interdisciplinary experimentation

One of the things I am most proud of in the new format of The Ambassador Poetry Project is the inclusion of video feeds. In this most recent issue, Penn Kemp shares an interactive sound poetry experience with students during a campus visit. I love that technology encourages us to capture new poetic experiences and pushes us to try new things with our craft.

I’ve been exploring mixed media for some time, and although it’s not my main mode of expression I have again made a mental note to try more mediums for cross-pollinating poetry. In prior experiments, I have conducted poetry readings with a live musical performance, read poetry surrounded by installations, and created poetry for print with the accompaniment of visuals. Too, my recent book, stains: early poems, is mixed media; there are several photographs strategically placed within the sections.

Years ago, I had a small project on the go where I studied works of other poets and then built visual imagery around quotes. I recently stumbled upon one of my earliest attempts at this union of art, with this piece here that uses a quote from Sylvia Plath:

“Sylvia Won”

Lately, I’ve been focusing on the straight-up poetry but I’ve again sensed the need to experiment with interdisciplinary forms and mixed media. Perhaps I can thank the recent purchase of a new MP3 recorder. Or my growing interest in capturing poetry on film. Whatever it is, I think it’s interesting to see where poetry can take us when partnered with layers of media.

Who knows where this curiosity project will take me. I’ll be sure to share some of the fruits of my experimental labors.

Issue 2: Ambassador Poetry Project

I am pleased to announce the second issue of The Ambassador Poetry Project is now available online at www.AmbassadorPoetry.com. I hope you’ll visit the website to discover a variety of voices from Michigan and Ontario.

This issue includes selections from poets such as Judith A. Goren, Therese Becker, Linda Leedy Schneider, Matthew Falk, and sound poetry from Penn Kemp. Also included is visual work by Grand Blanc High School student Rob Chron.

You’ll also notice a few website improvements to help make your visit more enjoyable. Please let me know what you think of the improvements and your overall experience in visiting The Ambassador Poetry Project.

Thank you for your continued support and have a great weekend.

Q&A with sound poet Penn Kemp

I’m pleased to present Penn Kemp for today’s author Q&A. As the writer-in-residence at The University of Western Ontario, Penn continues to be an active voice on the campus grounds and throughout the broader community, sharing her sound poetry and multi-media approach to literary arts. As a Literary Citizen, Penn is actively engaged in advocating for the role of art within society, encouraging others to become involved, and promoting the work of other artists. Sound poetry is such a special component of Penn Kemp’s work and I am pleased that she is able to tell us a bit more about this unique mode of artistic delivery.

Please join me in welcoming Penn Kemp.

Penn, what exactly is sound poetry and how did this come to be your passion?
I love to lift poetry off the page, to have it experienced as sound. For humans, sounding is our first and perhaps our last resource for creative expression. Such communication can resolve the tension between inner and outer worlds through musical play. Writing for me is emblematic of sacred, physical realities but it is solitary until shared.

Nature has been a source of wonder, metaphor and inspiration but the completion of a poem for me is the connection to people in its performance. Between image and sound as a poems priority, I cannot choose, so this work becomes concrete or performance poetry. A piece is meant to lift off the page in as many dimensions as it can.

Sound poetry became a vehicle for me when I was in labour, uttering sounds I had never heard before. In raising my kids, I listened to their babble, intrigued by how language develops.

As a poet coming into the classroom, I look forward to the possibility of showing students how to write from an original voice. Before asking students to write, however, I have them find a centre of silence to still all the notions they have of clichéd rhythms.

This technique helps them to open up their intuitive side, which they may have had to block in order to concentrate on their courses. My strategy is to encourage them to remove the mental blocks which may prevent them from hearing the sounds that are the building blocks of language, and then to manipulate sounds into chants and poetry. As a sound poet, I am adept at listening to unknown words with a clean ear. Students, given permission by my example to experiment with sounds and sounding, quickly throw off some of their accumulated inhibitions. From enjoyment it is a short step to creation.

In my performances and workshops, I have found that sound poetry is a wonderful vehicle for enabling students from many different backgrounds to explore linkages and differences in sound patterns.

In these times when it is important to establish joyful communication among different cultural communities, sound poetry offers a way in which all students can share in the sounds of another culture, without having to master its language. "Breaking the Sounds Barrier" is a way of encouraging individual self-expression within a framework of group activity.

I am excited by the potential that sound poetry has for breaking down barriers. The chants and poems which result from this process are truly enchanting, and the message, that out of diversity can come forth creative beauty, is one that is crucial.

What would you say to a student who finds poetry intimidating?

