KEVIN SPENST
A Most Cheerful Fella

by Karen Petersen
Kevin Spenst lives West of Denman (on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory) and writes and writes and writes. Often, he also rides and rides and rides his bike.

With Anvil Press, he published Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: A Memoir in Verse, in addition to authoring in excess of a dozen chapbooks [including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Upend (Frog Hollow Press) and a “holm” with Alfred Gustav Press coming out at the end of this year. (see below)

Kevin has also shared his work in many Canadian publications, including, but not limited to Event, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, the Rusty Toque, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and 2020 and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds.

In 2019, he was the writer in residence at Joy Kogawa House near Marpole.

Kevin co-organizes the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes a chapbook column in subTerrain magazine, is an occasional co-host with RC Weslowski on Wax Poetic on Co-op Radio, teaches creative writing at Vancouver Community College, and is the 2022 Poetry Mentor a SFU’s Writers Studio.

He has three more chapbooks coming out very shortly:

Alfred Gustav Press (North Vancouver) will be publishing a series of Kevin’s love poems this December as one of their ‘holms’ - smaller format chapbooks dedicated to those poets who have previously published with them in a regular chapbook, as Kevin did with Pray Goodbye in Series Eleven (November 2013). The poems are dedicated to the “ever-fluorescent Cheryl Rossi.”

But wait, there are more poems coming out from another micro-press in London, Ontario. [845 Press under the auspices of The Temz Review.] A Videotape Swaddled in Purple Wool is a relatively long chapbook (at forty-four pages) and is made up of love poems and pandemic poems, almost all of which were written in the West End.

The third chapbook is a collaborative collection which Kevin wrote with his nephew Joshua Pitre, who lives in Montreal. Joshua is doing a degree in linguistics and converted the letters of the words of one of Kevin’s poems into IPA symbols [International Phonetic Alphabet].

More poems followed and more strategies were applied. They submitted the poems to Collusion Press in Halifax and boom, the experiment will be published this November and possibly next May.

Here’s Kevin’s best piece of advice re writing: “Find a way to incorporate the craft of writing into the rhythm of your everyday life. For four years, I wrote a short-short story every day. That helped get me started.”

And behold Kevin’s motto (from Beckett) “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Kevin will be reading from A Videotape Swaddled in Purple Wool at the Massey Arts Centre on East Pender this December 14, with Viviane Li, who also has a chapbook of poetry with 845 Press.