Barbaric Cultural Practice by Penn Kemp
Reviewed by Linda Lucas
As one who had lived in London most of my life, I had taken Penn Kemp somewhat for granted. “A prophet is not without honour except in [her] own town,” as the saying goes. Upon unpacking books during a move to Sarnia, I took up Barbaric Cultural Practice this spring to re-read, having read it first in 2016 when it first came out. Its art has not only withstood critical scrutiny--its resonance has increased. In going back to Penn Kemp's poetry, I find myself “homing to the given,” like a migrating monarch butterfly.
Penn Kemp's power asserts itself from the first poem, “Tip Line,” in which the word “CLOUT” asserts itself in acrostic shouting down the left margin, decrying all things 'trending,' including social media, stock markets, technological innovation, and the entire cyber world. Against these, she lays the rhythms of the natural one, which serve both as a source of comfort and a source of climatic upheaval. Shelley wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.1 If that is so, Penn Kemp is writing some very good law. “Use your words,” might be the first of her commandments in this time of unprecedented, violent disruption, in this time of the underexamined power of the influencer.
The ten-year gap between this publication and the current reading have lent an added emotional dimension to the poems. Some people threaded into the fabric of the text are no longer with us, having departed “one by one”: Gavin Stairs, (Penn's husband and the person to whom this volume is dedicated), Ann Kerr (predeceased by her husband, Sven), and Catherine Ross (my former prof for English 022 at UWO). Their spirits are wafting now among intertextual allusions to Descartes, W. B. Yeats, Paul Klee, Johnny Cash, bp nichol, Homer, Robert Graves, Robert Frost and William Blake, not to mention a multicultural plethora of gods and goddesses. Kemp's homage to living female contemporaries--the likes of Susan McMaster, Mary di Michelle, Gail Fox, Brenda McMorrow, Anne Anglin (who did the cover as an interpretation of one of Penn's dreams), Leona Graham, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Elizabeth Kolbert and Patricia Green--is both appreciative and telling. Penn Kemp celebrates women, especially creative women, as her poetry shows.
She also loves language and languages. To read her work means to ingest some of the most delicious words: apantomancy , chimera, djellabas, eidolon, étincelant, kenning, littoral, mimesis, palimpsest, paraclete, tchotchkes, and tocsin. These are spicy words that make you want to look them up even if you are pretty sure you already know what they mean. Being Canadian, Kemp naturally forays into French, but she seasons her work with Greek, Spanish, Latin, Yiddish and Arabic flavours as well. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Kemp is a language sponge. This volume is a wringing out of a multitude of phrases, lyrics, clichés, headlines, and syllables that she has en/countered (to use one of her tropes) and arranged into an intricate wordplay that maximizes the sound power of utterance. Her poems are woven into a Pentateuch of tightly wrought forms. Some good examples of this are “Night Orchestra” with its “mull till too oud” of mechanical sounds, “Heart to Art” where “Heart suspends suspense/ and pauses, skips the beat/ to bear what can't be/ born,” and “Man Date” and its “House. Hold. Man. Age. Meant.”, a list that hits each separate note of the song involved in returning home after a long absence. Every sound is carefully chosen to echo sense and widen the sphere of association.
I want to call her work a mixture of two things: orchestrated sonomorphism and syntactical lovefare. The interplay among words, prefixes, suffixes, roots, spelling changes, conjugations, assonance, alliteration, “nerbs [and] vouns” is playful and will sometimes make you laugh out loud. She plays syntactical hopscotch with her lines where sentences begin, shift, morph and circle back within other structures, like lines in an Escher drawing. In “Blow by Blow,” the speaker clarifies why this is so, saying “an image always tempts [her] into words,” but she sees herself primarily as doing the work of the translator:
to move one sense into another's realm, to navigate between borderland, beyond boundary where one sense is felt in terms of another before the words slip into the familiar rut of what has already been heard or read.
