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Winners of the 2015 Poetry London Contest

3/31/2015

This year's judge: Gregory Betts

1st Place: Kevin Heslop: "all of language is braille"
2nd Place: Penn Kemp: "As if you are leaping in the air"
Honourable Mention: Jeremy Nathan Marks: "Newport"

The winning poems were read at the March 25th Poetry London event, which featured poets Gregory Betts and Matthew Henderson.

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The specialty of Penn Kemp (Apr. 1st, 2015 feature) dates from early 1900s.

3/28/2015

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Penn Kemp's specialty, sound poetry, goes back to the early 20th century

For those of you unsure of where sound poetry came from, here is Wikipedia's version of events:

The writing of pure sound texts, that downplay the roles of meaning and structure in poetry, had it's beginning in the early 20th century. The Futurist and Dadaist movements of the beginning of the century were the pioneers in creating the first sound poetry forms. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti discovered that onomatopoeias were useful to describe a battle in Tripoli where he was a soldier, creating a sound text that became a sort of a spoken photograph of the battle. Dadaists were more involved in sound poetry and they invented different categories:

Bruitist poem is the phonetic poem, not so different from the futurist poem. Invented by Richard Huelsenbeck.
Simultaneous poem is a poem read in different languages, with different rhythms, tonalities, and by different persons at the same time. Invented by Tristan Tzara.
Movement poem is the poem accompanied by primitive movements.

Early examples:

Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) is a sound poem and concrete poem by Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti.

Hugo Ball performed a piece of sound poetry in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916:
"I created a new species of verse, 'verse without words,' or sound poems....I recited the following: gadji beri bimbaglandridi lauli lonni cadori..."(Albright, 2004)

For many dadaists, such as Hugo Ball, sound poetry also presented a language of trauma, a cacophony used to protest the sound of the cannons of World War I. It was as T. J. Demos writes, "a telling stutter, a nervous echolalia."[7]

Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1922–32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example:
The first movement rondo's principal theme being a word, "fmsbwtözäu" pronounced Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, from a 1918 poem by Raoul Hausmann, apparently also a sound poem. Schwitters also wrote a less well-known sound poem consisting of the sound of the letter W. (Albright, 2004)

Chilean Vicente Huidobro's explores phonetic mutations of words in his book "Altazor"(1931).

In his story The Poet at Home, William Saroyan refers to a character who practices a form of pure poetry, composing verse of her own made up words.

Later evolution:
Sound poetry evolved into visual poetry and concrete poetry, two forms based in visual arts issues although the sound images are always very compelling in them. Later on, with the development of the magnetic tape recorder, sound poetry evolved thanks to the upcoming of the concrete music movement at the end of the 1940s. Some sound poetics were used by later poetry movements like the beat generation in the fifties or the spoken word movement in the 80's, and by other art and music movements that brought up new forms such as text sound art that may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble "fiction or even essays, as traditionally defined, than poetry".

Female practitioners:

It has been argued that “there is a paucity of information on women's involvement in sound poetry, whether as practitioners, theorists, or even simply as listeners.”[2] Among the earliest female practitioners are Berlin poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who experimented in what she called “Ursprache” (Ur-language), and the New York Dada poet and performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness’s poem “Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)” was published in The Little Review in March 1920 to great controversy. Written in response to her husband Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven’s suicide, the sound poem was “a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries”.[3] The Baroness was also known for her sexually charged sound poetry, as seen in “Teke Heart (Beating of Heart),” only recently published.[4]

The poet Edith Sitwell coined the term Abstract poetry to describe some of her own poems which possessed more aural than literary qualities, rendering them essentially meaningless: "The poems in Façade are abstract poems--that is, they are patterns of sound. They are...virtuoso exercises in technique of extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music." (Sitwell, 1949)

Theories of sound poetry:

In their essay “Harpsichords Metallic Howl—", Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo review the theories of sound by Charles Bernstein, Gerald Bruns, Min-Quian Ma, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jeffrey McCaffery and others to argue that sonic poetry foregrounds its own corporality. Thus “the Baroness's sound poems let her body speak[;] through her expansive use of sound, the Baroness conveys the fluidity of gender as a constantly changing, polysemous signifier.” In this way, somatic art becomes the poet’s own “space-sound.”[6]

Later prominent sound poets:

include Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Ada Verdun Howell, Allen Ginsberg, bpNichol, William S. Burroughs, Giovanni Fontana,[5] Bernard Heidsieck, Enzo Minarelli, François Dufrene, Mathias Goeritz, Maurizio Nannucci,Andras Petocz, and Jaap Blonk, a Dutch sound poet who often works with improvising musicians.