Have fun! Play with the words... read them aloud and relish them. Go for the sound as much as the sense of the words. Listen with fresh ears before what might be your initial judgement or frustration.

What events are you involved in around campus and throughout the community in London ON?

As Western's writer-in-residence, I host Gathering Voices, an eclectic literary radio show on Radio Western, which you can read about and hear archived on CHRW.

My Muse/news, renewed monthly on http://mytown.ca/pennletters, features Upcoming Events. One of the great pleasures of the residency has been the opportunity to visit many classrooms on campus, including King's, Brescia and Fanshawe College. Professors and students alike have been very welcoming and enthusiastic. My talk last term, "Courage, My Love," on a career in the arts, plus a sound poem for inspiration, is now up on YouTube. Pictures from recent events are up [here].

*****
To listen to Penn Kemp’s “Man Date” on Qarrtsiluni, visit
http://qarrtsiluni.com/2009/11/12/man-date./

If you are in the area, there is a workshop with Penn Kemp and Brenda McMorrow. EnChanting: Transformation through Poetry, Sound & Song will take place Saturday, December 5th, 10-5pm. Email penn@pennkemp.ca for more information and location details.

Another upcoming event you won’t want to miss is on Thursday, January 21, 7:30 pm. “Luminous Entrance” will be presented at Brescia Auditorium, Brescia University College, London ON. This is a participatory performance of the Sound Opera Luminous Entrance. More information is available on Penn Kemp’s website or feel free to email Penn directly.

Thanks for dropping by for today’s author Q&A. I’ll see you on Friday…

a writer’s work is never done…

This is just a quick post today, since my to-do list has overpowered my intentions. However, I did want to include a reminder that for this Wednesday’s Q&A, I will be featuring poet Penn Kemp. As the writer-in-residence at The University of Western Ontario, Kemp has gone above and beyond in her role, taking poetry and arts advocacy to the community-at-large and engaging diverse audiences with her philosophies and artistic practices. Please join me on Wednesday to learn a bit more about this incredible writer.

Since my to-do list is a bit overcrowded today, I am afraid I must keep it short. I hope to resurface soon and share some of my latest reads, readings, and reviews. Have a great Cyber Monday!

I’m thankful for…

For as long as I can remember, I have always tuned in to the televised Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. So, of course, this year I was anxious and eager to have the celebratory floats in the background while I worked away. This year the celebration meant something different for me; this is my first American Thanksgiving as a resident. I still honor the Canadian date, but it’s nice to have two thankful days to celebrate. Which makes it very interesting… odd… quirky… that I. Somehow. Completely. Forgot.

No, I didn’t forget Thanksgiving. I forgot to watch the parade.

When I woke up Thursday morning I got straight to work. I proceeded to work the majority of the day (aka: all day, but I hate to sound like a nerd) and it wasn’t until Dear Spouse asked about watching the parade that I realized… I forgot. I was so busy and involved with catching up on work that I actually forgot about the whole parade thing.

Of course, in the big scheme of things, this is no big deal. But, it leads me to the topic of what I’m thankful for. As a writer, I want to kick myself every time I complain about being too busy. The fact is, I should be – and am – very grateful for the amount of work I have. If I had no writing work, that would be sad. Right now, my writing life is full and wonderful and consuming and I can’t think of anything to be more thankful for. I’m working, I’m writing, I’m happy.

So, despite missing my ‘first’ parade, I can still walk away from this year’s Thanksgiving knowing I celebrated in my own poetic way. Yes, I made an overwhelming dinner and, yes, we enjoyed the evening. But the day was spent honoring the work that makes me happy.

For this, I am truly thankful.

Q&A with author Dawn Potter

I recently came into acquaintance with Dawn Potter, author of Boy Land and Other Poems and the newly released Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. Tracing Paradise is an incredible memoir on writing from a poet whose work has been called “fearless” by Ellen Dudley. Her next poetry book, How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press), will be released in March 2010. Please join me in welcoming Dawn Potter.

Hi Dawn. Can you tell us about what prompted you to write Tracing Paradise?
Actually, I had no intention of writing this book. I had come to think of myself as primarily a poet, and writing a memoir had never occurred to me. But I had undertaken the weird task of copying out all of John Milton's Paradise Lost word for word, and the poem was going to my head. I was literally driving past exits because I was too busy thinking about Milton. And finally, after I'd spent yet another hour at my friend Baron Wormser's kitchen table gabbling away about what I was learning, he told me to write a book about it, promising to read the first draft of every chapter if that would help me to get my thoughts onto the page. His offer was a tremendous gift because not only did I immediately have an audience, but also Baron (who is himself a poet and essayist) is a great teacher and so was able to pinpoint gaps and ask questions at a very early stage of the project.

