Penn Kemp : “One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones”

 

 

 

 

To write about Lives of Dead Poets is to go back fifty years to Toronto’s burgeoning poetry scene in the early 70s. Having moved with my husband to Toronto Island in 1971 and living there with two babies in diapers, I was writing in the wee hours… and hungry for community, for a poetry community. The Coach House Press had published my first book, Bearing Down, in 1972. The next year, I edited IS 14, the first anthology of women’s writing in Canada and part of Victor Coleman’s series at Coach House. But what next? When Victor asked me to host a new reading series at A Space Gallery on St. Nicholas Street, I jumped at the opportunity. The Canada Council at that time sponsored honoraria and travel costs for poets not only from across Canada but from the US. Imagine being able to invite poets you had long admired to come read in Toronto! What a joy for a keen novice! I learned to typeset flyers and posters for our monthly events, and to record many of the readings on reel-to-real tapes (now in my archives at McGill): both activities far beyond my technical grasp but I reached. Ward Island writers received the visiting poets with open arms; festive weekends for the guests ensued: party time! The poets often stayed with us en famille or with Victor or his mother. This poem describes one such visit by P. K. Page:

The Girl from Sao Paulo

In the Fall of 1973, P.K.
Page came to visit us on Toronto Island. 

I'd arranged for her to come and read then in
the poetry series I was organizing at A Space. 

The weather was blustery so the oil stove puffed
and popped away in the middle of our living room. 

You have to imagine this elderly cottage, without
much insulation, two little kids crawling underfoot. 

P.K. was dressed to the nines in a glamorous cape
and armloads of silver jewelry.

At the stove's first growl, she leapt up and alighted
for the evening on the couch arm closest to the door.

An oil stove had exploded on her before—she
was taking no chances.

But she made that perch hers, crossing elegant legs,
gallantly discussing poetry and poets

until the last boat swept her away to the city.

Several of the poets I met at A SPACE became livelong friends: Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb and P.K. Page. I kept in touch with Robert Creeley and Allan Ginsberg in person over the next decade, and by letter with Diane di Prima.

Lives of Dead Poets began in contemplation of the many poets I’ve known who have since died. That comes with being eighty years old, of course, and lucky to be here, given the necessary transience we all face. Gwen MacEwen’s death in 1987 was an early shock: at 46, she died far too young, it seemed to me. We first met at a reading in 1967 and bonded over a mutual love of Ancient Egypt through the next twenty years. When I had the occasion to travel to Cairo on a tour of the old sites, she warned me not to go, given her fear of the modern city. But of course I went… and then wrote about our conversations while she was alive, in my collection, Suite Ancient Egypt, a chapbook and sound opera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6zU21sg6_As  ). “Not Waving But Drowning” describes a scene in which she turned up a reading at Harbourfront a day late and incoherent: I escorted her away, https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/kemp/audio.htm. The day she died, I called her several times as I was in the neighbourhood but there was no answer. After her death, I wrote about ongoing visitations in my M.Ed. thesis on creativity, 1988.

Bob Hogg was a much-loved poet whom I’d met briefly decades ago as part of the poetry scene in Vancouver; we caught up with one another a few years ago in Ottawa and corresponded: he wrote me just before he died, as the poem in the chapbook describes:

“What a gift you and your poems and stories
             are to us, your friends and all Can Lit!” 

                      The night
   before you died, you
replied—

“it goes on even when we no longer do!”

                    The day           before                you

                  The day         before

“you”


Daphne Marlatt kindly read this poem for Bob at his memorial reading in Vancouver.

bp nichol and I knew each other in early Coach House days. Through underwhich editions, he published a cassette of my sound poetry, recorded at The Music Gallery and Glenn Gould Studio. He was about to publish a chapbook of mine through his GrOnk Press. barrie called to postpone a reading we had scheduled for September, 1988 at Flesherton ON Library, where I was writer-in-residence. He died that weekend after the operation which we thought would be minor. Again, the poem in the chapbook captures the poignancy of that time. barrie and I were born a month apart. Similarly, Bronwen Wallace was about the same age: she was supposed to read in the same series I was hosting (for Ontario poets, this time), but illness and then her death intervened. I guess the moral is, what? I’ll leave that to you, dear reader.

