. Child-eater that she is. Act calm as cookies 
and milk but with a generous and potent sense 
of imminent peril. Carry a dirty tote-bag against the chest
like a heart defibrillator. Too young to know
what hasn’t yet been experienced. In the sun, walloped by
radiation, nuking the molecules of dermal
layers. Horny but not eager to do anything about it.
Astral project to the seashore to ward away
the grey-soul day. The savoury ocean’s salted broth laps
at an upper lip. Consider the fish. Differing mouths
gaping for similar yawns, filling with pause. Filling 
with teeth, nicked, splintered and pointed. 

 

 

Symphony for the Self-Centered

backasswards sounds about me always
what does your playstyle say about you
maybe that you rode here on a bicycle
made of vintage trombone parts
you remind me of buttered bread with the whipped butter
melted in
mmm
hush you say
listen to the song
to a tune that feels like longing
in a key that pierces vision
the music plays from across the club
but the lyrics don’t come
and the bass is under our seats
it hurts to hear something so lovely
without knowing if you can keep it
I knew you were a badass you say
you sat in the back of every music class
and never said anything
I like guys like you
you make your own rules
you know your Self
it’s a little rough but that’s part of it
yeah I say
I reflect on my own musical ineptitude
I’m unable to play any instrument
but somehow still produce music fit for the stage
daunted
and considering that my talent might be thin
almost invisible
I play on
still hoping that my genius will be discovered
it’s the saddest thing ever
because my world is dominated by self-obsession I have little to say
to others
and what I do say
rings hollow
above all I’m absent
so leave me alone
thinking my little selfish thoughts and kicking myself
in the shins for even bothering
to come to band practice.

 

 

 

 

Foster Gareau is a queer French-Canadian poet, sentimentalist, former member of the unhoused and alcoholic in recovery with a degree in Cinema Studies. In 2025 his work has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM international, Frozen Sea, carte blanche, Yolk Literary, & Change, Soliloquies Anthology and others, and he was shortlisted for the 2025 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Laura Kerr : The Enduring Idea, Part 2: A Living Poem

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.