Kaie Kellough
Kaie Kellough is facing slightly tilted towards camera fight. He is wearing a plain, white shirt, and is posing outdoors before an out-of-focus backdrop of green and white circular spectrums of light.
Biography
Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. From western Canada, he lives in Montréal and has roots in Guyana, South America.
Magnetic Equator (poetry, McClelland and Stewart 2019) was awarded the 2020 Griffin Poetry prize. His collection of short stories, Dominoes at the Crossroads (Véhicule, 2020), was nominated for several national awards.
Kaie’s vocal performance, recorded audio, and electronic narrative explore migration and the suspension of arrival. Kaie creates mixed media compositions with saxophonist and synthesist Jason Sharp. Their collaborative audio-visual performances have been broadcast by jazz festivals across Europe and Canada, and their first group album, FYEAR, will be released on Constellation Records.
Kaie’s work has traveled to the UK, Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, and continental Europe. He continues to craft new passages.
Poetics Statement
“My poetry issues from the Black diaspora’s oral, musical, and literary traditions, and returns to them inflected by the ongoing experience of a body and a consciousness moving through today’s troubled world. I approach language as dynamic, as sonic, and visual, as embodied, even when my focus is the printed word.
My work reaches toward collaboration across artistic disciplines, and I believe that poetry flourishes when it is sounded, when it is performed, scored, or presented in ways that challenge how we read, that trouble what we consider “the poem.” I continue to present poetry in collaboration with instrumentalists, composers, animators, and type designers. I do write for the printed page, but I think of print as only one way for poetry to encounter its audiences.
My poetry persists in a state of suspended completion. If it is published in one format, say in a book, that represents a single version/vision of the poem, but the poem is not fixed. It remains flexible, changeable, ready to be adapted to the world and the needs of the moment. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
From Magnetic Equator, McLelland & Stewart, 2019. Untitled.
people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people predated arrival. people fled predation. people were arrayed. people populated. whips patterned rays into people. people arose. people rayed outward to toronto, london, boo york. people raided people. people penned the past. people roved over on planes. people talked over people. people rented places. people planted people in people. people raided plantations. people prayed. people re-fried. people died and didn't get second glances. people won scholarships and vanished. people lived atop people. people represented people. people drain-brained. people studied for the common entrance. people paraded. people stumbled and tranced. people took two steps backward. people simmered and boiled over. people plantain. people orphan. people sugarcane. people undocumented. people underground. people never lauded, landed. people arrived but. people . people departed and arrived again. people retreaded. people stole knowing. people plantation. people horizon. people done run from people. people arrived not knowing their patterns. people arrived riven, alone in the world. people made their way from time. people hailed from climes. people fanned their spreading. people cleaved unto people. people writhed over / under people. people arrived over / under people
billions of slow forest eyes follow me, curved and pointed at their edges the leaves blink, the slick leaves turn and read me as i pass, a glowing amber figure, an interloper with a strange culture of concrete and wires colonizing my gray-matter, the dangling vines are letters my language can’t decipher, the jungle floor is fallen leaves, decomposing maps, fermenting directions, lives steaming as they sink into the earth is fired fronds in overlapping patterns above the sun-hammered black copper floor, veined glyps that branch and re-branch into each other, is an inchoate language simmering down into the cosmic crucible, is leaves flattened and sinking into the earth’s molten ore without a whisper, is the echo of the canopy’s nocturnal chatter, is an infinite archive of carbon-based letterforms, is a gibberish rustle in the underbrush, is the eyelid’s crocodile skin, its reptilian braille thinking, is an imprint more ancient than paper, is decomposing into the bitter, gleaming sap of a literature, is a wink in the gloaming of homo sapiens, is an organic desire to continue without hubris, heaving and exhaling a fermenting mist that drifts up between the branches, that settles into moss in the grooves of rippled trunks, that sails up into the solid beams of light rotating down through breaks in the green, up into the insectile parliament in the canopy, and up again, the earth’s exhale hangs above rot and ripening alike, the forest’s jaw groans
this piece is / is not about the past, and it is / is not about the future, but it is / is not about a stasis all waves syncopate. this piece awash in ways is not a pisces, though fish flash in the offing. this piece ripples on the surface. it foams ashore in futures, it tides back into the passage. these words shift and chop, dissolve and go nowhere. these words don't go nowhere, they simply shift atop. they could shift a ship, these words wharves shift and as they do, space shifts, and a ship of some mass also shifts. its contents shift. its contents constitute a cargo. as with continents, cargo shifts. this piece is a cargo harried across a world. the cargo constitutes a consonant carried across. the cargo carries across. this cargo is stars. it is a shifted piece of ass. the world is itself a cargo carried in the hold of this verse hold thoughts shimmer along pixelated surf. these thoughts are also a cargo. they migrate without ever arriving at a store. thoughts know no store
are unsure and sometimes dissemble. economies are unsure and sometimes dissolve. cargo sinks to the bottom as shift, overheard. somewhere in an office, the cargo is written off. the written onus. the letters crouch and signify in the offing. the signifying mitigates but never ashores. the arrival is delayed, in four-four tide. the time elects to move forward and back at once. the tide elects not to arrive but rather to lingo between, among, within, beneath, atop. the letters syncopate atop the screen but are backspaced. the is rewritten