London's Penn Kemp has created the term "sound opera" for her version of sound poetry. The following is from London Open Mic Poetry Night's interview with Penn Kemp:

LOMPN: You refer to your poetry now as “sound opera” instead of “sound poetry”. What do you mean by “sound opera”, and how do you differentiate it from “sound poetry”?

PK: A sound poem is for me performed by a single voice, even though Canada fostered marvellous sound poetry groups. I’ve enjoyed pushing textual and aural boundaries, often in participatory performance work, working across a variety of poetic practices to engage the audience. Since I often work in collaboration with musicians, theatre folks, videographers and other multimedia/ visual artists, I looked for a term that was less focussed on a specific literary tradition, even one like Dada. So the sound poem naturally developed into “Sound Operas": poetic narratives that weave sound, imagery and music in a contemporary counterpoint of many voices and different forms. My writing life is divided between poetry and theatre: Sound Opera jumps that gap and allows for both. Seven of my Sound Operas have been performed at London’s glorious Aeolian Hall. Poetry in performance is the way I spread the word for the arts and inspire action to support them! It's a great joy to collaborate with artists from different media: they expand my sense of possibility.

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Organizer's Report on the Mar. 4th event and the future

3/16/2015

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Everything came together perfectly for the first time in our three seasons. A great introduction by John Tyndall and a wonderful reading by feature Patricia Black were only the first, large stepping stones across the pond. The next step was so easy it wasn't even noticed by most people: It was the lack of loud, live music, which has always in the past seriously hampered the buzz of conversation. The audience was too busy talking to notice it was missing. This was the first time, as well, in which we used two co-hosts during the one event. I opened it with a subdued, straight-forward introduction to the evening and, when Patricia was finished reading and all the questions and answers had come to a halt, the other co-host, Joan Clayton, stepped forward and her energy took the open mic section to the next level. Her introductions to the readers and her little comments after them also helped to unify the event. And then luck added its own finishing touches to this particular event: The progression of open mic readers was so perfect, each in exactly the right place to only add to and not subtract from those on either side, that a newby to the series could easily have thought it had all been planned. When it was over, it felt perfect. We stood around in the glow of it, not wanting it to end. Linda and I packed up and slowly headed home. I spotted a MacDonald's and we stopped and sat in the car for half an hour licking ice cream cones and chatting about the people and the readings and this little community of poets we're a part of.

Stan Burfield, organizer

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REMINDER: OPEN MIC TONIGHT, FEATURING PATRICIA BLACK

3/4/2015

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Featured poet Patricia Black

--featuring Patricia Black and all the open mic poets who want to read.

WHERE: Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

MUSIC: We are quieting down our music to allow for easier conversation than was possible in the past. Consequently, we will have live accompanying music from 6:30 to 7:00, or, if we can't get a musician, piped-in restaurant music.

THE FEATURED POET: Patricia Black will open the poetry portion of the event at 7:00, followed by a Q&A. Patricia's bio, interview and four of her poems.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poet, as many open mic poets who want to read will read, the first 15 of them before about 9:15 pm when we will have a short break. After that, open mic readings will continue until 10:30 or until they have all read. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. It's first come, first served. The audience will thin out as time goes on, so the shyer poets might prefer to have their names near the end.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income.

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﻿Winners of the 2015 Poetry London Contest﻿

The specialty of Penn Kemp (Apr. 1st, 2015 feature) dates from early 1900s.

Organizer's Report on the Mar. 4th event and the future

REMINDER: OPEN MIC TONIGHT, FEATURING PATRICIA BLACK

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Winners of the 2015 Poetry London Contest