Penn Kemp will be presenting a weekend on the Muse and Creativity at Gaden Choling, Toronto, Sept. 11 and 12. She will be performing at the Poets for Peace celebration with singer Honey Novick at Oasis in Toronto July 25. She has been invited to read at six locations in BC, including the Hornby Island Festival. She will also be speaking at the Acorn-Livesay People's Festival November 6 through November 14. And more adventures:
Penn gave writing workshops at Bishop's College School in Lennoxville April 24th and Ottawa at the Masc Festival Young Author’s Festival in Ottawa, April 26-28. In May, she judged all four categories of poetry for the Conference of Independent Teachers of English Poetry and presented prizes to the winners, with a reading of her poetry.
A poem, "Selected Isolation", was chosen by the National Gallery of Canada for use in several different contexts: it appeared in the still life exhibition's catalogue, "Nature Rearranged", spring 1999. The poem travelled with the exhibit across Canada and is featured in the summer 1999 publication of "Vernissage", the National Gallery's magazine edited by Susan McMaster. The poem was first published in TRAVELING LIGHT by Moonstone Press, 1986.
The amazing League anthology SIOLENCE that Sue McMaster edited is now
out and available from Quarry Press, P.O. Box 1061, Kingston ON K7L4Y5.
It includes Penn’s eponymous essay, "Siolence" and a poem, "Painting".
Forthcoming work is coming out in John B. Lee’s anthology, through Black
Moss Press.
WORKS ON LINE INCLUDE:
http://swifty.com/lc/linktext/poems/poems11.htm#kemp
http://www.puc.ca/playwrights/playwrights.htm
The Literary Network, December 1998; Summer 1999. http://webhome.idirect.com/~tplantos/
A major paper on her work was presented March 3 at SNDT University in Bombay, India for the Canadian SHASTRI Institute’s national level seminar. Kamala Gopalan read her paper on "Penn Kemp’s Vision of the Extraordinary Ordinary".
Penn is included as a sound poet in the Reader’s Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature, to be published by U of T Press. Sounding is such a hoot! As a performance piece, it will be performed with Anne Anglin in November at the University of Guelph, as part of a conference on "A Visionary Tradition: Canadian Literature and Culture at the Turn of the Millennium."
COLLABORATIONS:
"Stone Soup Sounding", with Anne Anglin, Penn and James Harbeck, was recorded by PsychoSpace Sound at the "Abundance" Concert, Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto, November 1998. Penn and Anne Anglin performed "Flush, Flash, Flood" on April 15th to celebrate National Poetry Month with League members in the Hart House Library. They performed for the launch of "Intangible" magazine at Art Bar in May. Their latest performance was "When The Heart Parts," in Playwrights’ Cabaret, Theatre Passe Muraille, June 26, 1999.
On May 1, Penn and Susan McMaster recorded a collage of their sound poems, "Tender Lions", at Alrick Huebener’s studio.
Penn read in a tribute to Gwendolyn MacEwen at Art Bar.
In 1999, Penn will be performing with poet Patricia Keeney in rehearsed readings of interlocking themes in their poetry. We will be describing this collage project in Literary Network News. Pat and Penn read on March 23rd in the Centre of Film and Theatre at York from 2:30-4:30pm. Subsequent performances are scheduled for several venues in Vancouver and Toronto. These evenings of poetry performance will be directed by Don Rubin of the Drama Department at York University, Toronto.