Kerry Dorey is a multi-hyphenate: he’s an actor and a voice artist; he leads sound baths at Village Yoga; and—between you and me—he’s a member of Pemberton’s growing Secret Poetry Appreciation Society.
Poetry has always been in the wings for Dorey; he was an actor for more than 30 years in Toronto, and when he moved out to Pemberton and began leading sound baths at Village Yoga, poetry became central.
“I realized I'd been sort of working with language all my life,” he remember. “And started reading poetry more for the sound baths that I do, because when people are lying in a space and trying to sort of just relax, sometimes just the notion of listening to some words being read to them can guide their thinking.”
Poetry through sound baths
However you engage in poetry is legitimate; old English poets never quite resonated with Dorey, so he looked to more contemporary writers. That was his in. And pairing recitations with sound baths has become a go-to medium for him to share poetry with others.
In the same way you can crank up some tunes on your drive home to decompress, Dorey uses sound baths to transition the body from a fight-or-flight state into a rest-and-digest state using chimes, gongs and a host of other instruments.
“The bottom line is just that it creates the opportunity for people to just relax and be able to transition their body from this sort of sympathetic fight-or-flight state that we're always in to this sort of parasympathetic rest-and-digest state,” he said. “Because we don't really know how to rest very well and we don't really know how to let go very well.
That’s not to say the impact of a sound bath is going to be the same for everyone; much like how listening to any song can resonate differently for different people, sound baths can elicit disparate emotions and reactions based on who’s listening.
“I'm not going to tell you this is exactly how you're going to feel, because everybody is going to experience it a different way depending on what they bring into the room,” said Dorey.
“They can make you go, ‘Oh, I remember this,’ or, ‘This makes me feel anxious,’ or ‘It makes me feel relaxed and peaceful.’”
A few years back, Dorey decided to pair his sound baths with poetry readings. Listening to him—which you can do at Village Yoga or through Lisa Richardson’s Wellness Almanac blog—you can hear why the pairing is so natural; Dorey’s voice is deep and resonant, gravelly but clear with an emotional core. It complements the sound baths.
“I think poems have a beautiful way of just pointing at an idea, and poets are able to articulate something that we can only sometimes think about,” he said.
“And so some poems that will resonate about just being present, being in the moment, thinking about the little things that pass us by during the day, that a poet is able to articulate and say, ‘Oh, this is something that I've noticed, and maybe it's important that you have a think about this, too.’”
'I think we're the start of it'
Dorey said Richardson—repeatedly voted Pemberton’s favourite local writer—was one of the first people he met when he moved to Pemberton six years ago. And in turn, he was one of the first she asked to be a part of the Society.
“Lisa just has a love of language, and an enthusiasm that is contagious,” said Dorey. “We just started sharing poems back and forth with one another.
“She asked me what I thought about inviting other people to sort of share poems. And so I said, ‘Well, I'll start it off for you and I,' and I did a poem and it sort of just started these people going.”
The Society is here to stay—and it’s growing. Richardson and Dorey, along with Society members Johanna Molloy and Lisa Sambo, led a poetry pop-up at the Pemberton & District Public Library in April.
“[Johanna] is a beautiful writer and is Irish… I just could listen to her speak forever because she is a beautiful voice,” said Dorey. “And Lisa, I’ve only just met her, but she brings a cultural element to it and shares some beautiful things about the local language."
Becoming a part of the Secret Poetry Appreciation Society is easier than you might think; whether it’s in writing or spoken aloud, produced by others or written at your desk at home, you just have to love poetry.
“I think it's anybody who wants to be involved, anybody who's the secret admirer of poetry,” said Dorey. “Come, and we’ll hold space for you.”
After that recent poetry pop-up at the Pemberton library, the Society is looking to share its love of poetry—and hopefully bring fellow secret poetry appreciators out of their shells around the Sea to Sky.
Dorey sees it as the start of Pemberton’s poetic tradition.
“I think we're beginning it. I think we're the start of it," he said. "We're collaborating with all these people. And there's clearly an interest, you just sort of put it out there and see how it resonates with people."