After hosting Daphne, Phyllis, Bob, Fred Wah, and George Bowering in the A Space series, the west coast poetry scene drew me to read there almost annually, often staying with Daphne or P.K. Aside from a dear friendship with Daphne over the last half century, Creeley has had the most influence on my poetry, not just in his writing but the intensity with which he lived… and recognized me as a poet. “Maintain!” he wrote, in a dedication. Our conversations would continue in Toronto or Bolinas or Buffalo from wherever they had last been paused. I never met Jack Spicer nor John Ashberry, but admired their poetry. And who could resist responding to such poetic last names?

Joe Blades and Joe Rosenblatt were very different presences in Canadian poetry, but my tributes connect them by name, for their love of poetry. It was deeply moving to read Ellen Jaffe this tribute to her via zoom as she lay dying in hospital. And to connect so tenderly with sweet Teva Harrison at www.wordsfest.ca in London Ontario, though she too knew she was dying. Poets with a London connection here include Robert Kroetsch and, of course, James Reaney. 2025 marks Jamie’s wife and fellow poet Colleen Thibaudeau’s centenary, I’ll be reading the poems in the chapbook in celebration of her writing through www.wordsfest.ca later this year.

The cover paintings are by my father, London painter Jim Kemp. When he was laid up at home, I would bring him found objects of interest to paint, including this moth, a symbol of transience. His blue painting reminds me of waves, crashing on the shore: mutability.

It’s been a delight to work with publisher rob mclennan. How lucky to come of age in a milieu where poetry was celebrated and the publishing world was open to poetry, with so many indie presses on the scene! In retrospect, life seems like a series of hits and misses, and my literary life has been lucky so far. May the tributes in Lives of Dead Poets bring you joy in acknowledgement of these lives well lived in poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

Penn Kemp [photo credit: Michael Filippov] 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.

Yvonne Blomer and Barbara Colebrook Peace : Imagined and Real Conversations with P.K. Page

 

 

“…..How to capture self here,
to spin and weave each new story
on the ancient fabric of soil and sun.”
                       Yvonne Blomer, What Tapestry, Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page

I confess, I never had a close relationship with P.K. Page, but I danced, like one of the dancers in her own sketches, in her periphery. When she was alive and living in Sidney, B.C., I was too young and shy to approach, too foolish feeling to ask a question or send a poem. This is just the way things go sometimes, there’s no point in beating myself up about it now, but I would have loved to have sat with her and talked poetry, or to have sent her a handful of poems. She perhaps would have seen in those early poems the influence of her own work and that of Patrick Lane’s.

Before diving even deeper into P.K. I want to, for a moment, speak to the legacy of poetry and the written word. This rises out of a class I’m currently teaching on Japanese form and aesthetic. In the class, I aim to stay close to the original Japanese writers of haibun and haiku and with my students we are diving into history, culture, women’s lives through Sei Shonagon and wandering poet’s lives through Matsuo Basho. It is a wonderous form of travel to delve into the poetry of another place and time. I believe this is also part of the invitation of the anthology Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page. I don’t want to be a walking advertisement, but I do want us to remember that Canada too has a long oral and written tradition from Indigenous story tellers to the writers of today and P.K. is one of those key writers. In fact her book And Once More Saw the Stars is a woven conversation with Philip Stratford using the Japanese form of renga. Here, Barbara Colebrook Peace and I are intertwining our voices to connect them to P.K.’s and the many voices in Hologram.

If you are younger than me, and not from the west coast of Canada, you might not even know who P.K. Page is. I understand that poetry does not have a shelf life, like a bunch of bananas do (Basho is Japanese for Banana tree, funnily enough), but I also understand that we live in the “now” and that young poets are looking to what is new, edgy, perhaps political, identity-focused, important as in American or world poetry for their inspiration. They aren’t necessarily looking in their own garden, city or coastal community. But I’d like to invite all us readers of poetry to find P.K. Page again or for the first time, to allow her to be one of the poets we might turn to, like W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson or Ondaatje and Atwood. She was a great writer and mentor; she was an enthusiast when it came to life and poetry, and she was a master of form.

With my own recent dive back into P.K.’s work through my work as editor for Hologram I have reread her poems, read the poems that have been written because of her and the attachments and memories that so many writers in Canada have to her.  Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page offers a slice of Canadian poetry history through P.K. and the poets who write from her poems. It shows how, like mycelium, poets are deeply rooted and connected to each other, to the poets of the past and to the younger poets of the future.

