The Daily Kit: Happy snaps from the opening of MY FIRST FOREST OF WORDS and the big 7 book Flying Islands Boolaunch at the Addi Rd Writers' Festival -- Saturday 16th May, 2026

in the Stirrup Gallery, Addi Rd

Happy snaps (various sources) from the opening of

Kit Kelen's

MY FIRST FOREST OF WORDS

the big 7 book Flying Islands Boolaunch at the Addi Rd Writers' Festival --

Saturday 16th May, 2026

Peter Boyle

Damien Becker

Gillian Rubinstein

Marl Mahemoff

Chris Mansell

Clark Gormley

Nadia Wheatley

Brook Emery

BROOK EMERY'S SPEECH FOR THE EXHIBITION

Launch Speech - Kit Kelen - My First Forest of Words

Given the times, I need to declare at the outset that this speech was not generated by AI and that, despite appearances, I am not a bot. It goes without saying that Kit’s exhibition has not been constructed by AI either. I have been wondering, however, what would happen if I waved my camera around the exhibition and asked AI to write my speech. AI would be bamboozled. It would produce, I’m sure, the most anodyne, reductive, inhuman description imaginable.

This brings me to the first thing I want to say about the exhibition. It is intensely human and represents one ‘thinking reed’s attempt to say something which is not simple, commodified, unambiguous, and banal; to say something which is meaningful yet resists being reduced to summary. Which means, I’m in trouble. This is hand work, handiwork, it is pencil and paper, paint and charcoal, it is creative mess and chaos. What’s the Einstein line, ‘creativity is the intelligence having fun’. It stands in sharp contrast to the mechanical, the sanitised, the spellchecked and whitewashed.

The second thing I want to say is that Kit’s undertaking is massive. There is something to be said for size because it is indicative of ambition. Not in the negative, self-aggrandising sense but in the artistic sense of wanting to push boundaries, go beyond, explore, not be satisfied with the neat and comprehensible, the expected, accepted, digested and forgotten. This is the work of a career and I am all but overwhelmed by the scale of it

Kit calls his exhibition a ‘forest of words’ which conjures up all the possible associations of ‘forest’ - dense, dark, beautiful, mysterious, haunted, lost … Goethe … for example - and contrasts the natural, unthinking materiality or, if you like, spirituality of a forest with the abstract signification of words and their multiple meanings. One of the struggles of poetry is how to use words to go beyond words, how to make words worthy of the world, worthy of human perceptions, feelings, and intuitions. Kit invites you to wander, and wonder, through this forest of words - the first words you might see beside the entrance are ‘come into the forest/go whichever way’ you wish. A little later you might notice the suggestion, ‘there is no grammar you can trust/ take this one spark and follow/ be lost’.

Kit frames the exhibition with the statement, ‘no signs without meaning - no meaning without signs’. I don’t want to get lost in the forest of semantics and semiotics. Like Kit, I am one of Pascal’s ‘thinking reeds’ but there are limits to what this reed can think. Suffice to say, I agree with Kit’s formulation but note that in the realms of art, and of poetry especially, ‘meaning’ is not unproblematic or uncontested.

To suggest how problematic it is may I offer these two quotations. The first is from the American Beat writer Brion Gysin in his ‘ Statement on the Cut Up Method and Permutated Poems’. He declares, ‘… poets are supposed to liberate the words - not chain them into phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think.’ The second is from the Dada manifesto: ‘Any work that can be understood is the product of a journalist.’ So, in these views, meaning is not the point, meaning is the enemy. But humans are meaning-making animals and will look for meaning in any text, no matter how gnomic, obscure or randomised. The poet’s task, according to T S Eliot is to ‘dislocate words into meaning’.

I’d also like to consider this extract from a review by the SMH art critic John McDonald: ‘… the work has to connect with the viewer primarily on on a sensory level. The only test is whether it captures and holds our attention. Interpretations can follow in good time’. I would like to stress the sensory level of this exhibition, the way poem links to poem, fragment links to fragment. Kit does not chain words. He liberates them. He dis-locates and relocates them. Importantly, he respects them.

