Lionel Kearns
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Lionel Kearns was born in 1937 and raised in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, where he was an enthusiastic student, musician and athlete. Influenced by his father, Charles Francis Kearns, a former WW1 pilot, outdoorsman, and short story writer, Kearns initiated his literary career in the mid 1950s by setting out on a life of travel and adventure that included playing hockey in Mexico. In the early 1960s, while studying at the University of British Columbia, Kearns became a close friend of the editors of literary magazine Tish, and contributed significantly to its development.
Exposed to the ideas of both Marshall McLuhan and the Russian Formalists, Kearns began an investigation of traditional and modern prosody that led to his proposal for "Stacked Verse", a page notation system for oral poetry that featured a "stress axis" running down the page through the most heavily accented syllable of each phrase of the poem. Kearns set out the theory in his M.A. thesis, and illustrated the notation in Songs of Circumstance, published by TishBooks in 1962. These poems, marked by irony and understated humour, were followed by Listen George, a free flowing long-lined verse-letter, recalling episodes of his youth, which Kearns wrote while studying Structural and Generative Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Active on the British poetry scene, Kearns came under the influence of the European Concrete and Sound Poetry movements, creating the first version of his much published mathematical mandala, "The Birth of God". Before leaving England for the West Indian island of Trinidad, where he spent a year researching the history and structure of Trinidadian English, Kearns worked as a production assistant and actor in the War Game, Peter Watkins' controversial film about nuclear disaster in the UK.
In 1966 Kearns returned to Canada to take up a position in the English Department of Simon Fraser University. By the Light of the Silvery McLuhan: Media Parables, Poems, Signs Gestures, and Other Assaults on the Interface (1968) is a book of celebrations and social protest rooted in the preoccupations of the 60s. Practicing Up to Be Human (1978) marked a return to the rhythmically crafted, intellectually intense poems of his early work. Ignoring the Bomb (1982) is a collection of new and collected poems. In 1982-83 Kearns spent a year in Montreal as Writer-in-Residence at Concordia University. His finest work, Convergences (1984), is a book length poem for voices that explores the 1778 interaction between the native people of Nootka Sound on the North West Pacific coast and the crew members of Captain James Cook's two ships. This work exemplifies Kearns' continuing fascination with the idea of text (context, subtext, hypertext) and his interest in history. The second edition of this work is available on line at www.lionelkearns.com/convergences.
Since retiring from Simon Fraser in 1986 Kearns has become increasingly interested in literary potential of digital media. He pioneered online education by teaching, from his home in Vancouver, a continent-wide graduate course, "The Cybernetics of Poetry", for ConnectEd, the distance education facility of the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1988 he became the first writer in electronic residence, helping Trevor Owen establish an online creative writing program that has since flourished across Canada at the "WIER" project.
References
- Lianne Moyes, "Dialoguing the Monologue of History and Lyric: Lionel Kearns' Convergences", Open Letter 7, 5 (Summer 1989),15-27
- Manina Jones, Log Entries: Exploring discursive space in Lionel Kearns Convergences, in Douglas Barber, ed., Beyond Tish. (1991).