Her themes are sensory with a homing in on the auditory, and they arise out of the immediate details of everyday life. The title of Barbaric Cultural Practice refers to an amendment to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that was covered in the news at the time of this writing, when Canadians were (and still are) negotiating cultural freedom against cultural repression. No detail goes unremarked: natural disasters, photographs in magazines, bombings of distant lands, butterflies on a windowsill, a conspiracy theory overheard in a Moroccan café, food security, family relationships, the art of ageing, grief, the work of other poets, or, as in the poem, “Regarding What Is Given,” the act of writing poetry itself. In the poem, “In Light,” the speaker advises us to let light “fill/ our whole body till cells/ dance like dust motes.” “Let us eat like plants,” she writes, “till we can/ swallow light like/ fire-eaters.” It is reminiscent of Atwood's passage from “Instructions for the Third Eye” in Murder in the Dark, in which the speaker invites us not to be afraid to see, so that one day our own bodies “will be glowing from within.” For Kemp, poetry is an act of courage, of activism, of rising above and through fear, by shining visionary light.
If I have a criticism (and as you will see, it isn't really a criticism), it is that some technological links are now dated. Do we not, though, (and when I say, 'we' I mean anybody who's had to negotiate the terms and conditions of a smartphone) tend to shrug off computer vagaries in a way that we might not have done even a decade ago? Glitches have become an everyday annoyance that we have learned to live with. (“Have you tried turning it off and on?”) For instance, like a number of American Government Web Pages, several of Penn's QR codes found on the pages of some of her poems now lead to a disappointing “404: Page not found” message.
These disconnections are an inevitable part of technology's tendency to move fast and break stuff, that, while heralding innovation, undermines and sometimes scuppers its own legacy. Have we grown so accustomed to technological failures that we don't even see them anymore? Kemp did, even before her own volume of poetry fell somewhat victim to the technology that helped create it. Her work, perhaps because of its occasional broken QR codes, is even more resonant now than it was ten years ago. Penn Kemp is a powerful confounder in this world of faulty algorithms that tell us what to think and how to think it and how to look while we are busy faking everything that we are told we need to be, including writers of poetry.
As a goofy experiment, I tried to put myself into the mind of a student studying Penn Kemp's work and I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem in her style on the theme of 'shining light,' to see if AI really did have a grasp of the poet's craft.
Here's what I got back in response:
Shine, Then
light,
flickering
before it finds
its form—
a thought not yet thought
but felt
full-bellied
beneath the rib of morning.
sun spills
syllables across the sill,
each one a whisper
of what might
still become.
we listen.
oh, how silence
glows
when it listens back.
a shimmer, a shim
of sense in
the nonsense
(or is it non-sense?)
glimmers
where meaning meets
the threshold.
speak it:
light is not just
what you see
but what sees
you
through.Obviously, AI has a way to go yet before it aspires to Penn Kemp's poetry. It sees light as an agent outside the body but without the spiritual element that allows it to be emitted from within. It cannot seem to choose form that elucidates meaning. Though it can tinker with her themes and wordplay, it has no intention. It cannot choose why this line or that should be left single, coupled into a pair unit or tripled like a strong braid with others, framed into a quatrain for balance and symmetry, or shifted from the left margin to enhance the visual effect or to emphasize a concept. It doesn't seem to grok punctuation or language conventions. It uses only English, has no meaningful grasp of idiom and ends on a sad cliché.
We need poets so badly, now more than ever. We need the human necessity of intentional birthing, and the visionary gleam,2 however fleeting, from the pens (or keystrokes) of poets like Penn Kemp. As she says herself,
Bear down hard. The time is come. It is not just possible. It is necessary.
About the Author
Activist poet, performer and playwright, Penn Kemp, M.Ed., is a League of Canadian Poets Life Member and winner of their 2015 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Spoken Word Artist of the Year award. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate for London, Ontario, with twenty-six books of poetry and drama published; six plays and ten CDs produced, as well as award-winning videopoems.
About the Reviewer
Linda Lucas was born in Marville, Province de Lorraine, France. A former resident of London, Ontario, she is a graduate of UWO with an MA in English Language and Literature. She has taught both English and French in British Columbia and Alberta as well as in Ontario for over thirty years. She is now retired, writing poetry, singing, and painting. She lives in Sarnia, Ontario.
Book Details
• Publisher: Quattro Books (2016)
• Language: English
• Trade Paper: 111 pages
• ISBN: 978-1-988254-38-8
From Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay, “A Defence of Poetry,” 1821.
From Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” 1804.