Barbaric Cultural Practice
In praise and rant, the poems in Barbaric Cultural Practice pay tribute to our dear MotherWorld’s enchantments as well as her upheavals. They confront the stresses of urban life as juxtaposed to nature’s round, and deal, for example, with the effect of computers on our psyche and with the imprint of electronic media upon perception, consciousness and dream life. They are a response to the need for action against climate change and a humorous protest against overwhelming technology.
Barbaric Cultural Practice is an urgent set of makings, of remarkable and dramatic word-acts, that reminds us that language – the hallmark of civilization – also enables barbaric, human imposition on Nature and the eternal. The inaugural Poet Laureate of London (ON), Penn Kemp is an expert tool-and-die versifier. Proof? Well, that very pun you’ve just read is indebted to her, for she employs every poetry technique available – every tool in the toolbox – to stress the stubborn connection between concrete reality and supposedly abstract words. Nor does Kemp flinch from pondering how our distancing embrace (that’s not an oxymoron) of electronica interferes with our relationships to the earth, each other, and to Art. Barbaric Cultural Practice is so timely, it is an alarm clock, shocking us awake to our drowsy, Eloi circumstances.
– George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada
Penn Kemp’s Barbaric Cultural Practice is a stunning and magical tribute of travel wisdom of vision of longing of voices and of Goddess ways of seeing into and circumnavigating the heart of old ways of ancient catapulting into futures of tech-knowledge-able dancing back and forth of swaying of seeds of truth gardening matter of otherworldly mantras singing of the everyday made extraordinary. what movement in stillness what stillness in motion. what beauty what love!
– Sheri-D Wilson, author of Open Letter: Woman Against Violence Against Women
A witty tongue-wrestle with the mechanics and metaphors of the poet’s new tools, in a techno-unbounded universe where the only limitations are the electrical conduits from brain through fingers to glaring screen. What happens when the lyric power of a highly experienced and galvanically charged poet dances in the electron stream? Connect with a surging circuit of Penn Kemp’s energetic and eclectic words, connect and recharge.
– Susan McMaster
“Penn Kemp’s Barbaric Cultural Practice brings together etymological, sonic, and cultural layerings of the words “barbaric,’ “cultural,” and “practice.” This electric new volume distinguishes the truly creative and evolutionary from what impedes a fuller engagement with each other and with planet earth. In these poems, the source of true wildness (wilderness) calls heart to heart: “I has widened to include/ you and you and you be-//cause no barrier intrudes/between us.”
— Susan McCaslin, author of Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne
“Penn Kemp’s work is profoundly mystical, a tour into otherworldly realms but informed by ‘this world’s’ concerns. She takes her reader to the edge, understanding the depths of poetry, and the ability of language to cross borders into metaphysical realism.”
— Leona Graham, activist, The WILD Foundation, author of Cloudbank Across the Fens
“What is it like, writing a poem? Penn Kemp knows. She has spent her life performing poetry, publishing poetry, being poet-in-residence, Poet Laureate, poster-person for other poets. Now she stows her yellow pencil, fingers the keys of her computer, opens a new window and waits for a poem to find its way onto the desktop…The rhythms, the internal rhymes, the spaces, work against logical walls. Then another twist, and Penn Kemp launches a final fantastic essential plea for light.”
— Elizabeth Waterson, Readying Rilla: L. M. Montgomery Reworks her Manuscript
Author’s full Acknowledgements for this book.
