Penn Kemp

FIFTY YEARS of Writing, Performing and Publishing

Performance poet and playwright Penn Kemp (M.Ed.) has been awarded the League of Canadian Poets' lifetime achievement award for Spoken Word. As London Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate, she received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal for service to arts and culture. Her most recent production and publication is a play, The Triumph of Teresa Harris, 2017. Other recent works are Barbaric Cultural Practice (Quattro, 2016); Dream Sequins, Lyrical Myrical Press; and Jack Layton Art in Action, which she edited for Quattro Books, Toronto. As Writer-in-Residence for Western University, her project was the DVD, Luminous Entrance: a Sound Opera for Climate Change Action, Pendas Productions.

Coach House Press published Penn’s first poetry book, Bearing Down, in 1972. She then edited IS 14, the first anthology of women’s poetry in Canada, in 1973, also for Coach House. Since then, Penn has published twenty-six books and had seven plays and ten spoken word CDs produced, as well as award-winning videopoems. Penn is prolific in many genres. Her “poem for peace in many voices” has been translated into 136 languages and performed by more than 3,000 around the world: see www.mytown.ca/poemforpeace.

Penn has been giving creativity workshops, teaching and performing her poetry since graduating from Western University in 1966. Penn chaired a panel on Women & Performance for the Writers’ Summit at Harbourfront in June, 2016 where the two anthologies she edited were launched: Performing Women and Women and Multimedia. The scripts for her plays are available on https://www.playwrightsguild.ca/playwright/penn-kemp.

Throughout her literary life, she has worked collaboratively with other artists, often in theatre and participatory performances across a variety of cultural practices to engage her audience. Many of her CDs are what Penn terms "Sound Operas": dramatic poetic narratives that weave sound, imagery and music in the counterpoint of many voices. Penn has been heralded by the Writers’ Union as a “one woman literary industry” and by the League of Canadian Poets as “one of ten foremothers of Canadian poetry”. Having performed in festivals around the world, in Britain, Brazil and India, Penn happily returned to live in London in 2001. Here she is active in the arts community. Penn edits poetry for Pendas Productions, a small publishing company she runs with her husband, Gavin Stairs: they have published volumes of poetry and CDs.

Penn writes: "My OutSpoken contribution began in August 1944 when dragged into the world by forceps, and again during labour at my daughter’s birth. The “e/mergence” poetry from my first book, Bearing Down (Coach House, 1972) I first performed at Edmonton’s 1972 League AGM and on radio, 1973. That performance opened up aural possibilities. I’ve been lifting the word off the page however I could since then, most recently in YouTube videopoems. As sound poet, I’ve performed in festivals round the world: eg. at NY Sound Poetry Festival, 1980; with the Four Horsemen at Toronto’s Convocation Hall, 1979; in bp Nichol’s CBC radio play; throughout colleges in India (1999) and Brazil (2003) as writer-in-residence; at Glastonbury Goddess Festival (2004) and London’s WORD festival (2015, 2016).

"Travelling courtesy Canada Council grants, I conducted sound orchestras in languages I didn’t know with hundreds of groups, through sounding and spoken word. Through 49 years teaching, I’ve encouraged and mentored students from K-post-grad. My book on writing and performing on www.mytown.ca/whatspringstomind. A project I spent years on is a poem translated into 136 languages, produced in two book/cds and performed by 3,000 on one World Poetry Day.

"Collaborating with artists of different disciplines, peers and students is exciting, inspiring and energizing, breaking new sound barriers. The ear remains my first love; hence, radio and mp3s. Concentrating on the voice rather than gesture or physical presence in communicating my words has taught me to listen acutely."