Kit asks the questions, how does one make meaning, specifically in art and poetry, and in music, art and poetry combined? Is meaning, even of the simplest statement, ever transparent? Are we talking about ‘meaning’ singular or ‘meanings’ plural? How, by what means, does one know, understand or misunderstand? By thinking, Blaise Pascal might answer, though I’m not credentialed to answer for him. We could also consider T S Eliot’s contention that meaning is conveyed indirectly through the music of a poem at least as much as it is conveyed directly to the intelligence. To make an appropriate link to the visual, we can consider Simonides statement, ‘Painting is silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks.’ These paintings and drawings do speak, they are in conversation with each other and with the poems that are interleaved with them.

Human beings love to categorise things. Once you have categorised something, or had it pigeon-holed for you, you no longer have to do the hard work of thinking. It has been named, described, tamed. You have a readymade, reductive, generalisation to fall back on. Kit’s exhibition defies categorisation. It is experimenting with Simonides’s statement, it is exploring indirect and direct ways of making meaning. Somewhere in the formative background of this exhibition I intuit the flash of haiku, the art and poetry books of ancient China and Japan, the combinations of collage, the wit of concrete poetry, the glint of the philosophical fragment, the impact of Imagism, ekphrasis, I suppose, even the randomness and surprise of the Cut-Up method; my mind turns to the paintings of Dubuffet, Klee and Miro, even the cartoons of Bruce Petty. All of these influences, and more, seem to be swirling around beneath the surface of this exhibition but none of them adequately describes it. I am making no attempt to categorise the exhibition but I will proffer one term which you might like to consider.

For some time now it has been fashionable to speak of ‘embodiment’ or ‘embodied’ poetry. This has annoyed me a bit because I sometimes see it applied as praise to poems which, to me at least, are lifeless and have no connection to the physicality of the body, its senses and apprehensions.But, though I hate buzz words, I will say that this exhibition is truly embodied poetry. It asks of you, provokes in you - the reader, the viewer - a physical, perceptual reaction before an intellectual one.

This thinking reed is not going to give you an interpretation of Kit’s work. Instead I’m going to suggest a way in which you can ‘read’ this work and make meanings for yourselves. Or, more accurately, ‘experience’ the work. I’m inviting you not to approach the work with fixed ideas about poetry and art; you can’t read these poems as you would read a traditional volume of poetry. I’m inviting you to ‘immerse’ yourself in the exhibition, let it wash over you. Forget sequence. Allow your eyes to roam, freely associate one poem with another, one fragment with another, discover fruitful juxtapositions, or even fruitful inconsistencies, consonances and dissonances, allow the work to throw up all sorts of questions without straining for answers. Make of it a sensory experience and leave interpretation to later or, if your name is Susan Sontag, don’t interpret at all.

As you wander the exhibition you are going to discover poems about blokes and poems about bears, poems which won the bicentennial poetry prize and the Newcastle poetry prize; you might notice that the quotation ‘always look on the bright side’ is followed by ‘a forest of gallows/where Eden was’; you might notice the despairing question ‘is there a world more fucked up than this?’ And the answer: ‘We’re getting there now’; only to find it followed by ‘there is the joy of just where I am/I hope you’ll feel that too’; like me, you might notice the punning absurdism of ‘an orchestra/high up in a tree/ sawing itself/off a limb’; or the lyricism of ‘it fell/ to birds/to make/a sky/ their moment to moment invention’; or the haunting ‘the most/dangerous animal/that is or ever was/ the one who/made the mirror/now peering/in at you’. Or your eye will light on so many different things that I didn’t notice. You are likely to meet anger, cynicism, whimsy, idealism, grief, hope in poems which are by turns political, lyrical, enigmatic, spare, exuberant, resonant and suggestive. A line that recurs to me is ‘the earth becomes a little weary of us maybe’ because it reminds me how much this exhibition is about how, as humans, we could do so much better.

He wasn’t the first to say something similar, but sometime in the 50s or 60s the American poet Kenneth Rexroth declared, ‘Against the ruin of the world the creative act is the only defence.’ I used to think this a bit apocalyptic and self-inflating. Now, when Humpty Dumpty Trumpy bloviates, blunders and blusters in Washington, implicitly decreeing, without irony or self-awareness, ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’, I think Rexroth might have been right. In a world where vocabularies are shrinking, jargon is multiplying, and words are increasingly used to obscure, to lie, to cheat, to manipulate, and confound the evidence of our eyes and ears, I think an exhibition like this which examines the nature of language and meaning is a needed defence of culture and civilisation against technological and governmental barbarism.

Which takes me back, finally, to the first thing I said about the exhibition: it is intensely human. I invite you to enjoy it.