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Pendas Productions - March 28, 2006 - 1 Comment

From The Lunar Plexus: A Sound Opera by Penn Kemp

Reviewed by Lynda Curnoe

How does poetry happen?  Penn Kemp’s From the Lunar Plexus: A Sound Opera is a series of poems that addresses this question, documenting a mental journey which begins with preparations for sleep. A narrator leads the listener underneath and behind everyday life and concerns into a landscape of dreams, images, and sounds, and then back out again.

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Pendas Productions - March 15, 2006 - 5 Comments

Pendas Productions

Reviewed by Richard Stevenson

Does contemporary poetry and prose often leave you cold?  Do you find that a lot of contemporary poets seem to write for the page and not the stage?  Are you tired of going to public readings only to discover that your favourite published poet or novelist is a bad actor and mumbles through the microphone in a barely audible monotone, or, conversely, engages in strange acts of feedback fellatio as s/he screams, declaims, yelps, and yawps his/ her way through incomprehensible free verse lines of self-flagellating psychobabble?  Are you tired of being embarrassed every time that touted poet mumbles greeting card verse that doesn’t scan, and you can’t make your way to the door without all the eyes turning in unison and slamming against your ass like a turnstile bar?  Maybe you were so desperate you grabbed for the first door handle you could find and found yourself holed up in a broom closet for the duration of the reading.  I know at least one person to whom that has happened.

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