As readers, we can't be expected to enjoy everything. Why did you feel it was important to study - so intensely - a poem you never liked?
I should say, first, that I am not a literary scholar but a common reader in Virginia Woolf's sense of the term. She said, "The common reader . . . differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and . . . reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole." In my case, while I am devoted to the western literary canon, I'm also largely self-taught and haphazard and subjective: "rickety and ramshackle," as VW says. Paradise Lost was sitting up there on the Great Books shelf, and yet I had never liked it or had any sympathy it. So I thought it was about time to try. I had just finished putting together my second poetry collection; I was at loose ends about my next project. And often, when I'm not actively doing my own writing, I'll turn to copying. I think that copying out a poem or a bit of prose is the closest way I have to getting into an author's head: it forces me to deal with every comma, every strange capital letter and line break. And often copying jump-starts me into my own writing. My friend Will refers to it as my "gateway drug." But honestly, I thought I'd copy out a page of Paradise Lost. I never, ever, imagined I'd copy out the whole damn thing. Yet I did, and it changed my life as both a writer and a reader.

What did you discover about Milton's work that impressed you?
This is exactly the question that Tracing Paradise tries to answer. I found a bewildering number of intersections between Paradise Lost and my own twenty-first-century life in rural Maine. It seemed, after a while, that everything I did, from stacking firewood to cooking a chicken, had some relation to the poem. But if I had to choose just one vital discovery, I would have to say "his sentences." They are unbelievably rich, and not merely in their beauties of sound and diction and image and syntax. What I discovered, as I copied out the poem, is that I could actively feel him working his way into his own thoughts. I realized that, very often, he didn't know what he was going to say until he started to say it: creating the sentence was the exercise of discovery. Somehow that made him so much more human to me. He wasn't just a marble bust on a shelf but a curious, grumpy, idealistic, infatuated, joyous, confused man who had once sat in a chair with his chin in his hands and tried to figure out how an angel's digestive system might work.

While going through this exercise, what did you discover about yourself as a writer?
Humility. Milton took risks that I certainly will never equal and that I think no artist may ever equal again, simply because our relationship to faith and dogma and culpability has changed so radically in the four hundred years since his death. As I say in chapter 2, he literally "laid his eternal soul on the gridiron to invent [Satan,] one of the rare literary characters who will survive in our tradition until the planet explodes. . . . And for so doing, Milton may indeed be weltering in the very hellfire he imagined, paying eternally for his hubris." That kind of risk is almost incomprehensible to us today. But this isn't to say that he doesn't also give me optimism, as I try to explain in my book's afterword: "Experiencing the poem, following its every step down every page, has given me such hope for my own work. It has shown me that the nobility of poetry lies in its artisan commitment to language as a venture into wonder. Poets think their way into mystery: deliberation builds on accident; accident builds on deliberation. . . . In Paradise Lost, Milton writes his vision of the cosmos. But he also invites me to write my own."

Would you share a little of your next book of poems, How the Crimes Happened?
CavanKerry Press is releasing the poetry collection in March 2010, which is very exciting for me. It's almost unbelievable to think that I'll have two new books out within the space of a year. Maybe the best way to introduce it here is to give you a poem. This one is titled "Eclogue," which is an ancient style of pastoral poetry. Virgil, for instance, wrote a book of eclogues before he wrote the Aeneid.

Eclogue
By Dawn Potter

A marriage worth of minutes we’ve stood
side by side, staring into the hooded depths
of your 1984 Dodge Ram pickup truck,
watching the engine chitter and die
for no apparent reason. I feel a crazy,
ignorant joy: here we go again, sweetheart,
struggling in harness over yet another
crappy mystery. Do you? I can’t say I’ll ever
know one way or the other what your thoughts
will do, though twenty years ago I made you cry
when I dumped you for the jerk down the hall,
and I’ll never get over it, the sight of you,
cool autocrat, in tears for a dumb girl
who happened to be me.

Now I’m the one who cries all the time,
you’re the one not walking away from me
down the hall. Just the same, you imagine
walking away, I’m sure of it; maybe when you’re
dragging another snow-sopped log to the chainsaw
pile, or we’re curled in bed waiting for a barred owl
to stammer in the pines, the barn dog shouting back
like a madwoman. It’s not that being here
is misery; it’s more like marriage is too much
and not enough at the same time: the trees crowd us
like children, our bodies betray a fatal longing.
What’s left for us, at forty, but dismay
till labor shakes us back into our yoke.