Contributor, Barbara Colebrook Peace and I had a brief conversation when she came to my house to pick up her copies of Hologram. During that conversation she shared other memories of her connections to P.K. 

*

“Our feet barely touched the earth, and memory
Earased at birth, but gradually reassembling
Coalesced and formed a whole, as single birds
Gathering for migration form a flock.”     
--P.K. Page, “Presences”

Barbara writes:

Reading this anthology, I find myself remembering times with P.K. Page— like the time before I had met her in person, and before I took up writing poetry. I was in my mid- thirties, a volunteer with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s “Gallery in Schools” programme.  Among the works of art we took into the schools, was a beautiful etching by P.K. Irwin called “Ship—Nocturnal.” Though I didn’t know her, I knew she lived in Victoria, and I phoned her to ask about it.

“Oh Yes, I remember that piece very well.  It started from a mistake!”  she said. She went on to tell me the story of how she set out to make an etching, with no particular idea of what the subject might be.  At the beginning, she accidentally made an ink blot. That ink blot — by the reverse process of etching — became a silvery star. Over what?  Over an otherworldly, dreamlike, ghostly ship, with the night sky appearing through the ship’s outline. 

When I visited the schools, I told this story to the children: a work of art can begin from a mistake! They loved it and were inspired. This story has given me some confidence in my own mistakes. Later, for instance, when I was working on a poem called “Jesus in the Nursing Home,” our cat jumped up on my computer keyboard and strode across it.  The accidental result became Jesus stammering: “PpppPaa, / he says, Ppppp Aaaa…”  I treasure this memory of PK before I knew her. Like the silver ship of her etching, it has an otherworldly quality which speaks to me this morning of her presence in one of the infinite, cosmic dimensions she wrote about.

Another memory dates to a time when Linda Rogers invited me to co-edit a book of essays about PK’s work. A group of poets was sitting round the table at lunch and PK asked simply, “Describe your ideal house.”  It was fascinating to hear the variety of answers.  When it came to my turn, I described a house with big windows, high on a hill where the light and dark came and went continually, where there were shadows, and where there was only a little furniture but an abundance of space. PK was the last to speak, and as I recall, her “ideal house” was similar to mine, which gave me a lovely sense of a bond with her. 

I feel that I will never come to the end of my discoveries of PK.  I am personally very grateful for the way the anthology’s offerings connect with my own memories and bring PK’s living presence before me in new ways.

*

I find such delight as I read Barbara’s memories here in the link between her visual art and her poetry, in the lesson of the mistake become a silver bursting star and in how that inspired students and Barbara herself. I probably overstate how much poetry to me is a conversation with the self that then becomes public and want to add to that idea that the poem becomes public, but so does the conversation, and it becomes collective too. So, as an editor of this new anthology, my wish is for the conversations of these poems and memories, as well as P.K.’s poems and art to ignite more conversations, art and poetry.

Barbara and my conversation continues as we dip back into the book, or our books by P.K. and then pick up pen and dip into our own new poems. As Barbara recently wrote to me, “I too am very fond of And Once More Saw the Stars and I like the correspondence between the two poets just as much as I like the poems. I remember Philip says, somewhere in there, how much he’s enjoying working with P.K. and ‘it’s just like dancing with you,’ which fits with what you say at the beginning of this article!”

Thank you P.K. Page, Barbara Colebrook Peace, DC Reid (co-editor and creator of this project) and all the academics and poets in Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page!

Yvonne Blomer and Barbara Colebrook Peace

 

 

 

 

 

Yvonne Blomer’s The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) explores grief, love and climate change. She has edited five anthologies, most recently: Hologram: Homage to PK Page. She is the past poet laureate of Victoria, BC, and was 2022-23 Arc Poetry Magazine poet-in-residence. Yvonne teaches on Zoom and lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. Forthcoming this fall is Death of Persephone: A Murder with Caitlin Press. Yvonne also has a call out for poems on ice https://caitlinpress.com/Blog/Call-for-Submissions-ICE.

 

 

 

 

Barbara Colebrook Peace is the author of two poetry books, Kyrie and Duet for Wings and Earth, both published by Sono Nis Press, and the co-editor of P.K. Page: Essays on Her Works published by Guernica. She has read her poetry on CBC, and taken part in various literary festivals and concerts.  She was delighted to learn recently that one of her poems was translated into Chinese!  She lives in Victoria B.C.