Lionel John Kearns (born February 16, 1937) is a writer, educator, philosopher and polyartist, known for his innovative literary forms, and his contributions to the field of digital poetics.
His parents were Dorothy Welch and Charles Francis Kearns, WW I aviator, short story writer, and conservationist.
[4] After the war the family returned to Nelson, where Kearns spent the next ten years as an active student, athlete (baseball & hockey), and musician (bagpipes[5] and saxophone).
[6] This period of his life was also marked by frequent trips with his father on foot and horseback through the natural wilderness of south-east British Columbia.
[4] In 1955 Kearns moved to Vancouver and enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he began his language and media studies, and associated with a group of young writers that included George Bowering, Frank Davey and Fred Wah.
[6] In 1966, after a year of field work on the island of Trinidad, Kearns returned to Canada to take a position in the English Department at the newly established Simon Fraser University in Burnaby,[9] where he taught for the next twenty years,[10] with the exception of 1982-83, when he was the Writer in Residence at Concordia University in Montreal.
His books, such as By the Light of the Silvery McLune: Media Parables, Poems, Signs, Gestures, and Other Assaults on the Interface (1969), and Convergences (1984), reflected his focus on language and his novel approaches to literary presentation.
In later years, he embraced newly developing technologies and applications, which allowed him to combine graphics, hyperlinked text, audio, and video.
His work, which blurred the line between traditional forms and digital media, made him a pioneer in the widening field of electronic literature.
[1] Kearns first published book, Songs of Circumstance (1963) presented a study of variable meter in oral poetry, focusing on breath groups that exist in emotionally textured speech.
[6] Although he eventually abandoned this notation as impractical, given the constraints of typesetting at that time, "Stacked-Verse" was discussed in a variety of literary publications, drawing international attention to his early work.
In 1964, the American Beat writer, Jack Kerouac, wrote, "Lionel Kearns is brilliant, that's mah opinion!"
[1] At Simon Fraser University, where he taught between 1966 and 1986, a period before the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, Kearns set up electronic seminars for his students, using computer bulletin boards and available terminals connected to the university's single primitive mainframe computer,[12] which he also used to write, edit, and format his widely discussed work, Convergences, a book-length meditation on a 1778 incident at Nootka Sound, when Captain Cook and the crew members of his two ships mingled for an unprecedented month of historical social interaction.
[6] After retiring from Simon Fraser University in 1986, Kearns taught a pre-internet online graduate course entitled, "The Cybernetics of Poetry", for ConnectEd, the distance education facility of the New School for Social Research in New York City.
[6] In 1988 he became the first Writer-in-Electronic Residence, helping Trevor Owen establish the WIER project, an on-line creative writing program for school students that flourished across Canada for more than twenty years.
[6][13] When Apple's HyperCard application became available, Kearns used it to construct interactive poems, later transposing them into Flash documents that ran on the Web.
Kearns displayed his digital creations, including a colorful updated version of Convergences, on his own website, which is available on the Wayback Machine internet archive.
Kearns has claimed that the purpose of poetry is to stimulate consciousness, waking us up to the fact that we are still here, alive, and free to act.
[14] Beneath the humor, irony, and sense of wonder that rises to the surface in much of his work, there lurks a layer of serious intellectual interrogation and philosophical statement.
The fact that many of his digital works have now disappeared as a result of media obsolescence, parallels his acceptance of the transience of experience and the mutability of life.