Work, work, that puritan duty—yet
how beautiful the set of your shoulders
when you heave a scrap of metal siding
into the trash heap. Our bodies linger
this side of lovely, like flowers under glass.
We drive ourselves to endure; on my knees
in the hay mow, stifled and panting,
I plant bale after bale in place: you toss,
you toss, I shove, I shove. We keep pace,
patient and wordless; the goats in their pen
blat irritably. In the yard our sons quarrel.
Mourning doves groan in the eaves.
Long hours ahead, till our job is done
and another begins.

Hunting scattered chickens in the bug-infested dew:
I watch you crouch along the scrubby poplar edge,
then circle back between the apple trees,
white hen skittering ahead, luminescent in the shabby
dark. Suddenly she drops her head and sits,
submissive as a girl. You’ve got her now; tuck up her feet
and carry her back home, then squat to mend the ragged fence.
A breath of sweat rises from your sunburnt neck,
salt and sweet. My love. Marry me, I say. You cast
an eye askance and shrug, I did. How odd it seems
that this is where we’ve landed: chasing chickens
through the woods at twilight, humid thunder rumpling
the summer sky, dishes washed, a slice of berry pie left
cooling on the counter. I’ve been saving it for you.

Can you tell us about Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching?
The Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching is a week-long summer seminar for language-arts teachers working at all levels, elementary school through college, who are committed to making poetry a central element of their curriculum. These teachers spend a week together in Robert Frost's barn in Franconia, New Hampshire, where they study and talk with eminent poets who are also top-level teachers in their own right. It really is a life-changing experience for many of the participants, who may not otherwise have colleagues who share their conviction that poetry is a vital emotional and intellectual element of education. Anybody looking for details about the 2010 conference should check out the Frost Place website: http://frostplace.org/.

Where can readers learn more about your and your writing?
I have a blog, http://dlpotter.blogspot.com/, that I update almost every day and that also has links to books, interviews, etc.

Thanks, Dawn!
*****

Join me next week Wednesday for my Q&A with poet Penn Kemp, writer-in-residence at The University of Western Ontario.

Until Friday… happy reading!

readings, zines & the gift of poetry

What a great weekend of poetry and people. Friday’s reading at The Lawrence Street Gallery was a great night with a lovely and supportive crowd. It was a pleasure to share the stage with Zinka Joseph. She read from her beautiful chapbook of poems, Lands I Live In (Mayapple Press), and wowed the audience with such a beautiful voice and a lovely charm. It was a pleasure to meet Zilka and share an evening of poetic voices with her.

Saturday’s launch of Renaissance City was incredible. Hosted by John Jeffire at Maxwell’s in Garden City, this event rocked the house. A full bill of poetry and music carried on for five hours! This was my first time at Maxwell’s and what a sight. It’s an art fair/ antique bizarre/ performance venue wrapped into one cool warehouse that was warmed with wine and friendship. The readings were inspiring, the music eclectic, and the audience was fully engaged. Thank you to John Jeffire and the folks at Maxwell’s for throwing a great party (and to poet Ken Meisel for the red wine!).

After such a great weekend of hearing poetry, I was inspired to read some new work and introduce myself to more voices. I simply have to share this as it’s too good of a deal to miss out. Did you know you can get a free issue of Notre Dame Review? If you’ve ever considered subscribing to this wonderful journal, take advantage of this incredible web offer here. I did and can’t wait to start receiving NDR on a regular basis.

Not only is it important that we support our literary presses, but what other way can you be introduced to so many great voices all in one sitting? I highly recommend treating yourself to a subscription or two to some of the many great journals out there.

I recently subscribed to Poetry. If you haven’t yet, now is the time. I just noticed they have an incredible gift bonus offer. When you buy yourself a subscription to Poetry, you get a gift subscription for free. This is a great idea for the holidays. Support your literary presses and give the gift of poetry this holiday season.

Another splurge this weekend includes ordering a copy of the 2009 Pushcart anthology. I’m looking forward to seeing what the year brought in. I was reminded to do so, as the time has come for the new nominations to make their way to the Pushcart Prize folks. There are always some great new voices featured, so I’m looking forward to what will arrive in the mail in a few short days.

This week, be sure to join me on Wednesday for a Q&A with poet Dawn Potter. Her latest book is a surprising take on Milton… and the art of discovery. You’ll have to wait until Wednesday to learn more, but I do hope you’ll come back to find out about her beautiful new book, Tracing Paradise.

Thanks for stopping in today. Have a great Thanksgiving week and see you next time.