Okanagan College Media Release - July 6, 2007

Add a national award for poetry to the ascending list of accomplishments of Okanagan College English professor Jake Kennedy.

Kennedy is this year’s recipient of the bpNichol Chapbook Award for poetry.

Kennedy won the honour for his chapbook Hazard, which was chosen out of 37 submissions from across Canada and given the top prize by judges Bev Daurio and Richard Truhlar, two prominent Canadian writers and publishers who were personal friends of writer bpNichol. 

“It is thrilling to think that in whatever tiny way I get to be associated with bp,” says Kennedy. “He was a relentlessly innovative writer. My connection to his memory knocks me over because I grew up reading his work.”

Considered by many as a trailblazer of experimental Canadian literature, bpNichol produced a prolific amount of work throughout his career and won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1971. bpNichol established the annual Chapbook award in 1984, four years before his death, as a means of recognizing talent and encouraging new Canadian poets.

Hazard, a 27-page collection of Kennedy’s prose-poems and visual poetry, was written between 2000-2004. The work is comprised of seven distinct sections. Each section bears the name of a writer or artist and specifically considers an uncanny detail or event in his or her life.

In a piece entitled “Beckett,” Kennedy focuses on the notorious stabbing of dramatist/novelist Samuel Beckett at the hands of a Paris pimp in 1937.

2. Hole
 
In this space the words do not meet their
destinations. The words start out alright
but they end up turning into other things.
I have seen this happen, but on a different
scale: 'We walked to the' and what comes
after the 'the' is a hawk in the sky. Appearing
to take away our speech. Essentially these
ideas get silenced, it is sometimes a case
of substitutions. The environment takes
over from the talking. In this space, more
specifically, the knife is leaning over to the
lung. The lung is also calling to the knife.
We have tended to characterize violent
acts as unspeakable.


“In the poem I try to think through this bizarre event in terms of three terms--Knife, Hole, Lung--and the specific links they suggest between language and action,” explains Kennedy.

Considering the genre of avant-garde poetry is less than prominent in mainstream literature, Kennedy feels the recognition and tradition of celebrating aspiring writers is really what the award was meant to do.

“There is a group of folks in Canada who are all working in the field of experimental writing and also knowingly following quite a narrow path in the literary world,” says Kennedy. “To be chosen from that field is flattering and I feel I am quite lucky. I think that luck is important though and if everyone gets a bit of luck in their career, that is what can move you forward.”

This fall Kennedy will resume teaching full-time in the English department at Okanagan College. He will teach two sections of Readings in Short Fiction and the Novel, one section of Introduction to Creative Writing and one section of a course he designed himself, History and Theory of the Book.